Hope in a Hopeless Place

Something crazy happened tonight. 

There's been a lot of construction around our new house. A. Lot. The main road in and out of our neighborhood has been under construction since well before our move and recently, the progress on the road has caused it to take longer to get down the hill. One of those worse before it's better kind of situations. 

This evening, I sat in traffic, waiting for my turn to creep down the hill and my thoughts were brewing darkly. 

My surgery in early August is healed, and there's now the potential that we may conceive. In fact, earlier this week, I was feeling really hopeful that maybe this would be *the* month. 

I allowed myself to daydream about the stroller I've wanted for ten years and never gotten that I've promised myself I will splurge on if there's a next time. 

I've thought about what it would be like to tell family and friends. How we could surprise them. What joy it would be.

I've prayed for the intercession of our beloved late priest Fr Logan to bring us a miracle. He loved my husband so much, thought he was so funny. He called me the rose between two thorns when I sang with my dad and another parishioner at healing masses. 

He prayed over me at those same masses when I was pregnant with SP and struggling with complications. I brought him dinner once a week for the months following one of his surgeries.  He was the priest at my first communion, and there when LB made hers as well. 

He was woven in a special way into our lives, and it was him I turned to in intercession this month when the inflammation that has plagued me and been non-responsive to all medications and unknown in cause to all testing remained between me and fertility. 

And, for a bit, I felt hopeful. But, as I've crept closer to the start of a new cycle, closer to what experience has taught me will be a hard reality, I've lost hope. 

It was this lost and hopeless feeling that centered in my thoughts as I sat in traffic waiting.  

The dark thoughts were reigning supreme and I was feeling so done. So over finding a way to have any shred of hope left. 

As some traffic slowly made its way up the hill, I glanced over at a car waiting to turn into traffic. And my heart leapt in my chest with a moment of ecstasy. There, in that car waiting ten feet from me, was my lost girl, my SB, sitting in a car with her dad. She looked good. She looked happy. 

I never knew I could hold so much joy and sorrow simultaneously in my soul. She looks good. Somewhere out there, my baby looks happy. 

What's more, there's this fear I've carried deep down in my soul that I wouldn't know her if I saw her. I haven't seen her in over two years, and I feared she would change so much before I ever saw her again that I wouldn't know her even if I saw her. But, I did know her. 

I'm not sure what to make of all those feelings that were swirling inside me when I looked up and added the feelings of seeing SB to the mix. Perhaps the takeaway is even the most hopeless moment can be redeemed. 

Or maybe it was just a moment of straight gift sewn into a hard season of life. 

In the end, I'm struggling to let the joy win out. But I'll take the tears and sorrow. It was worth it just to have that momentary glimpse and knowledge that she's okay. Just a girl, talking to her daddy in the car.