This is where the constellations shine in the darkness

I can’t figure it out, so I give God glory for it.

It is bedtime and the rituals have begun. She pokes her head through the neck of her second-hand summer nightie, its cotton folds falling over her legs dotted with mosquito bites. She brushes her teeth, I remind her to floss. We close the blinds, draw the drapes in an attempt to sleep past the early dawns of summertime. She gathers her beloved small stuffies, respectively christened Bert and Charles and Felicity.

The water-logged children’s novel is already waiting for us in her bed. It fell into the lake while we were on holidays and then ballooned to three times its original size while drying out, each page now as wavy as the water it slipped beneath, but the story is still there.

I turn on her globe nightlight that sits on the corner of her butter yellow dresser, the one that gently shines with the constellations while she sleeps.

She turns down the bed covers, props the pillows against the matching headboard, leaps into her spot. She pats the spot beside her, closest to the lamp, always her invitation. When I move to get onto the bed, she protests: “Under the covers, Mum! It’s always better when we’re both under the covers.” And I tuck my legs into the sheets as she yanks up her comforter and informs us both, “there, that’s better.”

It is.

And we begin.

We are reading The Story Girl by L.M. Montgomery at the moment. She flaps her hands, like little birds taking wing, to express her delight at certain antics of the King children and their friends on Prince Edward Island. She usually reads a section aloud first, then I read the rest as she eventually settles. Sometimes I swear I can feel her heartbeat slowing down as we go along.

One night, I read aloud a passage about fairy land - a fanciful aside by the author - and she clasped her hands to her chest in raptures. The next day, I found her painstakingly copying that passage onto a sheet of paper; now it is pinned to the cork board my husband hung on the wall exclusively for her treasures like the Star Wars poster and a birthday card from her best friend and the medals from her basketball team he coaches for her and the pack of little girls.

I’m such a tiny brick in the diverse and enduring wall of goodness protecting something precious in us all, but I’m doing my part here. I’m doing my part along with all the others also holding back the powers and principalities and devils of our age.

After we finish our chapter for that night, she needs to talk about the things on her mind, a few goings-on from the day that are burdening her small heart. She is still at the age of processing her own life aloud, I hope it never ends. She is starting middle school in the autumn but we have a month of summer left to us still.

I hide almost all of my people, my real community, behind a veil of privacy; I learned that one the hard way. Tonight’s conversation is just one of the millions of conversations that make up my life with her and her siblings, my husband and our real-life people. These conversations never become “content;” they will never teach anyone else a lesson, never illustrate a point, never leave the sanctuary of our home. This is the real sacred work.

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There comes a day when you realize you’ve always been replaceable.

Well, replaceable everywhere but the place where you belong.

In the years when I was burning myself out for corporations and bosses and institutions, my dad used to try to remind me of that: “If they can save a buck or if you get hit by a bus on the way home, those jokers will just replace you the next day. No need to give them your whole life, you gotta keep something for yourself and your people. You have to look after you. They sure won’t.”¹ Dad was always realistic, even philosophical, about our necessity to the institutional gods with their mission statements and claims of being “a family.” Real loyalty, he knew, was more rare than slogans about it.

But somehow, like most of us, I thought I was the exception. I left corporate life, then stumbled into something that felt like ministry. Eventually, for a few years there, I thought everyone needed my hot take on the controversy-du-jour or main character of the day or whatever nonsense was churning up outrage. I mean, I was issuing “statements” online like a small government. I thought I needed to write blog posts five to six times a week, books every year, answer questions for others that could only answered by their own living (if at all), clapback at bad faith actors in public, opine on it all. I thought I needed to travel twenty weekends a year to preach, to speak, to teach. I thought I needed to churn out content to stay relevant. I thought the needs of others constituted a calling.

At that same time I was a young mother with three tinies in just four years² and then my mother used to gently say to me, “You can have it all, just not all at once.” I seemed to hear only the first part of that sentence.

