The phone rings around 3:00 in the afternoon. I am busy reviewing my lecture notes for my class that evening, so I reflexively silence the call – a bad habit of mine when it comes to phone numbers I don’t recognize. But as I watch the phone continue to buzz on the counter, something nudges me to answer this one. I pick up on what is probably the last ring before voicemail. 

“Katie,” I hear a voice nearly whimpering from the other end of the line. “They won’t let me keep her.” 

It’s Hannah*, the young woman I had met two months earlier through an organization that helps homeless and transient young adults in our city.

“Hannah? Are you ok? Where are you?” I prod for more information.

“The social worker’s office,” she says.

Hannah’s baby had been born four days prior, which I knew, because I had taken her to the hospital. For months, we had anticipated that keeping and raising a baby would be exceptionally challenging for Hannah for a multitude of reasons – reasons that belong to her story, not ours. But we never expected her to call us when those reasons all came forward. 

With a spinning head, and knowing I would not get much clear information from Hannah, I ask to talk to the social worker. I hear Hannah pass the phone over, and then a distant she wants to talk to you.

“Hi, Katie?” the woman asks. “Hannah’s told me about you. My name is Rachel, I’m with Child Protective Services.” 

Over the next few minutes, Rachel explains as much as she can about what has transpired since I left the hospital on Thursday afternoon. The bottom line: no suitable caregiver is available to care for the baby girl, whom Hannah had named Ava. 

Ava, what a gorgeous name, I think to myself. 

Ava needs a place to go right away, and Hannah wants us to take her. 

I pull the phone away from my ear and try to communicate to my husband – with the social worker waiting on the other end of the call – about what is happening. CPS won’t let her keep the baby… She’s asking us to take her… as soon as possible… now… I have no idea for how long… what do you think? Alex looks at me with big eyes, shocked and overwhelmed, but also filled with tenderness. He nods.

“We will take her,” I tell Rachel.

Seven minutes after the phone rang, with no foster license and very little information, we start making arrangements to bring a four-day-old baby girl home to our family that night. 

The CPS office handling Ava’s case is just over 90 miles from us. We make the plan to meet a different social worker halfway between our hometown and their office. 

“How about the McDonald’s parking lot right off I-90?” she suggests. Perhaps I should question handing a newborn off in a fast food parking lot right next to the freeway, but I don’t argue.

As we wait for a quick background check to go through, in a blur of feelings and trepidation, I call my friend, Kelly, and beg her to come with me to pick up the baby while Alex stays home with our other three children.

Of course I don’t need to beg. She says yes before I could nervously finish the question.

We get in the car a little after 7:30pm and make the fifty-minute drive to our meeting point. I tell her everything I knew about the situation, and she – a foster parent herself – gives me a blitz lesson in the state foster care system and everything she thinks we can expect in the coming days and weeks – home inspections, health and welfare checks, doctor appointments, court reviews. Then, as we approach the freeway exit, Kelly puts her hand on my shoulder and starts praying out loud, for everything.

I am told to look for a white SUV, and with little competition for space at 8:30pm on a Monday night, I spot it right away. Kelly and I both get out of the car at the same time the social worker does. The woman had just fed Ava a bottle in the backseat of her car, and steps out of the door with the tiniest little girl wearing a pink onesie in her arms. She hands her to me for a moment, and then a clipboard. 

You must be Katie/can I see your driver’s license/please sign these/Ava just spit up and I don’t have a change of clothes for her. 

The words seem to come out in one sentence. She is busy, in a hurry, business as usual in the life of a social worker. Without being asked, Kelly grabs Ava so I can sign all the paperwork, and immediately brings her over to our car to get warm and safely snuggled back in her carseat. Everything Ava owns, from the crocheted blanket to the skin at the top of her little bald head, is thick with the smell of cigarette smoke.

She sleeps the whole ride home.

By the time I pull into our driveway around 10:00pm, Alex and my oldest daughter, Harper have the whole house clean. My friend, Annie, had dropped off newborn baby girl clothes. Kelly had grabbed formula, bottles, and a pack of diapers. Everything else can wait until the morning. 

And Ava sleeps more – peacefully unaware of the chaos of parental visits and court dates and home inspections swirling around the first days of her life story. I look down at the cadence of her chest moving up and down through the heaviness of newborn sleep more times than I can count. Her breath reminds me to take a deep one, too. 

She is so beautiful. 

And to think I almost didn’t answer the phone. 

//

Our McDonald’s baby turns four years old today. 

Four years old. I can hardly believe it. We are entering a season of her life when we will talk to her about adoption, about her biological mom and dad, about surprises and blessings and divine interruptions to our plans. There is so much I want to tell her, and there’s a lot I don’t. Kids don’t enter foster care because of beautiful beginnings; they enter because of broken ones.

But like most things, I trust the Lord that we will sort that all out with his help over time. 

Today though, we will mostly talk about miracles, over McDonald’s french fries.

*Names have been changed to protect privacy.

Cannon turned four years old this week. We celebrated with a family dinner, and his therapist decorated his room with a banner and a few balloons. It was all low-key and simple. He would not have wanted, nor would he have really understood, any more fanfare than that. But from start to finish, the whole day had me guarding tears and hiding my red eyes under a hat.

