Finding Our Way Back
Easter carried a different weight for me this year.
It's the month of my daughter's Christening. A month of faith. A month of renewal. And I've been sitting with that, intentionally, in a way I never quite have before.
But to tell you what this Easter means, I have to back up a little.
Back to a cold December, a totaled car, and a doctor's office where my wife tried very hard not to cry in front of a stranger.
…
We'd been trying to have a baby for a while.
Long enough that we'd found ourselves, somewhat sheepishly, sitting in a fertility clinic.
My wife had already learned she had PCOS, a condition that complicates things considerably, and on this particular afternoon, a doctor added to the ledger. Likely endometriosis too, he said. And possibly only one side doing any of the work at all.
He delivered this news the way men in those offices do.
Clinically. Efficiently. Moving on before the words had finished landing.
When he left the room, she cried.
I don't have a word for what it feels like to watch the person you love absorb that kind of news. You want to fix it and you can't. You want to say something true and useful and you mostly just sit there, useless as a screen door on a submarine.
On the ride home I did my best. And somewhere in the fog of that December - a week before Christmas, fresh off a car accident, carrying this new weight - we made a quiet decision.
We were going to let off it for a weekend. Just breathe. My wife hadn't touched a drink in over a year. That weekend, we went out, unwound, and felt something like our younger selves again.
We'd actually been praying since well before that clinic waiting room. Faith had been stirring in us quietly for a while. We just hadn't yet given it a proper home.
Come the new year, the next step felt natural, even obvious ...
We were going back to church.
…
Now neither of us were strangers to faith. My wife had the stronger variety, a la Catholic school and attendance during the trials of her life, and mine was of a spottier variety.
But we both felt the pull.
We decided that we would “try a few” and quickly aligned on: nothing too stiff, nothing that made you feel like you'd wandered into a board meeting.
The first Sunday of the new year, we tried a little church on the road to Colts Neck. We'd passed it a hundred times. On the way to Delicious Orchards. On the way to our hiking trails.
We’d never thought much of it before, yet we thought plenty of it that morning.
Every soul in that building came and introduced themselves. Shook our hands.
The pastor spoke like a man who'd lived something, not just studied it. His first sermon — on addiction, of all things — hit us somewhere specific.
The old hymns. The quiet in the room.
The feeling, almost forgotten, of being part of something bigger than your own troubles.
There's a difference, it turns out, between praying alone and praying inside a community of people who mean it. We'd been doing the first for months. That morning we found the second.
The prayers had somewhere to go now, and people to carry them with us.
...
A week or two later, my wife came out of the bathroom with five pregnancy tests …
She stood there, teary-eyed, waiting patiently for me to wrap up my writing.
It's positive. Babe, I'm pregnant!
I know what the skeptics will say.
Anecdotal. Coincidence. The body does funny things when you stop stressing.
Maybe so. But for us, in that moment and every moment since, the math was simple: we let off it, we leaned on our faith, and the thing we'd been told was nearly impossible became our daughter.
The pastor we'd fallen in love with eventually gave his notice. His father's health had called him back to Texas, back to take over his father's church.
We stayed on through the in-between, through the interim pastors and the slow, careful search that follows.
When the new pastor gave his first sermon, I felt it the same way I'd felt that first Sunday.
The same quiet certainty. Right person. Right place. Right time.
After a few services, we asked if he'd christen our daughter. The Christening is still a couple of weekends away and I find myself genuinely excited.
Not in a fidgety way, but in the deep, settled way of a man who knows he's exactly where he's supposed to be.
Some fires you build. Some fires get built for you. Ours came wrapped in a pink blanket.
That little church on the road to Colts Neck has been a place of quiet reflection, of reminder, of love, of community … ever since that foggy December when we needed it most and finally had the sense to walk through the door.
God was always there. Waiting, the way He does.
We just needed to find our way back.