It wouldn’t have mattered how many books I had read or that I had attended lectures and breakout sessions from the foremost experts in the field. Whether I had a master’s degree or the highest level, most current certification was insignificant. It meant nothing, and it never would.
I had coffee with a longtime friend this morning. Actually, it ended up as more of a soul opening than a coffee date; I guess we both needed a good cry. It is in looking for answers that we come to realize there may be none…at least, not yet.
I love Ed Sheeran’s music. I have been listening incessantly for three years. This is a departure from my decades-long habit of overplaying my post-punk college music. It began with one song, then another. For now, anyway, I am hooked. My little boys know the lyrics to many of his songs. Perhaps they have heard them enough times in the car or in the chicken coop to have committed them to memory. Regardless, I like to believe that they think there is something about his music, too.
When the concert was announced late last winter, I bought tickets for the Milwaukee show, as traveling to Chicago heightens my anxiety. Seven months was a long time to wait. No matter what my days would bring, I could look forward to the show as a great prize for making it through the days, weeks, and months. Though my potential travel companions changed several times, the concert was finally on the horizon. The opening band played, and then our hero took the stage. I had been waiting so long for this. The moment arrived, and the music was breathtaking. Then, it was just over. The show was fantastic, but one song that I had expected to hear had been left out. I had waited expectantly, but it was never played.
We struggled and stumbled through my daughter’s childhood. So many times, I had searched for meaning, for direction through the haze of angst, confusion, and emptiness. Now, I have turned to see that with or without my awareness, the circle of the seasons has come and gone enough times to blur the hardest times. I see that both of us, right now, are mostly okay. Perhaps it’s a different kind of okay, but it’s more okay than it could have been. I used to fear that once she left, I would not see her again. She came just the other day, though, with my best coffee drink. And it was not the first time she had come home. I realized, too, that there had been much that was good.
We had taken our medically fragile little boy to one appointment after another over the course of years. Each time, we hoped that this specialist or test would be “the one” that would give us the answer. That never really came about. Today, the tiny boy that struggled to breathe through many nights runs endlessly up and down the soccer field, spins cartwheels through the grocery store, and belts out “Castle on the Hill” with abandon. We may not have found the answer that we thought we were looking for, but somehow, that doesn’t matter, for we have arrived at today.
It seems I am always looking forward…to a certain show, to the telltale appointment, even to God’s kingdom. I guess I don’t know how this moment will bring me to the next. Still, I think I’ll get there.
The answer, the real truth, is not in a college course, within the pages of a best seller, or in the lyrics of a favorite song. It’s in the soul of someone who understands; it’s in the heart of the friend who is not afraid to walk with you, to pull you closer to her. It is inside all of us, whether we understand or are ready to believe.
Maybe the absence of the song I had hoped to hear was a little bit disappointing. There were plenty of songs, though, that were just as beautiful.
“…getting myself lost… I am so gone, so tell me the way home.”
–Ed Sheeran, “One”