He did not really like when we sang ‘Happy Birthday' to him. He refused the gluten and dairy free cookies I made just for the occasion. He still has no idea what to do with a present put in front of him and we worked all day on getting him to answer one question: “Cannon, how old are you?” He still responds with, “I’m Cannon,” a response I know I should not scoff at, because “What’s your name?” took the better part of a year to get to. But still, “I’m four” is an elusive concept and as much as I want to, I cannot will it to come from his mouth. 

I woke up that day wanting his birthday to resemble, even in the smallest ways, the birthday of a neuro-typical four-year-old: enjoying a few new toys and smiling as we brought out a special birthday treat, feeling loved and celebrated in the way birthdays should make you feel. For Cannon it was just another day: therapy in the morning, school after lunch, play in the backyard until we make him come inside. For me, the whole day was reminder after reminder of what isn’t. 

And I couldn’t help but feel one thing: I just wish it was different.  

I don’t always feel that way about this journey. In fact, most days I feel confidence. While he is not even on most neurological development bell curves, this little guy has come so far since his diagnosis. On his second birthday I remember trying to get him to look over at me when I called his name so I could just take a picture of him, and the closest we could get was when Alex finally got a smirk after practically standing on his own head to get Cannon’s attention. Today, he can say “cheese” when I tell him to smile. On his third birthday he had a few words, but today he has lots of words, hundreds of them. Mostly nouns, a few high frequency requests, and with a little bit of guiding he can sing “The Wheels on the Bus” and knows most of the songs from Daniel Tiger, often surprising us with sweet sentences like “You can choose to be kind!” Watching him learn and grow is one of the greatest delights of my life; it is hard to put words to the feeling of seeing your son do something you really wondered if he would ever be able to do.

But it’s also hard to put words to the feeling of longing for something he might never do. 

Those are the two lanes that special needs parents travel this journey in: sheer joy and complete uncertainty. One has the scenic view of patience and hope and gratitude for the littlest things – and all of those sentiments are so real and genuine, you never want to leave that lane. But it’s so easy to drift, too easy; and often without warning you can find yourself traveling down the road littered with potholes of bitterness and unending questions – there are just so many questions– and your journey goes from pointing out the beauty around you to gripping the wheel in silent anger. It’s usually when my hands are clenched tight that I start to wonder again why we are on this road at all, and that’s when I wish it was different. 

And then, in the very next moment, I feel guilty for wishing it was different, as if I do not love my son fully and completely as the exact little boy he is. But then I want him to have a friend to celebrate his birthday with him so badly the tears can barely be held in. Pretty quickly I am back to feeling grateful for how healthy he truly is – in the special needs world you do not take for granted when your children can walk and jump and speak at all, and one visit to the pick-up line at Cannon’s preschool will remind you of that. But then I land back over in sadness, because we’ve been to a half dozen different four-year-olds’ birthday parties in the last few months, with lots of friends and presents and cake, and I am not even sure my little guy understands what a birthday party is. Back and forth, drifting between the emotions that are opposite one another, but both completely true. 

If you’re wondering if you can feel gratitude and sadness at the same time, ask a mother - she’ll tell you that you can. 

I think there are going to be many more days in our lives that I will wish things were different, but I take heart knowing that, for one brief moment, as he waited for the whole purpose of his life’s story to unfold, Jesus did too. 

“Father, if you’re willing, take this cup from me.”*

God, if there is any other way, please do it. If your plan can be different than this one, I’m asking you one last time to consider it. You are the Creator and Sustainer of all, you could change this! You could make another way!

“Yet not my will, but yours be done.”

And it was. And the one thing Jesus begged God to do differently became the best thing that ever happened to any of us.

At this juncture, there are many days when it is hard to imagine how the struggles of a little boy could lead to something good. But then again, we are still waiting for the rest of the story, too. 

I don’t know what Cannon will be like on his fifth birthday. I dream of one day celebrating the incredible progress that every special needs mama holds a sliver of a vision of, but I live mostly in the day to day, because there’s enough to both celebrate and cry over on any given one. But I do know this, on the days I want something different, I remember that one day, everything will be different. We live with the promise of Heaven, sealed by the one thing God did not take from his son.

Until then, I’ll keep counting the ways that being Cannon’s mom became one of the best things that ever happened to me.

*Luke 22:42

I’ll admit it, I am a sucker for resolutions. It could be a lifetime of sports and goal-setting drilled in to me, it could be the “help me help you” tendencies of my INFJ-ness, or it could very well be that I came out of the womb leaning a bit too far to the people-pleasing side and being an achiever helped me accomplish just that (and yes, I’m working hard on the shadow-side of all that neediness). But taken all together, I love having a list of things to set my eyes on, and I super love checking things off of those lists.

I am in full agreement with Socrates when he said that “the unexamined life is not worth living.” The discipline of introspection, and then the conviction and repentance that follows for me, has been such a big piece of my life in the last decade – as a writer in the last seven years, but much more so as a wife, a mom, and a follower of Christ. My days begin with the space to think. They just have to for me – in the quiet, before anyone else is up, working around thoughts in my head about scripture, about Jesus, about words and meanings, about my children and my husband and whether or not I am stewarding these things in a manner that is honoring to God and reflective of who this is all for anyway. Examining who I actually am and how I actually live, holding that up to who I want to be, and then submitting that to the guidance and direction of God’s Word is a pattern of sanctification that I want on repeat in the cadence of my days.

Because usually, when that’s happening, I see how badly I am missing the mark.

The gospel becomes even more beautiful when you really see that.

