O LORD, you are my God; I will exalt you and praise your name, for in perfect faithfulness you have done marvelous things, things planned long ago. Isaiah 25:1

We roll out of bed on Monday and plunge headlong after our agenda. We’ve got a list of things to do and a full week of tasks and most Mondays start with tackling the list.

My Sunday night washed into my Monday morning and I woke up with such sadness. I was in the middle of the post-church lunch prep yesterday when my phone buzzed. I didn’t recognize the number so I let it go. A few minutes later, it buzzed again. Same number. They’ll leave a message, I thought. A few minutes later, my phone buzzed a third time, but again without a message.

And then I got a text: “If this is your number, Lisa, this is {childhood friend}. Please call.”

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Once my 8-month-old grandson learned to crawl, his determination was incredible. Nothing was going to keep him from getting to his destination.

Each morning, just after waking up, he made a circuit around the living room’s perimeter, a veritable obstacle course. First, he inched under the coffee table, then maneuvered over a stack of pillows, crawled between the wall and an end table and finally ventured across the tiled floor on bare knees.

The obstacles slowed him but they never stopped him from moving forward.

While my grandmomma instinct was to help him when it looked too hard, his parents watched patiently, letting him struggle until he had moved through each barrier.

They didn’t move the coffee table or shove the pillows aside to make it easier. They smiled at his tenacity and if at any point he would have come against something impossible, they would have bent down to rescue.

Oh, for that trusting tenacity when there are obstacles.

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One swift kick.

The frustration of the last ten months had come to a head and with all the patience of a 3-year-old, I took it out on the side of the tub with one quick kick.

Tubs are unforgiving.

My ankle began to swell with shades of blue and purple and soon I couldn’t bear any weight on that foot. For the next two days, I hopped and hobbled around, painfully aware that my heart needed fixing more than my ankle.

I’d been wandering a wilderness of isolation and waiting after we moved from a town I loved to a new large city. I didn’t doubt God had led us to move, but the months looking for a new church, new house, new homeschool group, new swim coach, new everything had taken their toll.

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