When I look back over the urgent things I was writing, the pace I was keeping, ten, twelve, fifteen years ago, I am equally parts impressed by and exhausted for that over-serious and rather self-important girl. I was trying to have it all, do it all, be it all. Trying to prove something perhaps. Trying to earn all the badges and set an example or meet a standard or something, who knows. Maybe I just had more energy then. The funny thing is that I wasn’t even that ambitious or competitive by nature, I just felt an urgency or demand about it because some part of me really thought we were changing the whole wide world.

And it was fun and meaningful, don't get me wrong. I was grateful and alive and I felt like I was part of a beautiful movement or two within a community alongside friends, too. I was more hopeful then. But I also felt like I should say yes to every single opportunity and reply earnestly to every single DM or email that landed in my inbox and meet every single request to “pick my brain” and be grateful for every offer of a guest post for exposure and make every long journey to a church to speak and, woof, I worked so hard.

When I became unexpectedly pregnant with my fourth child, one older woman who had been “in the game” and “on the circuit” for a lot longer than me advised me to not take much time off after her birth, I had to just take my baby on the road with me. It was my calling to be out here, doing this work. She said I could not give up on the moment, to strike while the iron was hot, and even that keeping up the pace was a question of my obedience to God. She also assured me that our kids rejoice in our callings in the end. I do know a few pastors’ kids and missionary kids who may disagree but hey, if you can convince yourself it’s for the glory of God, then perhaps it’s worth that pesky sacrifice.

I wonder if that particular person is disappointed in me now.

(I’ve gotten a bit better at disappointing the right people over the years; it took me longer than it probably should have but I got here in the end.)

RELATED: The Pursuit of God: Family, Work, and the Ghost of A.W. Tozer

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A couple years ago in an interview, the host of The Late Show and unexpected philosopher Stephen Colbert spoke poignantly about “learning to love the thing you most wish hadn’t happened.”³

A lot of folks didn’t understand what he meant by that notion but oh, I did. Even though my losses are fairly ordinary and scaled-for-commonplace-life in the scheme of things, I do understand what he means.

Because I love the car accident that reset my life more than eight years ago.⁴

What I mean is this: I hate it and I love it and I hate it way more and I wish it hadn’t happened and it caused suffering across almost every area of my life not the least of which is my body and also almost every good part of my life is because it happened.

Make of that what you will, I can’t make heads or tails of it myself.

I don’t believe for one second that God is behind our suffering for a greater purpose or ordained it for whatever we mistake as glory, but I do believe God can bring beauty out of the coldest ashes long after your prayers went unanswered. Maybe that’s grace, maybe not.

I can’t figure it out, so I give God glory for it.

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As the years have passed, I eventually set down every leadership role, surrendered every board seat I sat on, slowed my writing pace, closed social media accounts with a couple exceptions. I down-shifted my speaking calendar and then closed it entirely, even all those online Zoom meetings. I quit travelling for work entirely because of the toll it took on my body. I even stepped away from work I loved in favour of being a person with creaturely needs and communal obligations. I had to strip away a half dozen things I once loved, including my pet deceptions about myself like “I’m a good leader” or “I’m a high capacity person.” (I’m really not either, I’ll save you the trouble of asking around.)

Some of the people I thought were my friends drifted away when I wasn’t useful anymore, when I wasn’t a stepping stone they required for their ambitious heights. I won’t lie and say that one didn’t sting. Thankfully, now I’m left with a small circle I genuinely trust, those who remember to catch-up when they don’t have a project to promote.

I’m also left with the work I actually loved to do most - to just write about all the ways we experience and know the love of God in our ordinary lives right from the centre of a blessedly ordinary life. I’m with the people who actually do consider me irreplaceable. There is zero part of me that gets to believe my own hype anymore, what a blessing. I was never as necessary as I imagined I was.

It turned out that my dad was right, too: I was, in the end, entirely replaceable.

Thank God.

