God-shaped hole

It’s February.

Ergo, I was feeling angsty the other night. I had to drive somewhere, so I pulled up the anthem of my dark early-twenties days.

I’m standin’ on the bridge

I’m waiting in the dark

I thought that you’d be here by now

There’s nothing but the rain

No footsteps on the ground

I’m listening, but there’s no sound

Through a confluence of choice and circumstance, I found myself at age twenty-two professionally aimless, avoiding church and my Christian friends, partying heavily, and desperately lonely.

I had greatly desired to graduate from college with an MRS degree, as it seemed to my adolescently hyperbolic brain that all my friends were doing. Four out of five of my roommates senior year came back from Christmas break with diamonds given by their boyfriends—an occurrence that made a painful and depressing impression on me, as there was no one in sight with a diamond to offer me. 

I hardly had any greater desires.

When graduation came and went (and ALL my friends went off and got married), my support system crumbled and I grew disillusioned with a God who wouldn’t give me what I wanted. 

By wintertime, when natural daylight shrinks, I was spending plenty of time in an ill-lit basement indulging in wanton revelry to fend off the bewildering tears that would inevitably pop up in quieter moments.

It was so dark.

That November a teenage Avril Lavigne released the anguished ballad that played repeatedly like a soundtrack on all the pop stations. Maybe she was lonely too, in the literal and metaphorical dark, desperately sad that the hoped-for love of her life hadn’t materialized, and having given up hope that he would.

I’m standin’ on the bridge

I’m waiting in the dark

I thought that you’d be here by now

There’s nothing but the rain

No footsteps on the ground

I’m listening, but there’s no sound

Isn’t anyone tryin’ to find me?

Won’t somebody come take me home?

How I wanted somebody to find me—to take me to a comforting kind of life, out of the life I was living that I really didn’t want. 

But I had left behind the respectable life and it was impossible to return. Now of all times I did not deserve any good things from God. I concluded that He didn’t love me, because how could He? I was an unregenerate. 

It’s a damn cold night

Tryin’ to figure out this life

Won’t you take me by the hand

Take me somewhere new?

I don’t know who you are, but I

I’m with you

I’m with you

I did not predict what would happen in February 2003, or what would come of it.

With God all things are possible.

~ Matthew 19:26

God brought Jason into my life.

At the time I was just happy that someone I liked significantly better than any of the other guys I knew was actually, unquestionably, expressing interest in me.

It was only as time went on that it slowly, gradually dawned on me… that this was the man I had been wanting to find me. 

His quality was deeper than just a marginal improvement over my binge-drinking peers. He was longing for the same kind of life that I was longing for—abundant life…life in the light.

Somehow Jason found me lovable, and when he loved me, I started to think maybe God could love me after all.

As I came to realize that God had given me the husband I wanted, at precisely the time when I least deserved it, my heart melted at the kindness of God.

God’s kindness is meant to lead you to repentance.

~ Romans 2:4

My life changed after that. And not just because I got married. I understood what grace meant, in a way I never did before I went prodigal.

And I loved Him for it. 

But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved— and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the coming ages he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.

~ Ephesians 2:4-7

I came home that night from my angst drive, humming Avril and telling Jason how thankful I am that he’s in my life.

But like the Hebrews and their Red Sea moment, Jason coming into my life was just a picture of a much, much bigger salvation. God just used my husband, whom I could see, to teach me about His gracious hand, that I could not see.

The cry of my heart that Avril so ably captured wasn’t, at its deepest, my longing to get married.

I’m standin’ on the bridge

I’m waiting in the dark

The true light, which gives light to everyone, was coming into the world.

~ John 1:9

Isn’t anyone tryin’ to find me?

Won’t somebody come take me home?

For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost.

~ Luke 19:10

Why is everything so confusing?

Maybe I’m just out of my mind

For God is not a God of confusion but of peace.

~ 1 Corinthians 14:33

Avril Lavigne, “I’m With You”

Sledding party

 

Weather 2026

latte from Ada’s coffee shop

The snowstorm that turned into an ice storm a week ago is still the major news around here. Roads are clear except for the rock-hard snowbanks encroaching on them. It took a few days but we finally cleared our driveway and a path from our door to the mailbox. And bless our neighbor who plowed out in front of our mailbox with a farm tractor.

wine and Qwirkle date night

I got so behind on laundry that Jason felt like he was living in It’s a Wonderful Life, a world where Mindy never even existed.

Winter storm Day 1, in which regular snow falls

Caleb nearly brought me to tears the other day during his spelling lesson. I arranged the magnet tiles into multisyllabic words and instructed him to remove the prefix and suffix and tell me what root word we’re left with. As per usual, instead of sliding the tiles aside with a single finger, he created a vehicle of war out of several other tiles, started them at the far side of the whiteboard, and then zoomed them in with explosive sound effects and marker-drawn chaos, blasting the word apart and then searching among the wreckage for the root word tile while I closed my eyes and took deep cleansing breaths.

That wasn’t the part that brought me to tears. I’m used to that. What brought me to tears was when the lesson was finished and I turned around to put the magnetic alphabet back together, I couldn’t find the tiles we used. I was momentarily confused when I saw them neatly back in place and asked what happened to them. He matter-of-factly told me that he had put them back where they go.

He had put them back where they go!!

He took apart his letter-tile war engines and replaced them neatly as a normal person would expect to find the alphabet. This has never happened in the history of Caleb’s education. Be. Still. My heart.

Winter storm Day 2, on which we wake up to find the snow has turned to a single worldwide block of ice.

As it hasn’t been particularly enticing to go outside, and everything we might consider doing has been cancelled, I had the pleasure of realphabetizing my spice drawer this week. Happy thought indeed!

My homeschooled kids are the only people they know who’ve had any school this week. Even Ada has been home every day since community classes were cancelled. And since nothing has changed and everything is still frozen in place, I don’t see why she or any of their public-schooled friends would go back on Monday or Tuesday.

Lucky us! No school interruptions necessary for the homeschooled. Except when we’re chipping ourselves out to retrieve groceries or meet friends for icy sledding adventures.

Caleb sitting on top of the snow running his r/c car over the ice