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Fear of Ants

Beloved son,

Last spring you discovered what I would call your first real fear. It wasn’t snakes or spiders or a scary-looking person. It wasn’t lightning or heights or getting lost. No, it was that formidable foe formica: the great and terrible ant.

For the record, it wasn’t actually ants that first terrified you. It wasn’t a living creature at all. It was a mix-up, a tilt of your imagination that took a bed of dried pollen pods in the street and transformed them, apparently, into something hideous beyond recognition.

We were out for an evening walk when it happened. When we left the house, you spotted a cluster of ants swarming around a scrap piece of cucumber near the sidewalk. You took great interest in the scene. As we walked on, you kept saying, “More ants! More ants!” like a concertgoer shouting for an encore.

Mom and I are not sure why the shift happened. We cannot say what resemblance you found between the ants on the cucumber and, later in our walk, a bunch of pollen pods in our path, nor what about them turned your scientist’s curiosity into abject terror.

Whatever the case, when your foot crunched onto those pods and you saw those rust-colored half circles spread out behind and before you, our pleasant stroll turned blood red. Your legs seized. Your arms trembled. Your face contorted as you unleashed a scream unlike any sound we’d ever heard. You clamored into Mom’s arms and refused to let go. When we tried to set you down, it was as if we were dropping you into boiling tar. Mom and I were still out in the fresh spring air; you had entered a waking nightmare.

The only word you could form, like the name of the murderer on the accuser’s tongue, was “Ants! Ants!”

Mom and I were stunned. Futilely, we fixated on the rational. Something was wrong with our precious boy, and we needed to get to the bottom of it.

“What’s wrong, baby? What is it? There’s nothing there. It’s just some pods from the tree. Look—there aren’t any ants. You’re safe, you’re safe.”

Powerless.

Your ears were stopped by terror, your eyes blinded by its glare.

Our parental presence, in other times a magical balm for your troubled spirit, had lost its charm. Or if it did retain any power, it had to be administered at full strength. Standing close by, holding hands—this was not enough. You needed to be lifted and held.

For the rest of the walk, I carried you on my shoulders while on your shoulders you carried your fear. If I tried to set you down, your fear would climb down, too. Our unwelcome companion followed us all the way home, where Mom and I thought it would realize it was not welcome. Surely the familiarity of our front yard, the assurance of our front door, would send fear on its way.

We were wrong. Fear poisoned the grass, the front mat, even, to our dismay, the carpet of the living room. We eventually got you to sit in the tub and relax. Afterwards you were still wary of the bathroom floor.

We put you to bed that night wondering if you’d ever be able to play outside again.

In retrospect, this thought of ours was as much an overreaction as your response was to the pollen pods. Of course you were able to play outside again. But that is how fear operates, isn’t it. It amplifies, distorts.

Not long after you had recovered from the ant incident—and yes, you did recover, albeit with a few other mini panics at the sight of actual ants[1]—I experienced this distorting effect myself.

I can’t say why, but I have always had a disproportionate fear of intruders in the house. As a boy and even a teen, I would lie in bed and let every little sound in the house spawn the same scary story in my mind. I would picture a gloved hand punching through the glass of the front window, a shadowy figure slinking through the house while everyone (except bug-eyed me) was fast asleep. In these visions, the intruder would never rummage through our things, would never go for the obvious like the television or wallets.

Instead, he would inevitably creep towards my room, making just enough noise to alert me but no one else. In these mental inventions of mine, I always knew that I would have to get up and confront him, or he would enter my room and confront me. Either way, there would be no avoiding him.

Well, this intruder (“intruder”) came to haunt me recently, maybe a month after our run-in with the ants (“ants”). One night I awoke in the black of night to the sound of your crying from the other room. This was odd. While your sister was itty bitty and would wake us up at all hours from her bedside bassinet, by this age you were a rock-solid sleeper. Something was wrong.

As I approached your door on my right, I heard a noise from the bathroom on my left—the shower curtain rustled.

That was all it took for me to initiate a code-red panic. As quick as a heartbeat, the old visions sprang forward—the quiet breaking and entering, the stalker in the dark, the presence of some unseen figure coming ever closer. Except now it was no vision at all but an absolutely certain knowledge that a person—a man, I somehow knew—was in our house, steps away from my crying son, my sleeping wife, my slumbering newborn daughter.

If fight-or-flight were a switch, I snapped the dial clean off. Swept up in a tidal wave of adrenaline, I slammed open the bathroom door, flicked on the light, flung the shower curtain open, and yelled Mom’s name.

