Status Updates From A Force of Will: The Reshap...

I told him how embarrassed I was to waste his time looking for non-existent shirts. About how silly I felt to have him see me like this, dependent and adrift all at the same time. But he understood that this wasn't about clothes, not at all. "No," he said. "These are the things that matter."

I still needed to buy handkerchiefs for the funeral, plus black socks and black boxer shorts. ... As we left the store and I drove to the Metro, I woke up to reality. It was a Saturday night, and his friends had been cooking all day in anticipation for a low-key gettogether with him as honored guest. Only my silly shirt boondoggle had made him miss most of it. Chagrined, I apologized for keeping him from his friends.

I tried to be calm, to act as if I didn't mind. Like I was just as happy to wear my black suit and black tie, with black shoes and a white shirt. Like every other funeral I've attended. But i wasn't and I didn't have any more time to do anything more about it. I wouldn't be able to present my most honest self, clad entirely in black, to those gathered at the funeral.

Have you ever prayed until you can't anymore, or maybe you have come to a place where your very thoughts and desires are themselves prayer- where you've entered into it so deeply that actually forming words or thoughts is irrelevant.

It was a life, but it was a life without Will. That old life was a mirage, if it ever really existed. It was gone from my grasp, impossible to reclaim. I just wanted my old normal.

We trust that God is ahead of us, and all around us, leading us and loving us and preparing us for what's next.

We shape it as best as we can and then let it be shaped by God, ourselves, and our community. Maybe faith is only and ever palliative, intended to start us on a journey of eternal collaboration with our maker. We exert a lifetime of effort at growing and developing our best understanding of God and the world, and at living the kind of lives that tunes us into the music of the creator and that fulfill God's hopes.

Like a writer's drafts, or a backpacker's tent, or a scientist's hypothesis, or a gardener's weeding, or a parent's relationship with a child, our present faith only needs to work for its appointed time and should in fact be flexible, temporary and transitory.