*****

I have been going through this goal-planner again this year, and one of the things you are asked to do is choose a word for the year. I wrote down about a dozen to start with, things like diligence, joy, learn, family, and trustworthy. And then the word consistent came to mind, and I could not let it go.

Consistent means to be marked by harmony, regularity or steady continuity. It is a characteristic given to someone or something that is free from variation or contradiction, showing steady conformity to character, profession, belief, or custom. And consistent is everything I want to be.

When I get real introspective, and real honest, and I take apart the big pieces of my life, I can see just how in-consistent I really am. My mood - and my actions to follow - can shift and change a few dozen times a day based on things like social media (do people like me?), how Cannon did at therapy (do people see how hard we are working?), whether or not a friend got back to me (am I important to her?), and other big, life-altering (ha!) things like that. I love my husband inconsistently, usually showing him respect and displaying affection well for him when I am having a particularly good day myself. I parent my children inconsistently, again, usually doing the hard work of teaching and disciplining well and getting on the floor to play with them when I am having a particularly good day myself. And I celebrate others inconsistently –  would it shock you to know that I usually do that much better when I am having a particularly good day myself?

I’m seeing the pattern, and here is what it is teaching me: when my consistency is built around me and my day, it will be anything but marked by steady continuity.

But if the consistency of my life is built around the only One that never changes, I think I’ll have a fighting chance. Jesus has to be my steady. And the gospel has to be the thermostat of my marriage, my parenting, and the way I love others.

Consistent means to me that I am not a walking contradiction, saying one thing but living out another. It means that I am the same person to everyone; whether she is like me or not, whether he is easy to love or not, whether she can give me anything in return or not. The partiality of the world we live in is feeling further and further from a kingdom-mindset to me all the time – perhaps that is because it is? It means that what someone sees on social media is what they will see in real life. It means that my husband will not have to guess how loved he is going to be on a particular day. It means that my children will remember their mom as someone who was the same to them in the public eyes of the church lobby and the private hallways of our home at night. And it means the work I do in this world will reflect the only investments that will always, always bring a good return: God’s Word, and God’s people.

So this year, my prayer and goal is that the mark of my life is consistency. That my joy is contingent on the unchanging good news of the gospel and not the trending good or bad news of any particular day. That others know what they can expect from me. That my heart never loses the awe that I am saved by grace and not by merit. And that I am unwavering in my pursuit of seeing and savoring the goodness and glory of God in my every day, walking around, mothering and errand-running, cleaning and writing, bill-paying and diaper-changing life. 

The sun was falling slowly to the west, lighting up the tops of the wheat and the scattered wildflowers just gently enough to paint a layer of gold around them. I will never get over the way the world looks right before the sun sets; like it is at peace, content with itself for having given its best, ready for the rest it well deserves.

We had driven to the north side of town to meet our family at the orchard, dressed in corresponding colors for the yearly pictures. “I forgot the lollipops,” I said out loud.

“We will be fine,” Alex responded. “It will be quick.” Always hopeful, that one.

Cannon fell asleep on the drive, so when we pulled up we decided to just let him rest until we were ready to go take our pictures. It is easy now to see where we started to go sideways on this endeavor, and the decision to not wake him right then was the beginning.

After a few minutes the photographer arrived, and we made our way toward the blooming sunflowers for the big group shot first. Alex unbuckled Cannon and gently picked him up, whispering in his ear that it was time for pictures. He was out of sorts right away, I could tell. He woke up in an unfamiliar place with a lot of expectations, and then we started asking him to look at a camera and say cheese, which makes the list of the ‘hardest things’ for his mind to execute.

Even if I had remembered the lollipops, I’m sure this would have gone the way it did.

We tried. I tickled him and kissed his cheeks and let him hang the full weight of his body on mine, but this boy wanted no part of family pictures in that moment. So, after a few minutes, I told the group to keep on without us, and Cannon and I headed back toward the car.

That’s when I really noticed the sunset, and the visceral peace hovering all around. Everything I saw looked, well, perfect. The blemishes that cannot hide under the midday sun disappear under the filter of dusk, reminding me that Instagram has nothing on nature. The cooler air and the softer surroundings, all of it announcing the end of its work for the day. Then I noticed my heart, and even against the weight of a struggling boy, who was exceptionally difficult to carry while walking through the dirt in wedges, it was totally at peace.

No tears. No frustration. No embarrassment. No compelling draw to explain anything to the rest of the family or the photographer. In that moment I was just a mom doing what her son needed.

I’ve come a long way from the mom who needed her son to do what I wanted.

*****

It has been just over a year since we knew Cannon was autistic. I remember this time a year ago, at the end of a long summer, texting a friend who is a bit further ahead of us on a similar journey. She responded with such sweet empathy, and told me the first year was the hardest, but that her little one was improving all the time, that he has so many incredible strengths, and that it’s not easy but it’s going to be ok.

She was exactly right.

The first year was really, really hard. I did not know what to do with my son, I did not know what to do with all the opinions on why he is autistic, and I did not have the first idea how to internalize the comments and stories of others. I had no bandwidth for any one of the books a well-intentioned friend had heard was a good read, but I’d send a “thank you so much, I’ll look in to it” response anyway. I could not have named it at the time, but I spent much of the first year unraveling. I had put together a whole narrative on both God and myself as a mom, and thread by thread it was all being pulled apart.