What was my plan? What was my intent? No idea. I was a man in his boxers with nothing to protect himself but a cell phone flashlight. It didn’t matter. In an instant, I had transformed from a sleepy fawn to a wide-eyed buck. I had entered into a rare, untempered mode in which I was prepared to do whatever necessary to attack, maim, or otherwise incapacitate whoever had come to do you harm.

The problem with that plan—if you can call it a plan—was that one cannot incapacitate a shower curtain. For that was all that was in the bathroom. Not only did my “gotcha!” moment reveal that there was in fact no intruder (I realized later that I must have mistaken Mom’s rustling of the bedsheets for the rustling of the shower curtain), but I had also woken up everyone in the house. Your sister was crying. Mom, understandably vexed, called from the bedroom, “What are you doing?” You were standing in your crib in stunned silence, as if thinking, “Geez, Dad, I knew I was crying, but you didn’t have to call in the National Guard.”

I picked you up, helped settle sister, and went about trying to bring my heart rate below 200.

Futilely, I fixated on the rational.

“There is no one in the bathroom,” I told myself. “You saw for yourself. You misheard. There is nowhere for anyone to hide. No one is after your children. They’re safe. You’re safe.”

Powerless.

My self-talk did nothing to extinguish the flame of fear. I had to stamp it out until not a single ember glowed in the dark of night. With you in my arms, I visited every room of the house, checked every closet, looked behind every curtain and piece of furniture. Nothing.

Then and only then did I return to your room and rock you back to sleep. Even as you relaxed and gave in to slumber, I remained alert, my ears tuned, my imagination churning. I heard the house’s every creak and groan. The phantom intruder had retreated to some hidden place inside my mind.

So yeah, I can hardly blame you for having an episode over a pile of pollen when I nearly murdered someone (er, no one) over a rustling sheet.

As I think back and laugh about our horror stories, two similarities strike me. For one, they are both so silly. What better image of overreaction? Tiny stimuli prompted responses so overblown that they hijacked not only our own behavior but the whole situation. Some dead tree parts gather in the street, and now no one can enjoy our evening stroll? Mom turns over in bed, and now the whole neighborhood needs to wake up? Fear has no sense of proportion.

When I first started writing this letter, my preconceived “moral of the story” was just that: the silliness of fear. My spiritual takeaway was going to be that if we only realized the smallness of the ants that make us tremble and the bigness of the Father nearby, we would have nothing to fear.

And yes, sure. Hanging close to our strong, loving God, we have nothing to fear in this world or the next. That is true, and we should hold onto it.

But if that was an easy truth, if statements such as “do not fear” alone were enough to steady us, then fear could never be silly. The second similarity in our stories is the ingredient that makes a silly fear possible: imagination.

In both our experiences, there was no real danger whatsoever. The threat was completely imagined. The situation could have been dangerous had there actually been a swarm of bugs or an intruder in the house. In such a case, fear would have been useful, giving us the adrenaline needed to act.

But even after we had seen clear evidence that there was no danger, our minds enlarged and distorted the environment in just the right way to transfix us. An imagined reality overruled the present reality. It’s like some part of us was prepared, or preparing, to encounter something far bigger than ourselves, something overwhelming, something terrifying.

The Romantics sought out this sensation. They called it the sublime, “the quality of such greatness, magnitude or intensity . . . that our ability to perceive or comprehend it is temporarily overwhelmed.” They’d scale mountains and stand before waterfalls to experience it. They’d paint and write poetry to try to bottle it up.

They philosophized about it, too. “The passion caused by the great and sublime in nature,” wrote Edmund Burke, “ . . . is Astonishment; and astonishment is that state of the soul, in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror.” Burke must have come across some pollen pods in his day.

Where does this notion of the sublime come from? And why are we at once drawn to it and paralyzed (or spurred to fits of rage) by it? I believe that our capacity for “astonishment” points to something greater than either nature or our imaginations. I believe it points to a world for which we are made but not yet ready, a place of such scope and depth and substance that we would cower if we took full sight of it.

