Firefly Island

How often ... do we pass by a need, a life that could be changed with the smallest bit of effort? And it's not that we don't care but that we're driving so fast, all we see are the fence posts flashing by on the side of the highway? Maybe the first step in changing the world is in slowing down and looking through the fences.

If we never take a chance on people, we'll never know.

I wrote about the rush of love, the changing of a woman into a mother—a process that happened without conscious thought, as if the heart knew what the mind and body took time to learn. Love is the one thing that matters. That makes everything else matter. That makes everything worthwhile.

Love skimmed over the surface like a sailboat, grabbing me up and carrying me along one minute, the speed dizzying, the view passing by so quickly I couldn't take it in. The next minute, my little love boat was swamped in a storm, overturned, the sail pointing toward the murky depths, everything upside down. I was trying to swim with legs of lead. I'd never thought of love this way—as something that moved with the ebb and flow of currents. Push and pull. Joy and pain. Fear and trust. Falling, and trying to balance, and falling again.

I realize it's not the best timing-it's only been a month, but life isn't about waiting for perfect timing. If you're not careful, life happens while your stuck in a holding pattern

I was not alone in the human condition.

Generally, crises were Mom's domain. Dad's job was to listen, nod, act curmudgeonly, and offer to pay for things.

The depth of my love for him, of my need for him poured over me, both painful and sweet, both comforting and frightening. If anything happened to him, I didn't know how I would keep going.

Who are you, really? The question penetrated, echoed, demanded an answer. It nipped at me in ways I wasn't prepared for, pinched in places I didn't like. Was I really so entrenched in the world I'd been raised in, so set in my ways that I couldn't look beyond the surface of another person and see a human being? Was I that shallow?

In those moments, I'd known that something new was being formed in me, too, created so gently that I hadn't even realized it until that evening by the shore.

My heart filled with Nick's smile, with the look of sheer adoration he gave me as he lugged the bucket. In the space of an instant, I felt it again—the crumbling of an old part of me, the growth of something new. The changing of my heart into a mother's heart. It happened at the strangest times, in the most unexpected ways. Nick looked at me, and the love I felt for him was almost painful in its intensity. I'd never known I had it in me, the capacity to love this way. ... But when Nick looked at me, my mind tumbled through nights and mornings, seasons and years in the future. ... I saw a future like none I'd ever imagined. I wanted it, every minute of it.

For the first time I can remember, I’m satisfied not to know. To wait, and to watch. To see, as Keren says beside me now, what God can do with a single, ordinary life. When it’s given over to love.

The journey between what you once were and who you are now becoming is where the dance of life really takes place. —Barbara DeAngelis (Left by