I don't know why this winter isn't wearing on me as much as winter normally does. Typically I face the Lion in on the first of March with a snarl and a growl of my own. I won't take any more of his shenanigans.

But not this year. Not sure why.

Because it would make sense that this year would be the epitome of disappointment: I'm still here, for one. I thought I'd be in grad school, or married, or editing some non-profit publication, or even spoon-feeding orphans in India by now. I really, really thought that. I also spent half of this winter with mono, that has to count for something. I also miss my friends so much sometimes that I think that God really, really doesn't mean for us to ever repeat the same goodness twice. I also have cold feet right now. These things add up to a hunk of disappointment and disappointment for me usually comes out in some sort of revolution against the weather.

What can I say, I'm passive aggressive like that.

But I don't feel it. I mean, those things are true, but they don't feel disappointing to me today. And sometimes I feel guilty about that. I've got problems. I feel guilty for not feeling badly.

Last night during a very long phone conversation with a good chum, the conversation turned to the Israelites and manna. I told him to blog about it. I told him at the very least to email me every single good thought so I could remember it for real. Especially since I was driving while talking on my cell, which is illegal in New York and it would be even more unwise to drive, talk on my cell, and jot thoughts down. Unwise and illegal.

But he said something that I won't easily forget: manna means "What is it?" but it still sustained them for forty years. This nameless, flake of edible dust, this daily rain, daily bread, sustained them.

I say to him when he's finished his passionate sermon to one, that this is what I needed to hear. This is my manna season.

Because I look at the state of things right now and I think "What am I doing? What is sustaining me? What is this?"

Not knowing that I'm answering my question with my question. That is the answer: What is it? Somehow that sustains, somehow that feeds, somehow that fills.

So it is the winter or the wilderness or just the wandering season--but it is somehow the thing through which we walk, fed by our questions.

So take that, Winter.

I turn the verse over in my mouth and mind, like a peppermint candy, til there is a snowflake-like round skeleton of truth left. It's the barebones of faith: Abraham believed and it was credited to him as righteousness.

Abraham + belief = righteousness

I am not so sure it works the same for me.

My faith only seems to equal misinterpretation and misconception. I think this yesterday when I hear that she died suddenly, leaving behind a four year old, a four day old, and a husband. I think this last night surrounded by friends and a long, hard conversation. I think this driving to work today, shouting along with David Crowder again: Are we left here on our own? Can you feel when your last breath is gone?

I think this when I think that it is my faith that pushes me around, stumbles around, turns me around and stuns me into some sort of righteousness. Without my knowledge. I am faltering, failing, fearing, and then I am realizing and it is righteousness that is my realization. But not my own, not the marriage of my faith and works. This isn't righteousness.

Abraham had faith. He believed, but didn't become righteous. He was credited with righteousness. He got something he didn't deserve by doing something that wasn't natural. Like a paper-doll, he was clothed with it. It dressed him and completed him, but wasn't of him.

So when I begin thinking that it is my faith that makes me righteous, I stumble badly.

God doesn't see me when He sees me. He sees Christ. He sees the goodness of Christ dressing me. He credits me with Christ just because I say I want it. Because I believe. This strange math doesn't make sense, but it makes believers, and so I believe it.

I'm driving to work, dodging potholes left by ice pockets. I'm blowing on my hands and listening to David Crowder. I'm listening loudly, if it's possible. I'm thinking about Isaiah 60. I'm thinking about waking, coming, seeing, looking, seeing.

In November someone, or a few someones, said that this would be a long one. This is not what we want to hear on the cusp of our longest season. We do not want to hear that it will be a warm one, even, because temperatures closer to 30 mean more snow and we want less. At least I do. I'll take the frigid cold, so cold it's painful, but Lord, please, no more snow. So I bundled my self, my nerves, my attitude, and waited for the Long One. But the long one didn't come. I kept expecting it, holding my breath like the game we play in highway tunnels: who can hold it the longest? Waiting for the blizzard, waiting for the mountain of snow that would confirm Someone's words.

But it's the middle of February and It hasn't come. And all my projected disappointments have lingered still, waiting, opening every morning and pulling back the curtains to Is This The Day? The day that the Long One will begin?

And I think about this because I am thinking about anticipation. Someone else asks me the other day if I am doing what I want to do and I am smart and quick back to them, "Are any of us doing what we want to do?" And what I'm thinking is not smart or quick, "Aren't we all just waiting for the big disappointment? That we'll lay dying and think, well, I made it through and it wasn't as bad as I thought it would be." That the wars and rumors of wars and persecution and hurt and unfairness of it all were just, well, they just were and weren't as bad as they might have been?

We're all waiting for Spring and it hasn't even really been winter yet.

Isaiah 60 says it like this:

Get out of bed, Jerusalem! Wake up.
Put your face in the sunlight.
God's bright glory has risen for you.
The whole earth is wrapped in darkness,
all people sunk in deep darkness,
But God rises on you, his sunrise glory breaks over you.
Nations will come to your light,
kings to your sunburst brightness!
Look up! Look around!

And so this morning I add an addendum to my smart and shameful words and thoughts: We are sunk in deep darkness but God rises on us, His glory breaks over us.

Waking is not the realization that it wasn't as bad as we thought it would be or might be or could be. Waking is Seeing because we can. Right now! Not dwelling in projected disappointment (It might snow or It will snow and It might last until April or It will last until April), but walking in Light and Faith and Glory because the rest of the world is hibernating away the winter of their lives in darkness.

It IS nearly Spring, nearly over, and it hasn't been as bad as we thought it might be. Certainly not as bad as past winters and certainly not as bad as it will be in three years or ten. But it is now and it is today and we can let out our collective breath: Look up! Look around!