C.S. Lewis gives a memorable image for this realm of greater substance. In The Great Divorce, Lewis imagines a group of citizens from hell bussed up to heaven to get the grand tour, as it were. What they discover is just the opposite of the clouds of cotton candy that many people picture when they think of heaven. Instead, the visitors find a world that looks much like earth, only realer:

“It was the light, the grass, the trees that were different; made of some different substance, so much solider than things in our country that men were ghosts by comparison. Moved by a sudden thought, I bent down and tried to pluck a daisy which was growing at my feet. The stalk wouldn’t twist. I tugged till the sweat stood out on my forehead and I had lost most of the skin off my hands. The little flower was hard, not like wood or even like iron, but like diamond.” (28)

I find this description simultaneously silly (diamond flowers?), imaginative (clever Clive!), and spooky (ghosts?!).

In another of his masterpieces, Lewis leans into the spooky even further. One of the core arguments of Miracles is that God is a living God, a personal God, not some impersonal force or spiritual mist in the air. Lewis says that coming to terms with God’s personhood, His realness and presence, His utter lack of abstraction, should give us a shock:

“There comes a moment when the children who have been playing at burglars hush suddenly: was that a real footstep in the hall? There comes a moment when people who have been dabbling in religion (‘Man’s search for God!’) suddenly draw back. Supposing we really found Him? We never meant it to come to that! Worse still, supposing He had found us?” (93-94)

When my ears perked up in panic that dark quiet night months ago, it wasn’t a real footstep I had heard in the hall. And when your face melted in terror that spring evening, it wasn’t a real pit of ants you had stepped into. But that sense of shock, of alarm, of terror—what if it is a metaphor for our encounter with the real and present God, great and terrible, awesome beyond understanding, sublime in the truest sense?

Or perhaps such moments of terror are more than metaphor. Perhaps they are practice, our imaginations like vestigial organs of the bodies we were meant to have, searching for a reality we will one day know.

King Solomon famously instructed, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” (Proverbs 9.10). Perhaps imagination is the beginning of fear.

[1] My favorite was when we were out for a hike with Grandpa and you got scared of some ants on the trail. Taking a knee beside you, Grandpa gently explained that the ants couldn’t hurt you. He even demonstrated by letting an ant crawl over his hand. When you calmed down and we resumed our walk, Grandpa turned to me and whispered, “That ant on my hand? It bit me!”

Visitor from Inner Space

Beloved daughter,

Looking at you today—eight months old, crawling and standing and exploring like mad—it’s hard to reckon just how recently it was that you were a completely different you. The rapidity of your growth combined with the slowness of my writing means it’s easy for me to miss out on capturing many, many developments. But before you leap ahead too far, let’s rewind the tape for a moment to revisit that distinct but fleeting phase, the fourth trimester.

Contradictory term, isn’t it? There’s no third half in a soccer match, no fifth quarter in the Super Bowl, so how come a “fourth trimester”?

The basic idea is that when a full-term baby is ready to be born, she isn’t ready to be born. She’s viable and developed and taking up about as much room as she can, but nonetheless she’d much rather ignore the eviction notices that keep slipping under the door and instead stay put right where she is in her cozy little studio for another three months.

The theory goes that human babies long ago actually did stay in the womb closer to 12 months, but that over time our evolved jumbo brains necessitated an early departure if the baby was to fit through the exit. This theory explains why, for instance, a newborn horse plops onto the ground and starts walking almost immediately whereas a human baby seems entirely out of their element upon arrival, as if they’d arrived on the wrong planet.

I think of that scene in The Matrix when Neo is “born” into the non-simulated world. It’s a rough entry. His pale, hairless body, accustomed to its warm, gooey cocoon, is unplugged from his bio sac, flushed down a tube, dropped off a ledge into a pool of water he can’t swim in, and, helpless as a rubber toy, hoisted away by a giant claw. That captures some of the rudeness of what you had to do—almost unbelievably, what every person has to do—to make it into this world.

Neo’s journey isn’t done there, though. After a period of convalescence, Neo is told the truth about the harsh world he now inhabits. His response? He staggers backward, sick to his stomach. He can’t yet bear the reality he’s been born into. He needs time to learn, to process, to develop unused muscles. He is still in the fourth trimester.

In your first three months, we had all manner of names for you: mouse, button, nugget, burrito, scone—basically anything that fits in one hand. Far and away, though, the one pet name that best captures that first stage of life is alien.

I know—not the cutest term for one’s daughter. But hey, there are some mega-cute aliens out there. ET? Adorable. Baby Yoda? Off the charts cute. (And yes, we sometimes called you Baby Yoda, too.)

More important than the cuteness readout, the metaphor of alien just fit the bill better than any other description. In so many ways, you were our little visitor from inner space.

