Author: kaitpack

I’m dating when I sit across from her at lunch and tell her I just need to find someone for her.

“Why?” she asks.

And it’s a fair question.

Someone else makes an off-handed comment in the middle of the kitchen one day–and I remember it. “People always ask me if I’m dating, but they never ask me if I’m happy,” she says.

If the world has made life about fulfilling romantic desires, the church has made it about gaining marital status.

When I’m single again, at least two people in one week tell me I should get a dating app.

Someone else reassures me it’s okay that I’m not married yet.

Did I say I was concerned?

I start to wonder if I’m wrong to enjoy singleness.

I get home from work, sit at the table with a book, a plate of dinner and a glass of wine, the whirr of the air conditioner in the background. And I wonder how much longer this quiet life will last.

I wake in the morning to birds singing outside my bedroom window and open my Bible, penning thoughts beside a well-loved passage and looking up Greek words and timelines. I pray for my friend’s hectic morning; she’ll wake to busy little feet, scratched knees and hungry tummies.

She tells me how people look at her strange when she says she stays at home with her kids.

Aren’t we both finding our way in this life?

One family.

People always ask me if I’m dating, but they never ask…

They never just ask.

How is your wonderful, difficult, complicated life this week?

I watch the way she lives: wanting to date, but happy to not. To think I almost tried to “fix” her.

Do we keep missing out because we see a single person as a problem to be solved?

Was Jesus?

 

I rub sleep out of my eyes on a Thursday morning, but I can’t rub away the sick feeling that he hasn’t texted me back.

I pick up my phone to ask them to pray for me and put it down again. Pain is particular, specific, personal. How do you put your pain in words that mean the same to you as to them? We’re often fighting foggy definitions.

She asks me about being an adult, but I don’t tell her that being an adult means it’s easy to be unknown. And that it feels better to be unknown than misunderstood.

The world is big. Full of people slipping past the other’s point of view.

She looks at me from the driver’s seat and smiles. “You must get a lot of flack from everyone. You’re a livestock farmer, you’re religious and you hunt.”

I laugh. I also work for a pesticide company, but she doesn’t mention that. It feels good for someone to understand the misunderstood.

She asks me about being an adult, but I don’t tell her how, at the end of the day, I can come home to an empty house and a soul full of hope in the One whose family didn’t “get” him, who’s friends fled at signs of trouble, and who cried on the cross, “‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’” (Matthew 27:46).

Hope in the One who endured for me.

Misunderstood.

Hope in the One who understands.

 

“Good job at saying no.” She sends the text with a winky face.

She’s onto me. I’ve started saying no to things. Because not every good thing is something good for me to do. And sometimes saying yes is like subtracting 10% of my energy from something else.

I go on the church website and scroll through role after role accepting serving applications. I sign up for one.

Half the time I don’t worry that I’m doing something I shouldn’t. I worry that I’m not doing something I should.

Always in the back of my head: What am I doing with this one beautiful life?

She talks about turning 40 and how “there must, there must be more than this”. I’m a Christian. I know there is.

But sometimes I live like I don’t.

I hear her pause on the other end of the line. “Our human actions are just so much more limited than simply asking God to do it instead.”

I wander down the sidewalk in the early morning light. Like Moses, I remove my sandals in the presence of Holiness.

I don’t bother wondering if five minutes is enough. I just pray fervently.

I go home, take a shower and start my unremarkable day.

What am I going to do with this one beautiful life?

Perhaps the greater choice is not about the things I should do. It’s to start filling the things I do with prayer.

To fill the unremarkable days with purpose.

 

I point out a groundhog. She spots a cardinal.

We’ve been sipping punch in crowds all day and I’m wondering how I can get through the weekend. Thinking of the way he squeezed my shoulders outside the palliative care unit, the unopened letter I left beside her bed. How can you explain what someone means to you in 500 words? The dent in their car and my bank account. The way his heart just stopped—and can I bring a casserole? The texts lighting up my phone “guys can you pray guys can you pray please pray if you could just pray for me”.

We step onto the edge of a clearing. We search for the eggs of a killdeer.

“What’s that verse?” I ask her. “The one about the birds.”

“Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them…consider the lilies of the field,” she knows Matthew 6 by heart. “If God so clothes the grass of the field…will he not much more clothe you?”