There were dozens, hundreds, of smarter and better qualified people who are much better at the social media hot takes than I ever was, what a relief. There was always another lady-speaker to ask to the conference, another writer to cajole for an introduction to the publisher, another caption to read on Instagram than my word-salads, another viral essay that was a must-read to set your hair on fire and forward to inboxes, another useful foil to target. I am so grateful for that time in my life and I am grateful that it came to an end.

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I don’t believe in that evangelical notion of “life verses” anymore - the earnest practice of cherry-picking a line or two from the Bible in order to make it manifest in our lives or the lives of our children. Maybe we always had the notion of self-choosing a life verse wrong; maybe you were always meant to live into the promise of goodness or giftings and be surprised to find what was there waiting all along. Maybe it was meant to be a communal discernment. Maybe you need to winter and summer your life through a few more rotations of the earth before you can even allow the themes to emerge. That leaves some room for the surprises of the Spirit, the laughter of God, the voice of your community. If that’s true, then my current life verse is probably, “Make it your ambition to lead a quiet life.”⁵

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I mentioned that I am less hopeful about changing the world now.

I am, however, more hopeful about actually loving the world.

And, even when I’m not hopeful at all, I am committed to the tending to this world as if everything, every one is a universe worthy of love.

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“You can have it all, just not all at once,” Mum had said. And if the first part of my adulthood was my clumsy attempt to force the first clause of that sentence to be true, this (hopefully) middle part of my adulthood has been growing into understanding the gift of that second clause.

Just not all at once.

It all comes and it all goes. What a wonderful, serious thing.

My four children are in stages of growing up and grown up; that latter part happened so much faster than I imagined it could or should. I was reading chapter books aloud to three other tinies before this last one in this little bed in this particular bedroom. Their stages of life now are completely different than this evening’s happenings. I only got one “once” with their particular childhood, their particular teen years, their particular young adulthood now beginning as they step into the whole world waiting for them, I so grateful that didn’t miss any of it. (They’re gorgeous, you know. Such good, good souls. Sturdy and generous and wise and fun.)

I do love the thing I wish most hadn’t happened because if it hadn’t, I don't know if I would have had the courage to choose this slower pace, this quieter life, this winding path far off the super-highways of our age, this resetting of my priorities and privileges, this daily here-am-I planting and rooting of a life. I’ve wintered and summered this all for enough years now to know I will never understand it and I give God glory.

Turns out, I was replaceable everywhere but here. Here in this little girl’s bedroom, my hands resting on her head while I pray her to sleep because somehow, like her older siblings, the steady present faith that I hold as a precious gift now is the ground she walks on and it is the reality of her days. Her bedroom door stays cracked open to hallway lights and so her particular kitten will enter into her rest after I leave. This is where the constellations shine out in the darkness.

Love S.

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P.S. Don’t worry, we’re carrying on with our Unexpected Jesus series; this is just a little bonus essay from me in between in all.

• Jesus is found in both the breaking of the alabaster jar and the breaking of chains: A Benediction Inspired by Part 6 of our Unexpected Jesus Series // The Woman Who Anointed Jesus

• The Unexpected Jesus: Week 6 // The Woman Who Anointed Jesus

• A Benediction for the Ones Who Keep Reaching (Week 5 Prayer)

• The Unexpected Jesus: Week 5 // The Woman Who Reached

• A New Invitation: The Unexpected Jesus: A preview of what's next in our deep-dive series + a look back

1. He also used to tell me never to have more stuff in my office than I could carry out in one box, just in case I ever wanted to quit on the spot and march out. “It loses the effect if you have to make several trips,” he warned. Also true.

2. With this one small sprite still waiting ahead for me, a few years later

3. The entire interview is worth a listen. https://www.cnn.com/2022/09/21/entertainment/stephen-colbert-grief-anderson-cooper-podcast-wellness

4. For newer readers, I wrote about this in more detail in Miracles and Other Reasonable Things. But I don’t like to discuss the specifics of my health online, thanks for your understanding!

5. 1 Thessalonians 4:11