I’m not the only parent to have thought of this, by the way. Lots of resources describe birth and the ensuing transition as bringing baby “earthside.” The term isn’t used to emphasize how bizarre or unwelcome a new baby is in the world—people instinctively rejoice over newborns, and for good reason—but rather how bizarre and unfamiliar the world is to a new baby.

During and even after the fourth trimester, the world remained profoundly strange to you. Take for instance your diet. Until recently, every snack and meal of your life consisted of the same exact thing, no exceptions. Almost anything else—even water, the most abundant compound on Earth—would make you sick.

That arrangement doesn’t strike me as altogether hospitable. If I (the sci-fi version of me, that is) crash-landed on a foreign planet covered in trees that grew a bountiful, never-ending yield of delicious-looking food, only to find that I could eat literally none of it without growing ill, I might question my odds of survival.

As a crash-lander, you also lack the energy to last one Earth day, or even a significant fraction of one. If you go more than two hours awake, the fuss switch flips on. If you pushed it to three hours, I think I’d have to submerge you in water to prevent nuclear meltdown.[1]

Then there are all these oddities in your body compared to ours. Your breath always smells sweet, and your poop always smells like yogurt. You have cartilage instead of kneecaps, gums instead of teeth, and instead of one solid skull, six continental plates biding their time before forming Pangea.

When you were itty bitty, your brain and body weren’t on speaking terms: Your arms would jump and flail without your consent, your eyes would roll around as if trying to focus on something not there, and your head, were it not for our constant hand of support, would have swung around on your neck like a tetherball in the wind.

Early on, your body also had a radical continuity, a freedom from barriers, that I can hardly understand. You had just emerged from an environment of constant nourishment, free from hunger and therefore free from meals, free from routine, from timing, from clocks, a world without sunrise or sunset, a realm where light may have intrigued but darkness reigned. You had spent all of your life till then connected to another, part of another, inside another.

What a strange, strange thing to suddenly be flung into a world of divisions—light and dark, day and night, hungry and full, me and you. Otherworldly indeed.

But here is the amazing thing. In spite of this radical difference, even on your first day earthside you and I already shared radical likeness. I, too, was a little alien like you not terribly long ago, and not terribly long from now you, too, will grow to be a fully functioning adult like me.

Even now, before you’ve grown into that person, from a genetic point of view we are really similar. Like, really similar. Geneticists report that “between any two humans, the amount of genetic variation—biochemical individuality—is about .1 percent.” Biochemically, you share more than 99% similarity with any other person in the species.

And, out of those billions of people with whom you are, genetically, mostly indistinguishable, no one save your brother, my parents, and my siblings is as similar to me as you are.

So you—our little visitor from inner space, totally foreign to this world, its divisions, its pace, its customs, its physical laws, its language—you in fact bear my and Mom’s image more exactly than virtually every human, every creature, in all of history. We are radically different and radically alike, absolutely far and near at the same time.

Of course, that is my condition, too, and Mom’s, and every person’s. I don’t mean just in relation to each of our parents; I mean in relation to our Maker. The same braid of difference and likeness is woven into all of our DNA in the fact that we are utterly unlike God yet more resemble Him than any other thing on the planet. We are made for Heaven but bound to Earth. We are divinely inspired but so obviously un-divine.

C.S. Lewis gets at this paradox in The Four Loves, where he distinguishes between “nearness by likeness” and “nearness by approach.” Our nearness by likeness comes pre-installed: As creatures, we resemble our Creator. We bear His image without knowing or trying. And yet, in terms of nearness by approach, in how we imitate God in word, thought, deed, and character, we remain radically distant from Him.

“For what can be more unlike,” Lewis writes of the chasm between Creator and creature, “than fullness and need, sovereignty and humility, righteousness and penitence, limitless power and a cry for help?” (4)

And yet God does not leave us on the far side of that chasm. He comes to us, and He bids us come to Him. Theologians call this the paradox of transcendence and immanence. God transcendent, the exalted One, the Most High, our sovereign Lord almighty, is also God immanent, God incarnate, come to earth, born in a manger, clothed in flesh, dwelling in our hearts. God above us is also God with us.

And if I think that you as a newborn were a stranger in a strange land when you first came to us, I can only imagine the alienation that Jesus must have underwent to be born into this world, into our hearts. It has about it not just paradox or puzzlement, but absolute mystery—the visitor from heavenly space.

Like most mysteries, I find that the mystery of Jesus’ indwelling with us, the paradox of our distance and nearness to God, is best conveyed in art, not theology. And so I leave off with a song that I would often listen to while rocking you to sleep during those first months of your life.

