There is an unexplained sadness cloaking the cherry blossoms and fresh green this spring. I habitually stand on the edge of change and make decisions: will I stay or will I go? Will this sadness lead to death or life? Will I make the right choice? Because death isn't always the end, sometimes it's the thing that's needed for resurrection to occur. And sometimes life is the right choice. Sometimes it's to face change with sheer determination, will-power and not much else and just plow through it.

I say to my friend last night that I'm never sure if we have just enough grace to walk through a season and then either the season or the grace is gone. Does that make sense? We're Americans and we're Christians, so we'll plug on, roughing the harshest of seasons and pioneering through the driest of lands, counting on a shred of grace found somewhere, under the next rock or hard place. It's got to be here somewhere.

But what if it isn't?

What if the grace has gone and it's time to move on? The hope that the grass is a deeper green and lusher quality on the other side isn't a very good way to live life: if we're making grass the goal. But what if the goal is Further Up and Further In!?

I remember being nine or ten years old and my mom reading aloud from Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia. I never knew until a decade later why The Last Battle gave me goosebumps under my grandmother's afghan:

The difference between the old Narnia and the new Narnia was like that. The new one was a deeper country: every rock and flower and blade of grass looked like it meant more. I can't describe it any better than that: if you ever get there you will know what I mean. It was the unicorn who summed up what everyone was feeling. He stamped his right fore-hoof on the ground and neighed, and then cried: "I have come home at last! This is my real country! I belong here. This is the land I have been looking for all my life, though I never knew it till now. The reason why we loved the old Narnia so much is because it sometimes looked a little like this. Bree-hee-hee! Come further up, come further in!"

I love that. I love that.

Because here we are wandering around this representative kingdom, looking for shards of grace, shreds of comfort, something, anything, that looks like what its supposed to look like.

But we won't find it. It's not more grace we need, or more friends, or more hope or plans or goals: it's a deeper country, one that smells strangely familiar, like our current one, only so much better.

That's our real country. That's where we belong. Here? This sorrow? This season? This moment of change? This lifetime of unsettledness and fear and uncertainty? Mere shadows of the real thing.