It’s silent between us then. “Look,” she says, “is that a crane?” We watch a blue heron overhead.

I consider the birds.

“Should we head back.” It’s not a question.

“I’d rather stay here.”

We dread the bits of conversation-making over the tops of wine glasses. And what if someone tells us something else our hearts can’t handle.

I consider this.

We put on our heels, but there’s still dirt between our toes. And that’s enough.

We meet her on the way back, sitting on a park bench. And we gather around her, our prayers causing the heaviness to lift and washing our mascara away.

Before we head back into the crowd and the lights and the heavy sound of the bass on the dance floor, I pause and hide a bit of the quiet in my heart.

I pause and consider the birds and the way their song sounds in the silence of a clearing.

 

“I expect at least one piece of sad news a week now that I’m an adult,” I text her. I mean it as a joke.

But then I count back the weeks–and no one’s laughing.

I sit at home on Friday, voiceless, sipping honey lemon tea. And praying. Praying because it was one of those texts that knocks the wind out of you.

Words? They’re deleted as soon as they’re typed. Silenced as soon as they’re thought.

What do you say when she sends a picture of her twenty-week old baby cradled in her husband’s hands?

We were seventeen together once. Me and her. We had all the answers then.

I can’t even call her because my swollen vocal cords are bigger than the lump in my throat.

Growing up is like that. It’s made me mute, taken all my answers away.

And yet. I do not want to be seventeen again. Full of answers. Devoid of faith.

I linger over this paragraph in a book I read the day after, how faith is really just thinking.

Thinking Truth.

I bump into strangers walking down the path beneath the cherry blossoms with her. “I am so happy with this time of life.”

Grown up and helpless. Without a plaque-on-the-kitchen-wall-scripture verse.

Emptied of words. He fills the space with His.

Mute. Without answers. He speaks.

And in the silence, in that pause over the phone, it’s Truth that fills the gap.

“The sum of your word is truth, and every one of your righteous rules endures forever.” Psalm 119:160

I stand at the front of the church and watch her take the first step down the aisle, hanging on her Dad’s arm.

Like I watched her on the night she missed her bus stop and lost her luggage, how her eyes still sparkled as we licked ice cream under the street lights afterward.

Her radiance is not cliché. It springs from deep contentment born out of a thousand ordinary moments. It plays at the corners of her mouth like a well-kept secret.

Her groom must know it too by the way he wipes his eyes.

I blink like mad.

When I want to know if the gospel works, I watch my friends.

Because friendship is more than the blessing of community, it’s the evidence of sanctification.

Like the girl at the piano, playing the processional for the bride. The way she looks upward whenever she plays. Because–isn’t that the posture in which she prays?

And the girl who stands beside me holding a bouquet, who let the Truth come in and break down her walls. And I watched them crumble.

Like I watch her now, walk down the aisle.

I wipe my eyes. Because I’ve seen the way she walks throughout the week.

And it’s full of radiance too.

“In the same way, the gospel is bearing fruit and growing throughout the whole world—just as it has been doing among you since the day you heard it and truly understood God’s grace.” Colossians 1:6

 

“I’m getting soo old,” I lean against the kitchen counter on a Monday and complain to her.

It’s often Mondays that make me angry at the way Time steals joyful moments, steals the quiet solitude of the weekend away.

It was just months ago I remember that cool granite countertop against my wet cheeks. My shoulders shaking uncontrollably. And her knuckles rubbing back and forth across my back.

And then that was yesterday.

And then it’s six months later and I wake up and–. Remember that consuming ache?

I live a day and I don’t think about it at all.

It comes back again, but the sharpness is worn away.

She told me it would be like this. I thought she was just saying words.

But Time sews up the seams of the heart. And every passing month puts miles of distance between me and my aching soul.

And then it’s a word on the tip of my tongue.

And I wake up on a Monday, thankful that the Watchmaker sets the watch to move forward.

That getting old is just His gracious push toward the end of the end of joyful moments.

That He numbers the days of sorrow.

And sorrow and delight turn grey and die away with the seasons.

“Weeping may tarry for the night, but joy comes with the morning.” Psalm 30:5

 

I sit at work long after the sun, wearied, has laid its head beneath the horizon.