In “The Lion’s Mane”, a beautiful piece by Iron & Wine, I always gravitated toward these lines:

Love is a tired symphony you hum when you’re awake
Love is a crying baby mama warned you not to shake
Love is the best sensation lying in the lion’s mane

I would listen to these words as I held you close in my arms, swaddled in blankets and wrapped in white noise and darkness—the best replica we could manage of your life in the womb, that cozy world you so abruptly had to leave. I would look at you, my daughter, your tiny, strange, sacred body, and feel so connected to you, so near. We could hardly be closer.

I would ponder how the fullness of a symphony can live in a quiet hum; how a crying baby is and isn’t the person she will become; how the lion, fierce and terrible, is to those it loves soft and safe.

I would at times be struck by my twin existence as father to you and child of our Father—foreign to this strange world, needy and powerless, yet perfectly snug and known and near.

[1] Your endurance has increased with age. I think at the time of publishing this, you can last up to four hours before your molecular integrity starts to break down.

Addendum: Mom wanted me to be sure to point out that for as odd a little bug you were, your brother was even more like an alien when he was born. I mean, look at those hands. They’re made for a Spielberg scene.

Babyproofing the World

Beloved son,

Shortly after we moved into our first home—a good four years before you were born—Mom and I installed a new ceiling fan in our kitchen.

We had ambition and vision aplenty, but little know-how between us. What would take someone handy like your grandpa maybe a couple hours became for us an entire weekend of trips to Home Depot, viewings and re-viewings of YouTube how-to videos, Mission Impossible-style crawls across the attic rafters, and, as the project neared completion, a number of silent prayers that the ceiling would not collapse into our cereal bowls the next morning.

Our prayers must have been heard, because the fan did not drop out of the ceiling the next morning, nor the morning after that, nor any morning since. It quickly became, well, a fixture, something stable, something sure. For years I regarded our ceiling fan the same way most people regard their ceiling fans: Unless a bulb went out, I paid no attention to it whatsoever.

That is, until you noticed it. There is no fixation quite so unadulterated as a baby’s desire for an object. When you were around five months old and learning to reach and grab and pull, you discovered the two chains dangling from our ceiling fan, one for the light, one for the fan. Like mystical talismans descending from the heavens, the chains drew you in, called to you—who knows, maybe you heard them speak your name. “Greetings, little one. We are called Hampton Bay. We have powers beyond your imagination. If you find a way to reach us, we will share our magic with you.”

Whatever undiscovered particle it is that determines babies’ predilection for certain objects and horror at others, you were taken in. You needed to grab those chains.

At first you did just that, stretching out your arms whenever I walked through the kitchen carrying you. You would wrap your fingers around the oval metal trinket and stare at it as only a baby can. It didn’t take long before you combined “grab” and “pull” to create “yank.”

Click. Suddenly you could create shadow or, just as easily—click—light. While your arms understood the motion, I’m not sure your brain understood the cause. Whereas now, as a toddler, you might do something over and over again out of pride, as a baby you always seemed to yank on the chain out of duty. When we held you up toward the fixture, your face was serious and focused, your arms straining desperately to grab hold. It clearly wasn’t a game; it wasn’t even a job. It seemed a sacred responsibility.

I’d wager that if I held you up there long enough, you would yank and yank and yank and yank—on, off, on, off, on—until either your little baby muscles gave out or the ceiling fan itself ripped through the drywall and crashed onto our heads.

And that was precisely the problem: Embarrassing as it is to admit, I was fairly certain that you, at five months, were strong enough to tear our pet project down to the ground. The gentle, measured tug with which Mom and I pulled the chains was too subtle a motion for your reflexive yank.

At first this got me thinking about the obvious: What does it say about the quality of my handiwork if I don’t trust our ceiling fan to withstand the force of a 15-pound person?

But then I started to see—as I imagine all parents do at some point—that the whole world is made of nothing but questionably installed ceiling fans.

Wherever I looked, it became clear to me that the everyday existence of human adults is perfectly breakable. We are so naïve as to place plants on windowsills, candles on coffee tables, laptops on the couch. We are so delusional as to believe in the fixedness of fixtures. Drop in a grabby baby like you at five months, and it is just one giant demolition site waiting to happen.

Not to mention, of course, that the demolition crew is perfectly breakable, too. Mom and I have always taken numerous precautions to make things safer for you and your sister, but the very notion of babyproofing suggests that the world is inherently dangerous; it’s just that adults know how not to kill themselves navigating it.

