Thought for a moment

Our archbishop prior to the one we have now was our bishop... oh.... for a million years or so. He's got to be older than dirt, but he still holds parish retreats. In a book based on those retreats called This is Your God, he wrote:

But we must not think that God has said everything and that we know everything about human existence and creation. There will be no end to discovery in the realm of God's creation.

I have always carried a lot of anxieties about the future, and in that I know I'm not unusual. And the only reason anxiety exists is because there are things to be anxious about. Not a day goes by that people don't get a clue about their futures, and hope is always intermixed with at least a little anxiety. In my case, I heard from my cousin yesterday, who wants me to sing at her wedding. She's picked the songs she wants me to sing, and that is good; it is a great honour she has accorded me, and now I will know what exactly her expectations will be. But what it I can't learn to do a good job with this music? :-)

The answer to anxiety does exist, I am convinced. Love. Love the way Buffy St. Marie describes it.

The road is long
There are mountains
In our way
But we climb the steps every day

I remember lying awake after learning that my second daughter was coming. I'd just lost work, and my wife was working at a new post office job that paid a lot less than the ones we'd had before (we had worked together.) Financially, I just did not imagine us getting by. Our life was more expensive than our income as it was. I lay there staring at her in the pale moonlight, asking myself, "How are we ever going to get through this?"

A voice - loud as a trumpet, like gold if gold was a sound, a voice outside my own head but heard, I knew, only by me said, Everything will be alright. I had never heard it before, and I've never heard it again - not like that.

And He (yes, I believe it was He, to this day) was right. We were poor, and that burden I anticipated was very real; we remained poor for a few years. My wife lost her brother a few months later, just a week before my daughter was born. We had hard years ahead of us. But they were the best years of our lives. Love got us through. We laughed harder, smiled longer, played more enthusiastically than ever before - if we couldn't spend money, we could still make picnics and spend the afternoon at Vincent Massey park. We could still find the means to go camping with our neighbours down the street, even if our tent was too small and leaked too much, and our poor car couldn't take everything in one trip. We could still take our two kids to the neighbourhood park, and watch our new daughter delight in the discovery of wading pool water while my eldest kept trying to get me to be the gorilla, while she would be the banana. The money thing was a struggle, and it would take years to shake off poverty, even after I started to do well again at work. But money never gets you through.

Love got us through.