What I can tell you now is this: I was looking at the world and trying to make sense of God. And I was looking at my children and trying to make sense of myself as a mom. When you get those things backwards, nothing really seems to fit. But when God graciously takes apart the story you believe you are narrating and puts it back together as the only fitting Author, it makes a lot more sense.

When I started with God, with his character, his story, his purposes, and all of the realities of life in a broken world, then everything else had so much meaning. But this did not happen for me overnight. In fact, I didn’t really notice how far we have come until the sunset over the orchard reminded me that just as the world makes its way around the sun every day and not the other way around, so does God need his rightful place at the center of each of our days, and not the other way around. As John Piper so beautifully says, "The healing of the soul begins by restoring the glory of God to its flaming, all-attracting place at the center."

So much of life comes down to hope, doesn’t it? And when it comes to autism—perhaps even parenting in general—the first thing you lose when your child is not doing something they are supposed to be doing is hope. I can look back at last summer and realize that what I had always believed about life, the story I had weaved together, was written around a lifetime of accomplishments, good reputation, “blessings” and other renditions of the beautiful American Dream. The foundation of my whole narrative was hope, but hope that was in those good things. I have had to learn that hope is only as unshakable as its object. 

So a year ago, God took it all apart and re-wrote the beginning. It is still hope, but it is in Him.

And when my hope is really in Jesus, all of a sudden my heart is bursting at the seems to have real hope for Cannon, too. Not just in progress, but in the story God will tell with his precious life, and the glory a little boy who sees the world so differently could bring to Him.  

*****

Once Cannon and I made it back to the cars, I found his juice cup and sat down with him at a picnic table. Together we waited for a moment, looking out at the horizon and breathing in the peace all around us. In just a few minutes, he smiled up at me and then got down off my lap—his physical indication that he was fine now. We went and found the rest of the family, and while I don’t think we got one picture with all the cousins that night, or even one where all of us were looking, we drove away with smiles on our faces. Alex reached over and grabbed my hand, and we laughed a little bit wondering why on earth we didn’t wake him up and give him a few minutes to run around in the place before throwing a chorus of resounding “say cheese!” at him.

This is our beautiful life. Not one day of it has taken God by surprise, and not one of them will be wasted.

The other night, Cannon joined his siblings and me in a game of tag— he has never done that before. He turns when we call his name now, he asks for what he wants with words and not pictures. He sleeps all night. He hugs his siblings. In life we tend to measure progress by big things or in big moments—like family pictures. He didn’t do so well in that moment, but he has had a thousand amazing little moments before and after that one.  

So, I hope. And I’ll keep hoping. Because this progress, these everyday miracles, is in its rightful place on the periphery, like the stars and the moon lighting up our lives. They are no longer at the center. Our life, and our hope, moves around the Son.

“Cannon, stop please!”

He keeps running, hard and fast down the dirt row lined with blueberry bushes.

“Cannon,” I raise my voice, “stop now!”

His little legs pick up their pace, as if my words are sideline encouragement from a proud mama rather than the desperate plea of a weary one that I mean them to be. But I follow up with one last effort: “Cannon Lee, STOP!”

At this point, I realize the futility and start running after him, leaving my other two children behind with my mom and friend, and hoping I can catch him before I can’t see what row his little head turned down. As soon as I turn the corner there he is, totally still and turned to face me with a big smile on his face. He had stopped, just like I told him to. 

“Cannon, mommy needs you to stay near me while we pick blueberries, ok?”

He tilts his head with his precious grin still beaming, his acknowledgement of my words even though we both know they were not understood. He was playing a game: a clear dirt path signaled to him the freedom to make his way down it the only way he knows how—running. He grabbed my hand and walked back to the group with me.

We got in line to grab our fruit picking baskets, and as we waited our turn I held tightly to his little hand as he pulled and pulled, willing us both back to the dirt path. This is fairly standard in unfamiliar places; Cannon’s little body is overcome with the urge to explore and understand and run around in every inch of new territory, and his little ears seem deaf to anything his own little mind is not telling him to do.

When it was our turn for the farm’s director to tell us how to properly secure our blueberries from the bush, she looked down at Cannon, who was reaching down for handfuls of bark with his free hand.

“Is this the one who was running?”

“Yes, this is him,” I replied with a smile. “He gets excited.”

“Hmm. Well, he’s not a very good listener is he? Young man, don’t pick that up.”

Cannon grabbed another handful.

“Young man, don’t touch that. We don’t do that.”

He continues to look at the ground, spotting his next grab.

“Excuse me,” she responded with irritation in her voice, “do you need to go inside the farm and learn to be obedient, young man?”

In moments like these, I usually just focus on Cannon, try to distract him from the behavior that he shouldn’t be doing and give him a positive one instead. I was short on options for those in the moment, so I did something I rarely do.

“Ma’am, he is autistic. I am not sure how much sense this all makes to him. Don’t worry, I will watch him very closely out here.”

“Oh.” A pause. “There was an 18-year-old like that out here yesterday. Her mother couldn’t do anything with her.”

'Like that?' Deep breath, mama, deep breath. Adding this to the list of unhelpful things people tend to say without really thinking about them.

A year ago, that comment would have made me break out in a sob right then and there. Six months ago, I would have been frustrated, stomped my way through the rest of our time and then vented about it to a few trusted friends, toying with the idea of writing a pithy “open letter to the rude farm owner,” but my husband would have talked me down from that place. But last week, I just smiled back, emotionally numb to her insensitivity because that’s really all it was, an insensitive comment from someone who doesn’t understand.