Since we’re past your babyproofing phase, you might be wondering why this ceiling fan episode has come back to me now, over two years later. Well, for one, we just moved houses, so I got to say goodbye to the ceiling fan, hoping that it will hold up okay for the next folks. (I am pretty sure it will. By now it’s undergone years of rigorous testing.)

Our new place is nicer, better built, sturdier. But even as we enter an updated, recently shampooed, freshly painted home, reminders of its brokenness—current or eventual—abound. An outlet covering is pulling away from the wall. The lightbulb above the kitchen sink is out. Dings and pockmarks show where previous tenants installed their curtains and shelves and baby gate. The doorbell casing is shattered. Heck, we have a whole rite dedicated to documenting such signs of decay: the rental inspection, where we list every busted thing we can find.

Beyond our recent move, I am also keenly aware of the world’s fragility in this moment because your sister, now seven months old, is revealing to us every day new ways that our house is a death trap. With her recently learning to roll, and then crawl, and then pull herself to standing, we have swiftly entered the no-and-move phase, as in, “No, don’t touch that” as we move her away from a hazard—and inevitably toward another.

There are the obvious hazards, the ones that make it on the wellness check sheets: outlets, medicine bottles, stairs, cleaning supplies. But there is a whole host of mundane scenarios that pose a threat, too—really any everyday arrangement of reality. A scrap of paper on the office floor? Choking hazard. A fallen strand of hair on the bathroom floor? Tourniquet hazard. (Yes, it’s a thing.) A crumb of food on the kitchen floor? Bacterial hazard. A thick carpet floor? Suffocation hazard. A smooth tiled floor? Slipping hazard. The existence of floors? Gravity hazard.

It’s hazards all the way down. And if it doesn’t pose a threat to you or your sister, then you surely pose a threat to it. The only books we can let sister freely examine are two that we have in the “Indestructibles” series, which I believe are printed on camping tarp and bound with fishing line. Anything else is destined for her mouth and a slow, saliva-soaked death by dissolution.

Through my eyes as someone raising little breakable people surrounded by little breakable things, I end up with the impression that the essential condition of the world is brokenness—whether it is currently broken, is eventually going to break, or is imminently going to break us.

And that is the third reason unstable ceiling fans are on my mind: You wouldn’t know it, dear son, but as I write this people are enduring a season of great instability. Just about every brand of calamity has made an appearance this year: global health crisis, shuttered businesses, sweeping joblessness, racial injustice, months-long protests, political pandemonium, record-breaking heat and forest fires and hurricanes. Whoever moves in in 2021 will have a doozy of a time completing the rental inspection.

There are many who would rush to remind me that it’s pretty much always been that way, that 2020 is not unique in its unraveling. One of the most famous novels of the 20^th century borrows a line from one of the most famous poems of the 20^th century: “things fall apart.” A century earlier, physicists conceptualized entropy, which describes the inevitable trend of all things[1] toward disorder.

Long before that, the ancient poets and teachers insisted that this world is no sturdier than we are. The Bible says that the world is passing away (1 John 2) and will be destroyed by moths and rust (Matthew 6), that we its inhabitants are as fixed as a flower blown away in the wind (Psalm 103), as enduring as a breath or a shadow (Psalm 39 and 144), as permanent as mist (James 4).

But then, the gospel doesn’t end there. It begins there. It starts with our brokenness, our frailty, our fragile-as-a-flower existence, and it promises healing, wholeness, life everlasting. The gospel is not about babyproofing. It is not about fixing, patching, making do. It doesn’t install fixtures and then pray that they will hold up.

The gospel will hold up. The assurance of God’s eternal, redemptive love is a reality that will last. It is the Reality upon which our reality is built. In an audacious counter to the decay and disorder we see around us, Jesus promises nothing less than the “renewal of all things” (Matthew 19): our bodies, our relationships, our earth—yes, even our ceiling fans.

One day all these things will be new, not just fixed up, patched up, cleaned up, but new, regenerated, re-created. One day there will be no lives ended by disease, no people caste by race, no homes destroyed by fires. One day the books will not dissolve in sister’s mouth and the fans will not wobble and the five-month-old in you can yank and yank and yank to your heart’s content. Until then, we look up and pray.

[1] If you go on to study physics, you’ll point out that, technically, entropy only applies to closed systems, not all things per se. The point stands: Even physical laws seem to suggest that our very existence, if not already broken, is in the process of breaking.