This Is Not a Breakdown

Four sleeps.

That's the official countdown in our house, according to one very enthusiastic first grader who has been announcing it to literally everyone — the mail carrier, the checkout lady at Aldi's, probably a few strangers at the park. Four sleeps until Forever Day. Four sleeps until the word "adoption" stops being a process and starts being a story we get to tell for the rest of our lives.

The energy in our home right now is palpable. Like, you can feel it walking through the front door. Everything feels charged — with hope, with joy, with the particular kind of electric anticipation that only comes when something you've been holding your breath for is finally, actually, really going to happen.

And then I got in my car this morning and drove to work in the quiet.

Not the peaceful kind of quiet. The other kind. The kind where you notice that certain texts haven't been answered. That certain people have slowly, almost imperceptibly, pulled back. That doors you didn't even realize were closing have already closed. The kind of quiet that doesn't match the season you're living.

Here's what nobody tells you about joy: it doesn't come alone. Sometimes it shows up hand-in-hand with a loneliness that doesn't make any sense on paper.

I am — as anyone who's spent more than forty-five minutes with me knows — a white-knuckler. A planner. A woman who has elevated spiral thinking to an art form. I like to call it my gift. My therapist calls it something different. We don't need to get into that.

The point is: I like control.

I like knowing.

I like having a plan for the plan and a backup for the backup and probably a color-coded note somewhere about the backup to the backup. And when things shift in ways I didn't script out, my nervous system throws a full press conference about it.

So when I started noticing this quiet — this pulling away, these closing doors — my instinct was to fix it. Understand it. Map it. Figure out exactly what is happening and why and what I'm supposed to do with it, preferably by end of business today.

But there is no plan for this. There is no spreadsheet for a season that asks you to hold joy in one hand and loneliness in the other without dropping either one.

I titled my book Patient Endurance because I needed the reminder for myself. Not because I have it down. Because I am actively, perpetually, often awkwardly learning what it means.

And this morning — four sleeps from Forever Day, somewhere on the commute — Andrew Ripp's "Breakdown" came on. And I sat there, hands on the wheel, and I just let myself feel it.

If you're washed up on a lonesome shore

Soul crushed and tired

If you're curled up on the kitchen floor

And the house is on fire

If you couldn't feel further from redemption

You're the closest you've ever been

Rock bottom is a firm foundation

You'll see, my friend

This is not a breakdown

It's a breakthrough

This is not a midnight

It's a brand new morning

When it dawns on the dark

No, this is not the moment

When it all falls apart...It's a beautiful place to start

I don't know exactly what God is teaching me right now. I'm not going to pretend I have a tidy bow to put on this. What I know is that I can feel it — the way you feel a current before you can name which direction it's moving. Something is shifting. And for the girl who would MMA-takedown control everything in her path, being in the middle of something she can't see or steer is deeply, profoundly uncomfortable.

But here is what I also know: He is in it. Not despite it. In it.

In the joy and in the lonely. In the kitchen dancing to Forever Day music and in the car with the quiet commute and the full eyes. In the answered prayers and in the doors that close without explanation. He promised — promised — to be with us. Not just in the highlight moments. Not just when it all adds up. In the high and the low, the exuberant and the suffering, the clarity and the fog.

There He is with us.

Maybe you're in a season like this. Maybe your outside doesn't match your inside. Maybe something is ending that you didn't get to prepare for. Maybe joy showed up and brought a strange companion with it, and you don't know what to do with both of them at once.

I want to say what I needed to hear this morning: This is not a breakdown.

You don't have to understand it to trust it.

You don't have to see the full picture to walk in the frame.

You don't have to know what He's teaching you to believe He's in the middle of teaching it.

Rock bottom is a firm foundation. The shifting, the closing, the pulling away — it's not the end of the story. It might just be clearing the ground for what comes next.

Four sleeps from now, I'll have two daughters, a testimony, and probably a lot of happy tears.

And through all of it — every single sleep between here and there and beyond — He is with us.

That is enough. It always has been.