It's already finished!

Public speaking and a lifetime of Sunday Morning sermons have taught me one thing: (unlike the summation I am about to give,) life cannot be summed up in twenty minutes or three points. I say this to fifteen girls sitting girls sprawled around our living room last week just before I begin to talk about the Sayable and the Said. I say it to them because I am a cheat and a scoundrel--hording ideas on scraps of paper, scrawling words in the margins of my Bible to pull out at opportune times. I copy the methods I learn for good speaking, good learning, and good works and spew them on Tuesday nights or whenever questions need to be answered.

Which is always, I'm finding.

She stands in my kitchen today as we cook salmon and smell cilantro. She says: I'm trying to figure out how God can be the God Who is There and Who Cares, and still be the God who lets soldiers die and divorce rip and cancer steal life. I make a mental list of all the suffering I see, the suffering that touches the people I love, and silently agree. How can He be both? This is a question that three point sermons can't answer.

We suspend on hope, on ifs and on If God Wills. Emily Dickinson said it this way: I dwell in possibility. And the father of the demoniac in Mark 9 said it this way: If You can do anything, do it! Help us! This is when only the Sayable can answer.

I mean to say that sometimes the answers to the questions we trip on and swirl under are not found in knowing the answers at all. Sometimes the answers are in the saying of truth and that is all.

There are no ifs in following Christ, Jesus said to that father. Because we believe and because God doesn't need our help anyway, the only thing that needs help is our unbelief. So we pray like this: I believe. Help my unbelief. A statement and a question. A statement and an exclamation. A question and a statement. It depends on your punctuation. It depends on your prayer. But pray it anyway. Ask it anyway. Any way.

Because we believe in this man who was God and flesh simultaneously. We believe in a perfect garden and we believe in death and resurrection. We believe that sufferings aren't for sins sake, but Glory's. We believe that lost coins and sheep are worth it and we believe most of all that sometimes we don't believe. So we say that, too, right out loud.

Then we see the miracle, small and hushed, quiet and unassuming, slipping in unannounced because the best miracles do. And we wake one morning and find that we believe and that we really do.

There are three sets of us. The older set, the middle set, and the little set. The middle set was severed by death, leaving only one with six year gaps on either side: which one fit better? I don't know. I am twenty years older than the youngest of of us and the oldest of the little set just celebrated his fourteenth birthday. He stands a head taller than me and looks so much like the brother we lost at this same age. If I was superstitious the resemblance paired with the age might scare me, but I trust in a Higher Order.

Tonight we bookended, the oldest set minus one and the little set present and accounted for. Are you confused yet? We were eight: seven boys and a girl. My parents joked that they broke the mold after me and I used to think they were serious and just didn't want another one of me; would you have? We were seven but death sneaked in on a rainy April morning and snatched number four away and so we were six for a few months, then a premature eighth joined us. Then we were shattered completely.

I don't write about my family much. Not because I don't think of them or love them or wish great things for them and small things too, but because as personal as all the personal things of the world are, there isn't much more personal than family.

Tonight before I read out loud to the little set, I sat on the edge of my couch and said, "You won't always have friends, but you'll always have us, and so treat us well. Treat one another well." And I meant it.

I see my parents in me more and more. My mother was younger than me when she had me and I am the age she was for my earliest memories, her hair short and her clothes colorful. I don't remember much of my dad until later, much later, I wish I knew why those memories aren't so easily recalled or if they happened at all. I remember holidays, Easter bunnies and a Santa Claus that smelled of chalk and cigarettes. I remember a godfather and godmother. I remember the Roman Catholic Church.

Tonight I see my mother in me when I brush back the hair on the fourteen year old, when I hear myself say her words. I wonder if she felt the same inadequacy that I felt saying them. And so I didn't end there, I said more, I said, "I know I've failed to do that, treat you well always, but I want to. I want to."

And he nodded at me and his eyes, so like his older brother who is frozen in my mind at fourteen, smiled. This is why I trust in the middle of what was shattered and scattered completely: because there are no do-overs, he is not the same person, though they look so much the same. He is new and fresh and different. And so, too, are the rest of us. We don't walk forward out of our history and into perfection, we are still figuring it all out.

Because every degree between now and fifty is felt, acutely. Because the sun casts longer shadows longer into the day. Because we see Spring, but barely. Because we hear more than ice creaking while we walk to our cars, to the bank, to anywhere. Because we hear birds, ruffled by melting snow on their feathers, pleased, though, by weather fine enough for their presence. Because the boxes marked Summer Clothes aren't just vague memories, they're hopeful fantasies. Because it is February and February isn't pleasant, but yesterday and today have been. Because we have passed the days of hovering on or below zero and we are climbing up. Because the groundhog saw his shadow this morning.

Because it is easy to be happy when the sun is setting in the reflection of every window I can see and boys and couples and students are walking, unrushed, on the streets. Because we are coming out of hibernation collectively.

The Gospel According to Stained Glass

Plates of color bound by twists of metal—
Illustrated religion for those who cannot read
The plastic signs on Interstate 40
Announcing potluck dinners and that JESUS SAVES.

Ten feet tall, no one imagines measuring up,
Because they can’t—sinners and saints alike,
All in their pale or pretty garb,
No intensity so rich it fills a window
And stuns the parishioner
into wonder and silence.

The whore with her crown of beauty let down at her Lord’s feet,
The Rock upon which He built His church, even after three denials,
And the real first communion—with a traitor present and accounted for.
They are easily understood lessons, when they are told with Blue,
Green and Vermilion Orange.

We understand color, we understand stains.

So God bless the sinner and the stunned parishioner, him too—
No wonder it’s called Stained Glass.
Only the stained understand.