This whole episode has been one drawn out, perspective-shifting, reality check.
Pre-letter:
La La La. This house-building thing is great. We'll just skip our way through the summer, have some great barbeque's, and have our feet up on the coffee table by September.
Post-letter: ...Oh.Truly an infuriating set of circumstances. We were lied to, ignored, and forced to reconsider our entire timeline. (I have been known to sink into roiling depths of anxiety and irritation over much less.) And yet, our home has remained under a God-induced state of peace and contentment. This is most definetly worth exploring. I have gotten the distinct impression that Aidan has been watching me carefully these past few weeks, wondering when I am going to crumple into a weeping mess. Not a tear has been shed. Instead, I have felt wrapped in a sense of acceptance and trust. It is the very same sense I had when our baby boy was taken away from us so he could learn how to breathe in an incubator. And accompanying this has been an awareness of the alien quality of this strength. It does not belong to me. It has been given.
Aidan was born, it seems, with a highly efficient processing chip in his brain. He calmly and carefully assesses his circumstances and then acts or reacts in a mild and practical way. My brain chip? Faulty and prone to over-heating as far as I can tell. Growing up, I lived amid fairies. (Wow, that statement most definetly needs clarification.) The "fairies" of which I speak are of the magical, winged, fantastical ilk. In other words, I lived in la-la land. The grounded practical aspects of my parents' characters' completely eluded me, while the whimsical, hyper-romantic, less-than-grounded aspects of them both obviously conspired together and hijacked the gene pool.
I am standing in front of my bookshelf. Eighty percent of the books have the words "princess", "magic", or some other expression of whimsy imprinted upon them. For my highschool graduation, no ordinary dress would do. I sat in front of my seemstress, handed her a movie about Arthurian Legend called First Knight, and told her I wanted to look like Guinevere. And a few months later, bedecked in crimson silk and gold overlay, I did. And for years I carried a postcard of Germany's Neushwanstein Castle around with me wherever I went, just so I could look at it and be caught up in the familiar allure of otherwordly beauty.
Now, I want to make it clear at this point that, as I see it, fantasy and imagination are not the enemy. They make life colourful and deliciously full of possibilities. It is the havoc it all wrought upon my flighty mind that caused me so much grief. In the face of very real and unpleasant circumstances, my hazy, pink-tinted thoughts obscured my processing capabilities. It all felt so much worse than it was. The princess in me wanted to hold those problems close, and transform them into epic tales, in which I was the heroin. Those who are grounded, have a far more comfortable fall than those who are up in the clouds, so to speak. We fall from so much further. And hit so much harder. A kid should never have had to ache the way I did.
Skip ahead ten years to the present. How does one go from being a girl who wove her relatively small problems into hyper-dramatic tales of light and darkness, to being a woman who stares very real problems in the face, and looks past them so she can focus on her children's giggles instead? Did I just grow up? Nah. I still love a good princess story. And I still love to give in to my emotions all too often. The difference is in the grasp. How far can a young girl see? She can have a Saviour, but he meets her where she needs to be met, and shows her what she needs to get through the day. But a grown woman, perhaps a wife or a mother, she can no longer limit her grasp to the concerns of a single day. She must look ahead: Weeks. Years. A lifetime. Eternity. She must grasp the promise of glory beyond this life. And that same Saviour meets her where she needs to be met and gives her the ability to see past the inconveniences to what matters.
So, about that little letter. It might have been a long month and a half of waiting . But that one little letter encouraged some very big thinking. Our house? Might never happen. Will that break me? Nope. Will it stop me from loving my life? No way. For now, this sunny little apartment contains all of the things I hold most dear. And the dearest things of all follow you from point A to point B, wherever point B happens to be. If this new home happens to be our point B, great. But I have got to look further. And I am. I am looking so much further than John Shaw Road. And it looks awfully good.
