what is it?

Hi, friends. It's been a minute. ----- I had absolutely no intentions of stepping away from this space. I truly didn't.  Life got wild, and, well, you know the drill.  Anyways, this is just me slowly trying to make my way back. :-)  I've still been writing a lot while I've been away - in the Tuesday Letters, over on Insta...basically everywhere *except* for here. Hopefully we're changing that. But before I get into life updates and all of that good stuff, I wanted to give this piece a space to live here on the blog.  I shared these words back in July, less than a week before my twenty-first birthday. They're a big chunk of my heart over the past year or so - the good, the bad, and the ugly. It's a piece that means a lot to me, and I thought it deserved a permanent space. I hope you're all doing so, so well, and that October has been a kind one. Wishing you clear skies. xx ----- 7.13.21 "He rained down manna for the people to eat, He gave them the grain of Heaven." - Psalm 78:24 ----- The sunlight is gentle through my window today. It's been the kind of thunderstormy day that makes up most of the summertime in the south, with two minute downpours that give way to the clearest of skies minutes later. It's quiet now, hazier, and the golden light that normally pours into my bedroom is tinged by the clouds. As I'm sitting here trying to peck out this letter that's probably going to end up far more vulnerable than I'd planned, I'm DMing a friend, asking the question that you probably are, too - how are we already almost halfway through July? Some days feel so slow, and yet the summer is absolutely flying by. I looked at a calendar last night and realized just how soon classes will be starting up, and I think that I've decided that I don't need to look at calendars anymore. Denial is a healthy coping mechanism, right? ----- The next time that a Tuesday Letter lands in your inbox, I'll be twenty-one. All week, I've found myself thinking about life a year ago - how different it was, in so many ways. How much has stayed the same, both in ways I'm grateful for and in ways that I'd give anything to change. And amidst the mess of it all, in looking back and sorting through the summer that broke my heart, I remember being so completely terrified to turn twenty. I wrote about it, as I do most things, so if you were around a year ago, this isn't news to you. But I was so anxious, in a way that was almost paralyzing, because I felt as though I'd hit two decades of life with nothing to show for it. I wasn't where I'd hoped I'd be on my timeline, and I didn't know what to do with that. ----- If I'm being dead honest, twenty has quite possibly been the hardest year of my life. The first six months to the day were a sea of grief, and I've spent the past six trying to figure out where to go from there. My initial anxieties about being twenty - worries about things I hadn't done or made it to - quickly faded to the back of my radar as I became settled in the fact that there was nothing truly momentous about a new decade; each day was another day like any other. But instead I felt so bogged down with the weight of everything in day to day life that I simply wanted to breathe. ----- In the Old Testament, there's a story in which the Israelites wander the desert for forty years. They're searching for the Promised Land, but they can't get there - God won't let them. They were disobedient and didn't trust Him, and so He left them to wander. Without help, all of the Israelites would have died quickly in the barren desert. But six days a week, God rained bread down from the heavens for them to eat - manna. There's a post on Jane Marczewski's blog called "God is on the Bathroom Floor". In the post, Jane, better known as Nightbirde, writes about her relationship with God amidst tragedy. Immense trauma left physical damage to her brain, and she write about the autumn that she spent wrestling with God in the rawest way.

"I remind myself," she writes, "that I’m praying to the God who let the Israelites stay lost for decades. They begged to arrive in the Promised Land, but instead He let them wander, answering prayers they didn’t pray. For forty years, their shoes didn’t wear out. Fire lit their path each night. Every morning, He sent them mercy-bread from heaven. I look hard for the answers to the prayers that I didn’t pray. I look for the mercy-bread that He promised to bake fresh for me each morning. The Israelites called it manna, which means “what is it?”  That’s the same question I’m asking—again, and again. There’s mercy here somewhere—but what is it? What is it? What is it?"

It's the question that I think I've spent the last year asking: what is the mercy here? Where is the good? I know in my brain that You are good, but I look around and ask: where is it? What is it? I find myself feeling like a hypocrite, writing letters and posts and emails in the morning about finding the good, seeing the good, and then turning to my journal the same night and questioning when I'll see it myself.

But then the post continues, and the words of a woman who's known more pain than I can fathom are a balm to my heart.

"I see mercy in the dusty sunlight that outlines the trees, in my mother’s crooked hands, in the blanket my friend left for me, in the harmony of the wind chimes. It’s not the mercy that I asked for, but it is mercy nonetheless. And I learn a new prayer: thank you. It’s a prayer I don’t mean yet, but will repeat until I do."

When I look back over the last year, over twenty, and I really look at it, I see where the mercy lies all over it. Oh, I spent the year praying for mercy alright, and at first glance, it never came. Those midnight prayers and whispers as I went about the day sometimes feel like nothing more than that - whispers. But mercy was there nonetheless. It's not obvious, not screaming for attention, but it's there, in the grace of a quiet morning with my mother and sunlight on my back porch and the kindness of someone miles away. And no, it wasn't the mercy that I asked for, but since when am I the one to make the call on the mercy that I deserve? Who am I to negate the mercy I've been handed? I spent most of twenty feeling as though the overwhelm of it all would crush me. But that's the thing about manna - you always get exactly as much as you need. God didn't leave the Israelites to starve, and He also didn't give them more than their share. God isn't a God of messy estimates - He gives exactly the portion you need to be handed. And so I'm reminded that despite the chaos, despite the heaviness, I'm still here, in many ways in a place that I couldn't have imagined eight months ago. And there is no ounce of false belief in my mind that I could have managed that alone, that I got myself here. It was all manna. And that's where the prayer comes in: "thank you". The whisper of a prayer that we don't always mean, but repeat until we do. Thank you for grace. Thank you for breath. Thank you for manna, rained down in the portion that we so need, even when it's the furthest thing from what we hoped for or asked for or wanted. It's a daily act - finding the manna in the desert. Recognizing it for what it is when it didn't come in the form that you thought it would, dropping gratitude from your dry lips day after day after day. Because if I'm going to wander, at least I'm not doing it alone. I don't think that twenty will ever be a year that I look back on with fondness. But I also hope that when I think back to these days, I remember the manna - even as it's a daily process of finding it. Maybe it's rarely been what I asked for, maybe it's never been what I asked for. But it's sustenance all the same, because it was never about my plans, anyways, was it? I am here and I have been sustained, and that's the greatest mercy of all. So, here's to twenty-one. I don't have the faintest idea what it will hold in any way - but I know that I will be sustained. And I know that the manna will still be here. And so I whisper "thank you" until I mean it, letting my days become tinged with gratitude like streaks of color in the sky, because there is mercy here.