But today, a week later, what I wish I would have said is this:

A mom came out here with her 18 year old autistic daughter? Wow, how cool! You know, she’s a brave mama. Autism is so unpredictable and all we want for our kids is to be able to participate in great things like this, like picking blueberries on a beautiful summer day, so the fact that she came out here and tried, that’s amazing, and I’m sure it wasn’t easy for her. Yes, brave mama indeed. If you see her or anyone like her again, you should tell her that. Sounds like she’s doing a great job.

I missed the chance to say that last week, but I won’t next time.

Cannon has a defender much great than me, and that’s God. But God made me his mama and therefore his advocate, and I think I am finally strong enough to be just that. I don’t plan on arguing and I certainly don’t plan on crying; most comments come from ignorance, not maliciousness, and they are simply part of the journey of special needs—I think in particular a special need that on the outside doesn’t look like a special need. But I am so very ready to tell the next person who just doesn’t understand what she is seeing one very true thing:  we, special needs mamas, are a brave, brave crew.

*****

We brought home almost 4 pounds of blueberries that day, and even though the owner told me not to I kept sneaking Cannon a few as we picked. I believe in that boy, and I believe in the story God is writing in all of us, because His stories are always heading toward what is good, toward our forever home. They are not always easy, but always good. Moments like that just remind to not be afraid to tell it. 

We measure things, all of us. So aware of all that is bigger, grander, beyond our control, or outside of our ability to explain, we use measurements as a means to grasp what we can, however we can— with the intent to put our lives onto a tidy shelf in our minds and label its contents: this is what I understand, this is what I am worth, this is how other people think of me.

We measure height, weight, growth, and shrinking. We measure bank accounts and retirement funds. We measure influence in likes and comments, and we measure accomplishment in applause. We quantify our lives in every way that we can, because against the backdrop of a life that is unpredictable and impossible to control, there is comfort in knowing and naming, in calculating who we are with whatever satiates the appetite to be known for that moment.

I first noticed this tendency in myself when I started writing on the internet seven years ago. I would toil over an essay, proud of the way I crafted sentences to be both rhetorically beautiful and theologically sound (that was the goal, anyway). I prided myself on honesty and connecting to the most common experiences of my peers that I could, then I would hit publish and share it with the world (or, with my Facebook friends, who certainly felt like the whole world in my self-centric mind).

One hour later, I’d wonder if anyone “liked” it and casually open the browser. I did not know at the time what was happening, but I see it so clearly now: the measurements—not based at all on my effort to honor Jesus but rather on my word’s and their reception with others—they would take over my day. I was valuable if people liked my words and I wanted to quit writing forever if people didn’t. My worth was found wanting or not based on the fickle, simple click of a tiny thumbs up button on a screen.

My words, my value, my day. And over time and too many emotional roller coasters, I learned that the problem with measurements is that there is simply too much of me in every equation I use.

It’s easy to make a life out of measurements; too easy, in fact. And when we set our sights on the one we want—whether it be salary, followers, publications, purchases or promotions—we chase it hard, with all of the God-given talent and passion and creativity we have. And while God-given pursuits are noble, needed even, it is also tempting in that chase to forget how Jesus went after his God-given pursuit: we go fast, famous, and big, always considering ourselves and our influence. Jesus went slow, overlooked, and small, only considering the will of his Father and the heart change his words of truth offered.

We chase what we can measure. Jesus walked through life in awe of the immeasurable one, of His Father.

At the heart of our misplaced pursuits is a simple solution, not easy, but simple: chase Jesus first, then we will chase after purpose like He did. We don’t need to abandon our creativity, our good endeavors, our goals or our passions; but we might need to do them in a different way, we might need to stop measuring them and simply let God use them. Open handed, humble, willing to let our very best effort and accumulated hours go completely unseen, we must remember that God has always used a very different system of metrics than the world, and all the applause on earth cannot earn the favor of a Perfect God. The cross, and only the cross, already did.

But a heart that pursues him and his glory with all that it has? That, friends, is where the abundant life is found. That is where we find joy immeasurable.

God does not need us, not one of our fancy offerings or impressive measurements is even worth holding up to the One who told the oceans where to stop. But he uses us! He lets us be a part of kingdom work and gives us real influence right where we are. How often do we sit in awe of that truth? And in the end, I think we will find that the most important measurement of all is the distance between a perfect God and our feeble and fickle hearts, and the marvelous fact that only scandalous grace could bridge that distance perfectly.

Everything changes when we stop measuring ourselves for Jesus, and simply start following him. 

__________

*This essay originally appeared on the Open Door Sisterhood blog.

“Mommmm! How do you spell ‘Great Grandma?”

“Harper, please don’t yell across the house. Come out here and I will tell you how to spell it.”

“But mom! It’s a surprise for Great Grandma. You can’t see it.”

“But I am not going to wake up your brothers, Harper. Can you come to the couch and I’ll tell you the letters?”

She sauntered out to the living room just a minute later, arms full of supplies and awkwardly cut paper hearts. After she spilled the contents of her tiny arms onto our oversized ottoman, she warned me not to come too close. “I just need the letters, mom. I’m making a card for Great Grandma. But you can’t see it yet.”

“Oh, Harper girl, that is really sweet, love! Great Grandma will be so excited to get that.”

“Yeah she will.” (Harper does not often lack confidence in her ideas.)