I sit at work, typing out words on a screen and making edits on proofing documents with my red pen.

And on a Friday, I drive home in the dark. Calculating. Adding. Dividing. Subtracting.

“I’m terrible at math,” I told him earlier that week.

But on the weekend, I drive home. Calculating.

Always calculating.

How do 48 or 58 hours of work add up to spiritual success?

Does Monday to Friday add anything to the Kingdom? Or is it only Sunday that counts? And long Saturday mornings flipping onion-skin pages of the Word.

But I think of the ways the tasks have changed my soul.

Circling misspellings and comma misplacements, I’ve trained my eyes to be thorough.

Watching my boss draw a line through something I’ve written, I’ve let my heart be instructed with criticism.

This week, sitting under the heaviness of stress, I’ve breathed prayers as I refill my coffee.

Even if this is not preparation for something “greater”. Even if it’s not a “training ground” for future ministry.

This is the life I’ve been given. The Mondays and Fridays, the meetings and the deadlines. Like Sunday, they’re part of His plan.

For a moment, as I drive home under street lights, I stop doing the math.

Because it all equals out to an opportunity to be holy.

“The LORD God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it.” Genesis 2:15

 

The sensation of the sand under my winter boots sends chills down my spine. I stare across the frozen lake until I can’t tell where the ice and sky collide.

My boots crunch on the crests of the frozen waves as I walk onto the ice.

I think back to Monday night sitting in a living room with mugs of lukewarm tea and Bibles open on our laps, reading Jeremiah 10:12.

”But God made the earth by his power; he founded the world by his wisdom and stretched out the heavens by his understanding.”

Just like that, creation explained.

I look across that snow-covered tundra. The sun blinks brilliantly through the clouds and winks out again.

The Bible study leader had posed a question: “Who is God? Do we know Who we are dealing with?”

The clouds break and light streams down onto the frozen surface of the water.

Who am I dealing with here?

If His understanding is wide enough to unwind the heavens…

…to break open the heavens.

On a frozen lake in Ontario, I put one mitt over my face to block the sun.

I’ve had twenty-some years to study the nature of God.

I’ve examined Him through the red lens of Justice and the blue lens of Mercy and the white lens of Holiness.

But to see through more than one lens at a time?

I think about my week, how my heart wondered if the God of the Bible is out of touch with this millennial. Perhaps He didn’t know how we would “progress”.

I turn away to face the shore. The sun is too much for me to bear.

Because I am out of touch with the Glorious Light.

 

I’ve sat in my fair share of church pews.

I’ve heard 1000 hours of sermons.

Sermons on how to fight the good fight. To put on the breastplate of righteousness. To take up the sword of the Spirit.

How I must be prepared to give an answer. To pick up my cross.

And midway through a full week of work. A week of feeling like I’m the only Christian in the office, in the country, in the universe.

Midway through the week, I cry out in frustration to God. Frustrated that I’m an anomaly. My whole worldview is insane in the eyes of everyone I see on a daily basis.

Wouldn’t it be easier to blend, to mix? Wouldn’t it be convenient to believe that everything is true, everyone is right? That morality changes based on whoever I’m hanging out with on a Friday night.

And drowning in anxiety about defending Christ, I forget the words in the Psalms.

“The LORD is my rock and my fortress and my deliverer, My God, my rock, in whom I take refuge; My shield and the horn of my salvation, my stronghold.” Psalm 18:2

I forget that any defense I could give is nothing compared to My Defender.

Here in my pathetic humanity, in my fear, in the middle of a week of failure. My God fights for me.

I forget the words of the Lord.

“I will go before you and make the rough places smooth; I will shatter the doors of bronze and cut through their iron bars.” Isaiah 45:2

I’m caught in fear of defending Him while He wrestles demons in the darkness as I sleep. He wages war against my lustful thoughts.

And He stands between me and Justice, interceding on my behalf, before a Holy God.

“If God is for us, who can be against us?” Romans 8:31

I forget that He does not need my defense.

But I need His.

I forget how He conquered sin and death. He, the Victorious, called it my victory. He, the Righteous, crowned me with righteousness.

He is the Defender of my Faith.

And midway through a long week of work, He turns my frailty into strength.

He goes before me, turning my enemies into corpses and my fear into faith.