knowing

This week my friends - my family - in all the non-scientific, and therefore important, ways - went through something terrible. It is times like this that I wish for more careful and precise use of language in our world. When the nightly newscasters announce that the promising young quarterback’s career has ended with injury, they are not really describing a tragedy.

For a long time now, we have known that something was not right. The doctors did a lot of tests and collected a lot of information, but could never say for certain what was wrong or why. In the face of this uncertainty, my friends took the information they had and made the decisions they could. Mostly they prayed and kept walking.

Lately, I have been thinking a lot about how much living without going crazy or numb depends on our ability to walk the fine thin tension lines that run through our common experiences, marking out for us what it really means to be human. Individuals have infinite inherent worth yet our single lives are a mere drop in the bucket of human history. All the frailty, gravity, fleetingness held up against the body’s drive to survive, the brain’s ability to compensate, hearts that go on. I know my beginning, my undeserved resurrection, the ending. But it is the moments, days, years between that can drive me to distraction. Say it to yourself, Kate: There are things we can know and things we should not hope to know. Now mean it, believe it. Proclaim it.

This is what I know. Their baby was beautiful and loved by so many people. She looked like her dad. She could not have had a better mother. She changed all of our lives and now we are heartbroken & somehow still grateful. The rest? Why? When and if it will ever make sense? I don’t know.

On Monday, I stood in the rain and told a man I’ve known for a long time that we can’t be paralyzed by what don’t know for sure, that we have to move forward and trust that it will all become clear in time. I was trying to convince him of something that I need reminding of on a daily basis. The time for knowing will come. In the meantime, let’s hold hands. We’ll keep walking. It is in our unknowing that we are delivered; our salvation comes from belief.