Oh God, make speed to save us.
Oh Lord, make haste to help us.

Every day (except for the ones I forget), I utter these words from the liturgy (and Ps 70:1). They are part of the evening prayer, which I usually read in the early afternoon because I am an overachiever, and no matter what time my eyes run across them, I need them. A few weeks ago, I read them from my hotel room in Santa Monica, surrounded by my husband and two young boys, all of whom — including me — had been struck by Covid when we arrived in the US for our first visit in two years. These timeless and centuries-repeated words were more apt than ever for our situation: we were at a low point, and that is how I knew we would be okay.

Covid struck our younger son first, on the very day after New Year’s. If I believed in harbingers like (I used to) I would have begged for a do-over for the start of 2022. The religion I clung to when I was younger was more superstition than truth, more karma than grace. It was the “if you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans” and “God will never give you more than you can handle” brand of self-help-with-a-Jesus-façade, informed less by critical thinking than by Christian teen flip-calendars and quick fixes. These quick fixes showed up in my commitment to just try harder when I messed up because eventually I’d get it right … right?

New Years, with its resolutions and clean slate, used to be so appealing to me: just after Christmas I’d get a brand new shot at perfection, another year to start clean. Though I lived in Alabama, I knew from movies what snow looked like: pure, white, spotless. That was what January felt like for me. Until about January 2, that is, once I’d run through the extent of my efforts and found, once again, that they weren’t enough: I was somehow still the same person I’d been on December 31. These days I’m better at not making grand plans for self-improvement, but I still make plans. And this year, during a brief hopeful moment and opening of Australian international borders, that plan was to visit family in the US. And while we were there, why not visit Park City, and after that we could just hit up Disneyland, and then maybe swing by New York City before landing in Atlanta? 

I no longer believe God is the almighty jerk who laughs at all my plans, but I am thoroughly acquainted with his willingness to upend them to show me who he actually is.

This year, that upending looked like a postponed trip to Disney, a cancelled trip to New York, and missed connections with friends and family along the way, as well as extended time at a hotel we’d planned on just stopping through — complete with a glut of time together in a small space as a family of four. God make haste to help us indeed.

But these upendings, what look like interruptions to my eyes, are actually invitations. Not to a different reality, but to reality, period. As Ethan wrote in the recent Mbird devotional, “This is what the invitation to faith looks like on a daily basis: to accept what’s real over what we’d prefer to be real.”

In my former life of faith, I could convince myself of a new reality every January 1 — a reality of my own making. Then I’d spend the rest of the year trying to arrange everything around me to fit that reality. Let me tell you, it was exhausting. Now when my plans are interrupted I know that God’s not laughing at me — he’s holding me closer, drawing me deeper. Because of this pattern of his activity, I’ve come to trust that his holding precedes some kind of new dawn. And that the time waiting for that dawn to arrive will probably, kinda suck. It might even involve the worst thing that could happen, happening.

Four hotel rooms, several Covid tests, and approximately five hundred years ago, our family of four took a break from the cold and popped into a Park City movie theater to see Spider-Man: No Way Home. I entered with zero expectations because the film was two and a half hours long and the kids were with us. So imagine my surprise when it turned out to be one of the most nostalgic and cathartic experiences of my entire year. I watched as three Spider-Men worked together (a trinity, if you will). Not in a pattern of vanquishment, but redemption. Each of these iterations of the superhero had experienced profound loss — the worst thing that could happen, happening — which was not erased, but somehow answered through the arc they took together. The time each endured waiting for that dawn to arrive kinda sucked.

I don’t remember exactly which year I gave up resolutions, but it was probably sometime after my own profound loss, when the identity I’d created for myself didn’t pan out the way I’d planned. It was sometime after the worst thing that could happen did: I found out I wasn’t enough. And just in case I didn’t learn it the first time, it became a recurring theme.

It was a theme as I sat in a room felled by a virus (the worst thing, relatively speaking), surrounded by the people I love, whose very breathing noises made me want to claw my own face off (hashtag blessed). I’m not going to repeat here some of the things I thought and said during our “vacation” because I don’t want a public record of them. Suffice it to say that I am not enough: not for Covid, not for changed plans, not even for a regular day by 3pm. 

So maybe 2022 has started off better for you: less Covid, fewer hotel rooms, and still making it to the gym. Or maybe you’re knee-deep in the debris of failed resolutions already and uttering the liturgy through tears. Either way, you are at the same point in the eyes of the only one who matters: loved.

Amid the Covid darkness, I stole a few minutes to myself and walked out to the Pacific Ocean. Over the past five years, I’ve lived on the other side of this ocean and I’ve made myself at home in its waters: swimming first in the summer, then in a wetsuit in winter, and never far from its shores. I put my feet in the water and was surprised to feel it wasn’t that cold. Not now, not to me. I thought of all the interruptions that had to occur to get me, a girl from the Gulf, to be unperturbed by the chill of the Pacific in winter. I thought of how the Psalmist wrote about the highways to Zion in our hearts. How those highways don’t just appear, but are etched over years — engraved more deeply with each interruption and invitation and coaxing. Spirit-led steps. I thought about how we don’t find home by resolving to get there, but by being carried.

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