You’d think after five decades I’d know the signs. Emotional flatness. Lack of motivation. Feeling all peopled-out when I hadn’t been doing any peopling at all. Not to mention, I hadn’t shed a tear since . . . Well, since before coronavirus. BC.

You’d think I would know when I needed to cry, and what I stood to gain from it.

All morning I’d been watching out the window, mesmerized by how even the snowflakes seemed to be maintaining a forced social distance from one another. Some floated this way, some meandered that. Like they, too, wondered which day of the week it was, and if they were even supposed to be here.

As disoriented as the rest of us.

It only took one tiny sweetness, one feather’s brush to graze the thin, overstretched membrane that had evidently been long suspending my emotions like a flimsy water balloon. Leaking ensued.

Once begun, I wondered, would this mess of tears ever end? This bubbling magma in my chest, this sweet-hot tincture of grief and hope and fear and awe and hell and heaven. But lordy it felt good and right to finally cry.

The sweet feather that did that tender puncturing? A digital one. A report slid silently into my email inbox, revealing all the places our shipments of tea landed that day.

I pictured the harried young mom in South Carolina, the single woman riding things out alone in San Diego, and others sheltering in place across the Pacific Northwest, each receiving a sip of nourishment prepared by our (gloved) hands. A ration of comfort and hope.

Such a small thing, but it’s what we, Garth and I, can do. And we can all do some small thing. And it matters. It matters quite a lot. All those small things—a prayer here, a phone call there—aren’t they the stitches holding our fraying hearts together? Aren’t we all now just one chain of tattered hearts encircling the globe?

Forget that circumstances require a new business plan every three days. Maybe even an exit strategy. Now’s the time for weightier decisions. The weightiest.

Like whether we see before us a casket or a treasure chest. Like whether we’ll keep clutching at empty idols tied up with fading ribbons, or cut ties with things below once and for good.

According to his great mercy, he has caused us to be born again to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, to an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you, who by God’s power are being guarded through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time.  1 Peter 1:3–4

Take it! Take it all! Lord Jesus, leave me only this . . . this sweet knowing in my one frayed heart. The poignant joy of the stitching and the being stitched—to you, to one another. The pain and heavenly relief of the needle’s point, piercing, yet sustainable—because you were pierced first. The blood I know now not to spare, for love’s sake.

Because you certainly never spared one drop.

Rise, Jesus! Our eyes are on your tomb. All our tomorrows rest in your scarred hands. You were the one who set eternity in our hearts (Ecclesiastes 3:11). And now you’re our only hope.

Jesus answered them, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.” John 2:19

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