“Ok, are you ready for the letters? G-R-E-A-T, then a space, G-R-A-N-D-M-A. Great Grandma.”

Harper elaborately decorated the rest of the card with drawings of stick figures and hearts, swirly circles and even a depiction of her great grandma getting the letter out of the mailbox. She finally showed me her masterpiece with a beaming smile of pride, then folded it approximately 18 times into a thick, unrecognizable shape, and put it in an envelope. We sent it off, and I gave the card no more thought than that.

Last week a letter came in the mail from my grandma, Harper’s great grandma. She is my only living grandparent, having lost my grandpa and her sweet soulmate exactly two years ago. Since then, grandma JoNell has sold the big, beautiful home that held every memory of the last 45 years, moved in to a small retirement center, and spent many, many hours in the company of silence. When I opened the letter, it was a simple seven lines of beautiful, classic handwriting, the kind we just don’t see anymore.

Thank you so much for your nice letter and the sweet things you said.
I think your letter and the things you said were very good for a child of your age.
If you keep trying, I’ll bet you can be writing a book by the time you’re in school!
You are a very smart girl.
I’d love to have letters from you anytime.
Love, Grandma Mahoney

When I read this letter to Harper, she beamed, the image of her wise and gentle great grandma held in her heart as she took in the words that told her that special woman was proud of her. She brought the letter to her room and it is still on her dresser. I imagine we will put it someplace safe soon, but for now, Harper likes to see it.

I have done a lot of work in the last two years, things that I am proud of and that I hope have meant something. I’ve taught many classes and written many essays, some that have reached more people than I would have ever imagined. We bought a new house and a new car and we have diligently kept our debt at zero. I contributed to a book and celebrated it with parties and beautiful pictures. I’ve participated in Bible studies and book clubs, submitted articles at a few dream publications, read heavy theology and again and again set lofty goals for myself.

But I have not written a letter to my grandma.

Harper did, because my four-year-old seems to have a radar for what is important, one that I might have misplaced in my pursuit of doing important things.

Zack Eswine wrote these beautiful words about the mission of Jesus, saying that while we go big, fast and, popular, Jesus went small, slow, and overlooked. I want to say that the small, slow and overlook are my heart, but I wonder if my life has backed that up. The tiny letter from my grandma hit me with the conviction of a bag of bricks.   

There’s a world of people out there I tend to think I need to applause of, and there are people right in front of me I actually know but can so easily value less. The silent cheers of likes and comments can feel so loud and affirming, a moment of a fleeting "I matter!"-- gone as quickly as it came. I think it is time I switched things up a bit, and stop simply saying small, slow, and overlooked but living them.

I’d love to have letters from you anytime. You got it, grandma. 

For Cannon, on his third birthday

He came into the world so easily—one push, two pushes, then a baby boy on my chest, with a precious little face that mirrored his daddy’s from the very beginning. We wrapped him in a yellow, gray and blue blanket, the one he still spends every night with, and brought him home the day before Mother’s Day. I wish I had written more during those first few months of his life, or maybe taken more pictures. I don’t remember them like I want to, or like I remember them with his big sister. The details escape me every single time I try to recall them and for this, I feel so guilty. But I do remember that everything about him was gentle: the way he slept, his smile, his cuddle, his coos, even his yellow, gray and blue blanket.

But three years and three kids are not kind to a tired mama’s memory. And when we add the hazy details about when it all started to change, when the gentleness faded into disconnection and the coos stopped attempting to become words, it gets even hazier. It was an eighteen-month well-check, then a speech therapist, then a special school, then a specialist, and a hundred thousand moments of is this what I think it is?

It was. It is.

The tears still come, all the time I’m afraid. I would love to report that we’ve moved in to the rhythm of autism and we’ve got it, but that’s a lie. All we’ve got is Jesus, but that’s enough.

Because even through the fog that has been the last three years, and the way it got so thick and scary since the diagnosis, I do know this: when something is wrong, you have to make sense pretty quickly of a God who only does what is right. And this does not happen in a few peaceful quiet times and some tranquilly answered prayers in a journal. For me, it has been more like a street fight, questions thrown like punches and protests of my heart held out in self-defense. A broken record of Why? How? When? My fault? on repeat in my head the whole time.

It took me many months to understand I was asking the wrong questions. The only one I really needed answered was who?

The simplicity of it all still catches me off guard, because the everyday reality of life is anything but simple. I was drowning, spending all of my strength to keep my head above the water and when you’re working that hard to just fight the current you cannot hold anything else. But a new question and a new answer came in like a life preserver—it didn’t take me out of the ocean but it allowed to catch my breath, rest, and not have to fight so hard. It told me we would make it.

The answer to who was this: a perfect God, and a precious little boy.

If God had not given me Cannon, I wonder if I would have ever cared to look and learn how big He truly is? I could not even see the shoreline from where I was, yet God holds the entire ocean in the palm of his hand. This, still, is the most miraculous thing in the world to me.

The road ahead is long, and it is for a lifetime. I won’t pretend that the lessons are done being taught and that we can wrap this all up in a pretty bow and call it complete. In fact, I think it’s the opposite. After the hardest, most tear-filled year, I think we are only just starting. But if at one time I was drowning and unable to see the shore, today I have a life preserver and I do, very clearly in fact, see the shore: it’s God’s glory, his eternal purpose and redemptive plan for all of life. It’s not going to be easy to get there, but we will.

