Last week I stood at the edge of the Gulf of Mexico, with my toes in the cold wet sand, a crystal clear sky ablaze over my head, my best friend next to me, and I felt...anxious. Yep, there's me, in my happy place, stressed out. Why oh why, Kimberly, are you anything but grateful, here surrounded by this beauty?

Here it is [This has taken me 31 years to learn about myself]: I was afraid I wasn't taking it all in deeply enough. What if I'm not enjoying this to the fullest extent? I knew my time with such beauty was limited and I just wanted to be big enough to fill all the way up, to remember it all exactly, so I could carry it home with me. There's a Mary Oliver line about this (there's always a Mary Oliver line about this):

Have I lived enough? /  Have I loved enough? / Have I considered Right Action enough, have I / come to any conclusion? / Have I experienced happiness with sufficient gratitude? (The Gardener)

It's been a long, suffocatingly dark winter and I needed the beach. I needed to stand in front of something bigger than myself and feel small. So I searched out a cheap hotel deal, I persuaded Todd into "just one more vacation," I talked the Wakefields into coming along and splitting costs, I bought a plastic bucket and a shovel for Eli, I willed the snow in northern Alabama to give way, I loaded us all in the car for a seven hour trip, I checked us into the hotel, and then I bolted for that shoreline.

It's easy to imagine that I chased this beauty and after all of this effort, I needed to make sure I didn't waste it. And so I felt anxious.

The next morning I woke up early and made for that same spot and I got an image in my head of me, standing there in front of all of that water, with my hands cupped open in front of me, full and running over. Along with this image, a little nudge: I don't have to make myself big enough to contain it all. I just have to cup my hands and accept what I can hold.

Saturday morning, a week later, my toes in my slippers and not in the cold wet sand, I read this:

Your beauty and love chase after me every day of my life. (Psalm 23, The Message version)

And there it is. I don't have to chase. I don't have to find room inside and fill up before it's gone. I am not chasing beauty and love. I am being chased. Maybe I didn't find that beach or orchestrate that moment of beauty. Maybe it found me.

I stood at my sink, doing dishes but mostly just avoiding the eyes of the people I cannot fool. I put all the cheer I could in my voice as I waved them out into the night with wet hands. Then I called Becca, and I laughed and I cried so hard it made a weird sound from somewhere deep while she said "fuck" into the phone.

I had just found out that both my darling sister-in-law and my beautiful best friend were pregnant again. In the space of two hours, we got a phone call from Todd's happy family and then I heard Heather shriek my name from the bathroom of our apartment, where she was finding out she was having another baby, thanks to a leftover pregnancy test in the back of my medicine cabinet. Miracle #2 of this strange day (Miracle #1 was the babies themselves, of course): My initial reaction, my gut reaction, to both moments was joy. More babies! I am Aunt Kim to Nola and Eli and it is one of the deepest pleasures of my life. The grace that has been given to Tonya and Heather - it's beautiful, it's a gift, it's my gift. There are new baby clothes to buy and more books to add to the Niece/Nephew Amazon wishlist I keep and this summer there will be two new babies and I will get to hold them in my arms and whisper love over the tops of their sweet-smelling heads. I am so grateful.

But infertility doesn't allow for uncomplicated emotions. This damn thing takes and takes and as the evening progressed and the shock started to wear off Wes and Heather's faces, I felt my grief rising. Which is how I found myself standing at the kitchen sink, scrubbing plates, willing the tears to wait just a little while longer, telling God through clinched teeth: show me where you are. Tell me something. Show me. 

I cried to Becca for a while. I said out loud all the darkness, admitted the guilt, raged against the unfairness, marveled at how a woman who can't decide on any given day if she still wants children could be so grieved. Becca, as she has always done, graciously made space for my anger. Embodied it in her holy "fuck," giving me permission to feel all of it. I crawled into bed out of words and whispered Walter Brueggemann's in the dark: "You are God of our impossibilities. You have and will preside over those parts of our lives that we imagine to be closed. What we want is a gift and the open graciousness to receive it."

I woke up on Sunday and was surprised how tender the spot still was, like a bruise. I went to a new Sunday school class at the church where Todd works, trying to be good at this pastor's wife thing and nearly all of you know how naturally that comes to me. (It doesn't, if you didn't know.) But I put on my biggest, woolliest scarf, as armor more than warmth, and I sat, shoulder-to-shoulder with 12 strangers in a tiny room and we read together this: "he who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all - how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things?" All things? ALL? Really? How can I have all things when I don't have this one thing, this thing that matters so much? Here's Miracle #4 (Miracle #3 was Becca. Always Becca.): I believed it. I don't know why. But I believed it. I will be graciously given all things, even if I never receive this thing. It's both impossible and true. And then I cried in front of 12 strangers.

I went to the late service at the hip, progressive church and instead of a sermon, it was just space to pray. They'd been beautifully creative with stations and candles and all the ancient words I love, but I couldn't move from my chair. I was invited to let the real me meet the real God. But the first surprise wasn't the real God - it was the real me, hidden until that moment from even myself. Real wounds as yet unacknowledged. Real questions unasked. So I started offering up my truths, whispering them into my knees, pulling them up from my gut and holding them in my open hands.  And in a mystical, transcendent moment that I still only half believe was real, I felt Love take my hesitant but honest offering and replace it with Truth, beautiful, illuminating, too-good-to-be-true Truth.

Then there was Wes, come to find me in the dark sanctuary, his arm around my back. Once again proving himself big enough to hold both pain and joy, once again shoving back against my fear that I was somehow failing them. In yet another room full of strangers, with my face covered in snot and mascara, I was brave enough to lift my head and let myself be seen.

Tonya's having another baby girl. Heather is waiting to be surprised. These babies still have a few months before their much-anticipated debut. But both of them have already been miraculous in my life, both for the sheer delight of their existence and for the role they've played in a weekend of profound healing I didn't know I still needed. If this were a good story, it would end there and I could postscript this and tell you that it's all joy and shopping for baby girl tutus and highlighted baby name books now. It is all of those things but it was also a dark Christmas and a long conversation about my anxiety in the face of Heather's peace and learning to manage my resentment when it rears its ugly but understandable head.

Cheryl Strayed writes, "The place of true healing is a fierce place. It's a giant place. It's a place of monstrous beauty and endless dark and glimmering light. And you have to work really, really, really hard to get there." Glennon Melton says that "the tender places are the learning places and the holy places." Even preparing to put this out before your eyes, I am tempted to snatch it back, embarrassed to admit my reaction was so dramatic and intense*, afraid Tonya or Heather might hear my pain louder than my joy. But this is my tender place - it may always be - and it is holy and I will learn what it has to teach me and be grateful.

*I had Todd, Heather, and Wes read this first and I asked if it was too melodramatic and Wes said, "it's Kim," which of course is yes.

Can you believe how big they are? And they're going to have baby siblings. My heart might burst.