To acquire the habit of reading is to construct for yourself a refuge from almost all the miseries of life. ~W. Somerset Maugham

I would be most content if my children grew up to be the kind of people who think decorating consists mostly of building enough bookshelves. ~Anna Quindlen, New York Times, August 1991

I’ve been living in this apartment for just over one year now and there has always been something just… off… that I’d never been able to quite put my finger on.

Then this morning, a mood crept upon me that felt all at once familiar and strange… I restlessly wandered over to my bookshelves to peruse the titles nestled therein for the perfect companion to such a steely quiet day and realized with a start that my books are no longer there. The shelves are instead crammed with unopened bills, political magazines, receipts, school binders and of course, the newcomers; books that have been acquired over the last hectic year. My books, my rows and rows of beguiling, cryptic invitations tattooed on spines were never reinstated when we moved here. They are still prostrate and neglected in their cardboard cells, the wrongfully convicted waiting out their undeserved sentence in the concrete prison of a storage locker.

Like a child who suddenly remembers a friend who has moved away, I spent the day bereaved of the companionship I had taken so for granted, turning over the memories of the names of places we said we’d visit in my mind with a sigh.

No wonder this apartment has never quite felt like home. How could it, without my friendly, lyrical titles holding court over the living room? A Prayer for Owen Meany dominating the shelf where Icy Sparks and The Inn at Lake Devine lead such different and similar girls’ lives… Bel Canto and A Map of Glass sternly occupying the top shelf, reproachful in their unread, undiscovered states next to Possession: A Romance and The Reader, smug and secure in their status as beloved favourites. Books I’ve read beside books I’ve reread, and books I’ve yet to read mixed throughout like leavening to the bread of my library. Words that have shaped my conscience, fired my thoughts, startled my assumptions, words that trump even a coat of arms in their ability to declare a place truly my home. More familiar, more dear to me than a gallery of kitchen wallpapers, these books line my rooms and couch my daily minutiae.

We’ve been shopping for a couch for months… how do I break it to my husband that I would much rather spend the money on bookshelves in order to bring my dear old friends home?

re·a·lign (r-ln)
tr.v. re·a·ligned, re·a·lign·ing, re·a·ligns
1. To put back into proper order or alignment.
2. To make new groupings of or working arrangements between.^[1]

Somewhere along one of the many paths I’ve gone down on my internet travels, I came across an article written by Don Whitney called Ten Questions for the New Year, in which he says:

The beginning of a new year is an ideal time to stop, look up, and get our bearings. To that end, here are some questions to ask prayerfully in the presence of God.

My Dad works with engineers who work on those gigantic oil tankers which do such stunning things that I often can’t help but think deep down that it must just be magic. Their complexities and the sheer size of the jobs they perform^[2] exceed my abilities to understand. But listening to my Dad talk about his work is one of my favourite things to do. His understanding of these huge vessels and their systems is astonishing and, remarkably, it is inspiring.

Having been privy to a great many conversations along such lines has given me, osmotically, an appreciation for the way the movements of the massive often depend utterly on the precision and reliability of the very, very small.

A missing ball bearing or an instrument out of alignment can grind the most immense projects to a halt, at staggering costs. When you think about it, is it any different when it comes to our own hearts, thoughts, lives and the effect they can have on God’s vast plans for us? Are we misaligned with His glorious and loving Spirit? Do we stubbornly insist on grinding away at life with our own rusty ball bearings when God so desires to see us glide in God’s joy?

January is a fresh start… and fresh starts are why God invented mornings and years. He must have known we would need a reset button. Something to get us excited about our lives again when it starts to feel like we’re just treading water. A chance to pull off the road and take advantage of a much needed pit stop. Rotate, recalibrate, realign. I think Whitney’s questions are a good way to get the year off to a beautiful start, so in lieu of resolutions, I’ll be reflecting on one of these questions every day and sharing my answers to them with you here.

I was going to post this last night and do the first question today, but you saw how my computers (both of them, even) were being putzes. And as it turns out, the timing is even better because today I had a three-hour conversation with my Mom that really helped shift something deep inside me – a veil had fallen over my face when I lost my unborn son and it muted my vision of our Lord’s glory and amazing love. I felt I couldn’t get a clear feeling of Him. Prayer and worship felt strained. It was very painful and I was beginning to feel a bit abandoned.

But the flood opened up over me again today and my heart opened like a bud under the sun. My mourning veil has been gently lifted and brushed aside. It’s time to stand up and realign my steps with those on the sand beside me. It’s time to get back on the road to being exactly who God is shaping me to be. We have wonderful, wonderful work to do!

1. From the Free Online Dictionary [↩]
2. If you want to read about what these things do, Wikipedia has an excellent article on FPSOs and how they work. [↩]

I woke up this morning with that report-card feeling in my tummy. You know the one. It might have been more of a book-report feeling for you. Or a dentist’s-chair feeling. It’s the feeling deep in your tummy that makes smiling feel weird.

It’s because you know you have to do something that’s hard, or face the consequences of something you didn’t do well. Like studying or brushing your teeth.

Or growing a baby.

Oh, I know. I know it wasn’t my fault. Kind of. But I did a lot of things wrong and even though lots of people do the same things and still end up with a healthy baby, for me, that didn’t happen. For my baby, whose tests came back chromosomally normal, it is very likely something I did or something I just am caused him to die. It could have been my endometrial polyp or the fact I’m morbidly obese. Because it could have been those things, I feel I should have done more to fix them. I feel like I failed.

That’s the book-report feeling.

The dentist’s-chair feeling is because I have to let go and it’s going to be hard. I have to let go so I can do the things that will make room in my life for the new blessings to come. I have to trade the comfort of mourning for the fear that nothing will come to take its place.

This awful, awful fear that I’ll forget my baby only to realize no new joy is coming to rescue me from the emptiness.

Yet I know in my heart of hearts, in my tummy of tummies, that this fear is wrong. It doesn’t fit, doesn’t add up. One, I won’t forget Nathaniel. How could I ever? Ever? Two, new joy is promised to us again and again by our Lord.^[1] Three, it may not look exactly like the joy I had pictured for myself, but I seem to have grown up just enough to recognize that God’s imagination might be better than mine.

So it’s time. It’s time to start getting up in the morning in the vicinity of sunrise. Time to start showering and getting dressed every day and not just when I have to leave the house. It’s time … really time… to put everything away. To put Nathaniel’s bunnies and sympathy cards into their own special memory box. To make a frame of his positive test, sonogram, and name in the sand photos. To find a new place in our lives for him that allows us to move forward both with and without him.

if not this, then what?
if not him, who else?

1. John 15:10-11, Psalm 126:5, and my special favourite, Nehemiah 8:10b [↩]