I went in to watch Cannon sleep last night; he is still so gentle in everything he does, even in his sleep. As I watched his chest rise and fall all I could think about were the words “It’s your breath in our lungs, so we pour out our praise…” God’s breath, Cannon’s lungs, my praise. And then I thought about this: we are never really drowning when God is doing the breathing.

*****

I had no idea three years ago what life would look like today. And I have no idea what it will look like in another three. I know so much more and so much less at the very same time, and I am ok with that. But it’s His breath, our lungs, and for His glory. And I do know that’s enough to get us to the shore.

Cannon Lee, who would I be if it weren’t for you? Love you forever, sweet boy. We will get there together, I know it. 

My desk faces east, looking out the window onto our quiet street and beyond, where I can just barely see the tips of the mountain peaks in the distance, all still covered with snow from what has been a long winter and what has turned into a long and still-cold Spring. I meet the day right here, every morning, every season.

For most of my life I have been somewhat of a 'morning person'. Even in my teen and young adult years when it was an option, I was never naturally one to sleep until noon. But being a ‘morning person’ always meant waking up in a relatively good mood, and outside of that the standards were low. Before children I set the alarm for enough time to get ready for work, and after children, I simply let them be my alarm, and I learned quickly that with little ones no one is 'morning person' because motherhood demands you learn to be an ‘all hours of the day’ person, good mood optional.

But when my second was five months old, everything changed. I was drowning—faking it pretty well, but drowning. Parenting a baby and a difficult toddler, wrestling with questions about who I was, the work I had left behind that I was very confident in my ability to do in order to pursue the work of motherhood that I felt like I was terrible at, and all of it was messing with me. And when I really started paying attention to my heart I realized how noisy I had let my life get; from sun up to sun down, invited and uninvited noise at every turn and I could not find a counterbalance to it all.

Then one day, after spending the weekend with a friend who I watched beautifully live out this practice in her own life, I set my alarm for 5:00am. I read the Bible, I wrote, I prayed, and I marveled at how quiet the whole world felt at that hour, at how quiet my heart finally felt. And then I did it again the next day. And the next day. And the next.

That was two and a half years ago.

(And yes, I did want to take a nap about 3:00pm every day that first month. Sometimes I still do. Power through and be willing to go to bed at 9:00pm.)

Today, I think there are ‘morning people’- those who can get up and do what needs to be done and might even have a skip in their step as they do- and there are ‘before the morning people’- those who get up before the chaos, the demands for milk, the diaper changes, and the frenetic search for matching socks. Those things still happen, but they don't happen first. I knew I had officially become a ‘before the morning’ person the day after we brought our youngest home from the hospital. He was an every-three-hours eater from day one, but even then, when my alarm went off at 5:00am I knew what was waiting for me if I could just get my feet on the ground, and the allure of that quiet, it was enough. I pushed the baby’s Rock ‘n Play out to the table with me, and my little man joined my morning routines until he was big enough to sleep through them (which took almost fourteen months by the way—because what is this ‘sleep training’ you speak of? Apparently my children were born immune to it.)

When I think of the woman and mom I was two and a half years ago and the one I am today, I know the difference, and it is the morning. I am not more or less saved, not more or less holy, and not more or less accomplished (though I am rather efficient with my earliest hours). And I don't have a sense of pride built up in my morning routine as much as a sense of desperation; I need it, my heart needs it. Because when I did find the quiet, the counterbalance to the loud world we all live in, it was in that quiet, with—finally—nothing competing for His attention, that God got big. He was too small in my loud world, an equal part of equal size of the thousand moments that made up an average day. It was in the quiet, before the morning, that He finally became unmatched.

And with all that the journey of this last year has brought us, my heart has desperately needed Jesus to be big, to be unmatched. Really, haven’t we all?

On a technical and politically correct level, there is nothing magic about the morning, no command that says if you want to hear from Jesus he has office hours only before dawn. And yes, technically, that is correct. But I push back a little, because I think there is something magic about the morning: it is untouched, not yet derailed by a day that did not unfold like I planned. It is fresh, renewed, and I will say it again, so beautifully quiet. I think the Psalmists were on to something as the chorus of their praise echoes with sentiments of in the morning, show us Your steadfast love, Lord. I cannot prepare for everything the day will bring, but I can prepare my heart to trust who is writing it all, who has commanded the morning since my days began, and who has taught the dawn to know its place. *

For months the sun has stayed stubbornly behind those mountain tops out my window, as if it were too cold itself to want to come out and play. But as we inch our way toward a new season, the day turns gold a little bit earlier every morning, offering to light the day longer and longer, warmer and warmer. These are the mornings I wait all winter long for, when I can look out the window and watch the magic that turns dark to light so quietly and effortlessly, just like it has been doing every day since God called it all 'good'.

But I think the real magic is that in these same hours of quiet at the desk by the window, as the day comes alive and greets the world, so does my heart.

Morning glory, indeed.   

*Job 38:12

Oh dear reader, thank you. Thank you for being here, for meeting up in this little space and then being willing to come back for a visit. I do not tell you this enough, but it humbles me to no end that these simple words actually have an audience, and that by the grace of our good, good Father, they connect with some of you. Do you know I keep every email, every message, and every word of encouragement you all have sent? Yep, every single one. From South Africa and New Jersey and Texas, from the teacher at my daughter’s preschool, from the fellow special needs mamas, and the friends I do life with on a regular basis— when you tell me that something I offered on paper was even the slightest bit encouraging to you, I praise Jesus and then ask him to help me to show up again and write some more.

