My daughter is standing in my bathroom.  But she’s not supposed to be here.  She’s supposed to be getting ready for dinner.

I can’t go tonight, she whispers, her voice catching.  I just can’t do it.  Too many people.  Too much noise.  I just can’t do it tonight, Mom.  I can’t go.

I look up and I can tell in one glance she’s finally allowed herself to feel once again the weight of the weekend and the weight of her world—and I can see that feeling has reddened her eyes and stuffed up her nose and run down her cheeks onto her shirt as she sat, moments ago, alone in her room, feeling ALL THE FEELS, trying to be strong in all the wrong ways.

And I am awash with fresh grief that soaks me just as thoroughly as the shower I just moments ago exited.

This child…

This child who was my first and loudest joy.

This child who now sobs in my arms.

This child who is an island that friends merely ferry in and out from every now and then to visit, leaving her alone in an ocean of pain.

This child whose worship wrecks me.  Whose voice is like a sleeve upon which her heart is emblazened.

This child who is exhausted and discouraged and fearful that these days of endless, solitary exertion are all her life will ever contain.

This child who has worked so hard to attain what she thinks is so little.

This child once so full of life and light and passion whose countenance is now a February sky in Ohio—gray and listless, with only the occasional ray pushing its way through layer upon layer of melancholy.

This child who fights, in her grief and her pain, to understand a God who says he loves her yet has seemingly taken everything away from her.

This child…

My weary heart breaks wide open yet again for this child.

And I sit in the helplessness of knowing I cannot put back together our broken pieces.

I have now celebrated 17 anniversaries of my 29^th birthday and I still, after all these years, struggle sometimes to answer her very same question—What kind of love is this?  Because there are days I simply cannot comprehend this love expressed in a steep, boulder-strewn upward climb through trees wrapped in fog to a summit from which the view is obscured.

It does not feel like love to me…

I remember such a climb in Acadia National Park five or six years ago, the four of us trudging upward, boulder after boulder, toward the summit of Mount Gorham, Keira already struggling with an illness we didn’t know was not going to go away, fighting through back pain we didn’t know would take nearly a year to get under control.

I remember the disappointment I felt about the fog, having looked forward to seeing the majesty of the ocean hitting the rocky cliffs from hundreds of feet above them.  I remember how it weighed on me the entire day—that disappointment of a long-anticipated opportunity lost,  perhaps never to come again.

I remember, six months later, journaling about that day—my mind having remained in that foggy state for all that time—opening up Jesus Calling to the reading for the day, and finding this:

As you look at the day before you, you see a twisted, complicated path, with branches going off in all directions.  You wonder how you can possibly find your way through that maze…  You notice that a fog has settled over it, obscuring your view.  You can see only few steps in front of you, so you turn your attention more fully to me and begin to enjoy my presence.

The fog is a protection for you, calling you back to the present moment.  Although I inhabit all of space and time, you can communicate with me only here and now.  Someday the fog will no longer be necessary, for you will have learned to keep your focus on me and on the path just ahead of you.

Our doctor had just the morning before likened this journey we are on to a climb—and reminded us both that we can’t go straight up this mountain.  Our path must incline, then flatten, incline, then flatten—pacing ourselves, if you will, as we make our way upward.

I reminded Bub of this as we prayed.  And I reminded her of hiking in New England—how climbing those mountains was one of the hardest things she’s ever done.  I reminded her of our tendency at times, on the steep and rocky terrain, to only look down at our feet and miss the glory around us.  Our proclivity to only look at the path and not at the majestic view.  The blue sky above, the rocky outcropping on the adjacent slope, the ferns growing just off the path,  the way the sun flickers through the leaves as they quiver in excitement.

But now we are on a similar climb and we couldn’t even see the view were we to remember to look up.  And as one who meets God in the gloriousness of his creation, I am feeling, as is my daughter, isolated and frightened and unable to draw peace or hope from my surroundings.  

I cannot pretend to understand a love that comes obscured in the fog, in the steep, never-ending climb, in the echoing silence of pain and disappointment.

But I can attempt to trust it.

It is now Sunday morning, and I sit in church listening to one of our pastors teach about Abram and Sarai and Hagar.  Listening to him speak of Abram being marked with a promise and then waiting and waiting and waiting without any movement toward its fulfillment. Listening to him point out it was a full 14 years after promise when Sarai offered Hagar to her husband attempting to rush the process.  There’s a lot that happens in the span of 14 years, he reminds us.

He quoted a female author who wrote that a journey is 2% the start, 3% the finish, and 95% the road.  Did I not just speak the same thoughts to my daughter?  Did she not only yesterday concede the same fact?  That God is often more interested in the process?

Scott reminds us how easy it is to think God has passed us by and has forgotten his promise.  He reminds us God’s promises sometimes take longer than we wanted or anticipated.  He reminds us there is more than the giving of the promise and the receiving of its fulfillment—there is a lot of walking on a winding foggy path where we can’t see a blooming thing and he is forming us in the process of our journey.  Because he is just as concerned about who we are becoming along the way as he is with what we are going to be doing when we get there.

Did you notice he just talked about a foggy pIace?

I wrote about the fog just an hour before those words came out of his mouth.

Scott wonders aloud what 14 years of waiting for that promise must have felt like, going on to remind us that the fulfillment of the promise likewise came with pain.  He was now a marked man.

I don’t have to wonder what that feels like.  I know.

My daughter knows.

Many of us—most of us—ALL OF US know.

We each have our own path.  Our own 14 year wait or 40 year wandering or 400 year silence.

And we each must be reminded, as I was this morning, that our most important prayer as we are walking out our waiting is that we may have the strength and the faith to keep following him and trusting him.  Step by step.  Crawling over boulders, leaping over streams, hauling dead trees out of our path.

Even if it’s in the fog.

And so I pray, my prayer echoing Scott’s words from this morning—God make us a testimony of your faithfulness.  Equip us for the journey.  Walk with us.  Walk with this child of mine.  Don’t let us miss what you have for us in the fog.

And don’t let us give up along the way.

This child is breaking my heart, but she is also developing its muscle.

And she is learning, along the way, by the miraculous grace of God, of a love that will not let her go when the path is not clear and confusion lurks in the haze.

On good days, she will learn to believe it.

And on bad days?

On bad days I continue to pray she will learn to trust it anyway.

confusion faith fear fog grief hope loneliness loss process suffering trust