Because can I tell you the truth? This has been hard, at times harder than I have wanted to work through, and I cannot do it without him.

When I started just enough brave I was certain God was calling me to pioneer something big and bold in my city. I had grand visions of people all over my tiny pocket of the country being inspired to live bravely and fight for justice in their places. I was slowly but surely stepping in to an idea I knew—and still believe—was from God as an advocate for women in the sex industry. I wanted to tell a different story about them, and I wanted to help them see a way out. Well, God raised up a few like-minded women and we stumbled our way through something we had no idea how to actually do. But let me tell you something: all God needs is obedience, He’ll do the rest. And he has. He has sustained and grown something that is allowing women in a very dark place to see Jesus.

And he has done it not because of me, but in spite of me.

But two and half years ago, that was my brave. And I believed if I could find just enough of it, God would honor that. That ministry has grown in ways I would never have pictured. No website, no social media, only—much like this—vague descriptions of our end goal coupled with massive amounts of prayer and faith. We have a prayer team, consistent donors, and a support group far bigger than I had even thought to ask God to grow it. And yet with every month of growth or moment of ‘only-God’ praises, I have had less and less of a role. It has grown bigger, and I have gotten much, much smaller. I have had to.

It was just over a year ago that we started seeing signs of ‘something wrong’ in our little guy. So many of you have followed that journey since I started sharing it, but all roads seemed to point to autism from the beginning, and that is where we find ourselves today.

I wish you knew how many times I have asked God, “Why?”

“Lord, we were willing, we were ready to go anywhere! But what Cannon needs is here. Why are you keeping us here, why did you give us this? We were willing to go!”

Yet God is so patient with our myopathy, isn’t he? We can only see right here, right now. All of human history has been directed by his hands and we are so quick to grumble over the things we do not like in this moment. But over my months of protesting, he gently kept whispering this to me: ‘If I have asked you to do it, no matter what it is, you’re going to need to be brave.’

If he has asked me to be a special needs mama, I need to be brave.

If Cannon is angry and upset for reasons I cannot understand, I need to hold him tight so he doesn’t hurt himself, and I need to be brave.

If treatments and therapies and endless doctor appointments sweep away savings accounts and extra income, I need to trust that it is truly God’s money anyway, and I need to be brave.

If we cannot participate, or have to cancel plans, or if my little one is misunderstood by onlookers and people who do not know him, if we have to sit outside a birthday party while others walk in and silently wonder why we can't just yet, I need to offer a quick plea for patience and grace, and I need to be brave.

If we do not understand why, if there is no clear cause and no clear cure, if for all of our effort we cannot find a formula that guarantees a way through this, I need to trust the Author of every great story, and I need to be brave.

‘This is your brave, Katie. You only have to find just enough of it.’

If I could summarize our short time on this journey so far I would say this: God has grown bigger, and I have gotten much, much smaller. He’s always been big, I just haven’t always seen it.

And all along the way, I’ve done the only thing I know how to do: be honest about it. I have been honest with my grieving and honest with my hope. I have written from exactly where I am because there would be no possible way for me to pretend to write from some other place. I have thought a hundred times in this past year that I should quit, that these hours spent at the computer could be better spent researching methods and therapies and all manner of options for treating something that is so hard to wrap our hands around.

And almost every time, in the moments I am most ready to stop, there’s an email, or a text, or someone somewhere—maybe I know her but most often I don’t—telling me not to. Bob Goff said once that, “God doesn’t pass us messages as often as he passes us each other.” That, sweet readers, could not be more true for me.

A few months ago, as I was processing all of this with my friend Jen, she said something to me that I have been holding on to all this time. “Katie, I don’t think it is an accident that while your little guy has so much trouble finding his words, God has given you so many of them.”

God certainly does not struggle to see the whole picture, does He?

Today, I am just feeling… I don’t know, some combination of grateful and pensive, as I sit here thinking about how far God has taken me, and what he has done as I have so imperfectly shared the story. This space has kept growing. But I keep getting smaller. While I used to want to be a Writer, capital 'W', and a Leader, capital 'L', now I just want to be someone with unshakable faith, even if it is merely the size of a mustard seed.

If I did not see it two and half years ago, or even a year ago, when two very different journeys began for me, I see it so clearly now: He increases, we decrease. And as that happens, as the distance between God and us gets bigger and bigger, his glory fills in the space. It is so, so beautiful; I just had to get much lower to see it this well.

*****

So dear reader, that is the just enough brave story. My life looks so little like I thought it would when we began. But it looks exactly how God wants it to, and knowing that is all that I need to feel so incredibly grateful to be chosen for this work. I still think and pray all the time about how and when and why to share in words—when you are convicted to your core that God sees every single motive that governs your heart it quickly changes how you do everything. But for today, I think I will keep at it. These hours could be spent in a dozen different ways, but so far they have all added up to teach me about God, and they leave me more in awe of him with each passing one. Time well spent, I think.

I know now that brave is not always leading and not always grand and not even always something anyone but God will see. Being brave is doing exactly what God has asked you to do, and humbly pointing every bit of that work back to the One who sustains it. If you ask me, I think humility is the new brave.

So, what do you say we all keep getting smaller?

And a hundred times, thank you for letting me tell you everything. You are good friends to listen so well.