Unlocking doors

If you have to go to court in Alpena County, there’s a good chance you’re going to bump into a door.

On the top floor of the county’s lovely courthouse, a dignified, walnut-trimmed courtroom with art deco vibes and iffy acoustics hosts an ever-moving stream of people from all walks of life.

In my just shy of four years of hanging out in that courtroom, I’ve watched lots of those people bonk into the door.

It’s not their fault. Anyone presented with wooden double doors and needing to get to the other side of them would probably assume those doors would both open.

Not in the 26th Circuit Court courtroom, where the left-hand door — or the right-hand door, if you’re trying to leave — is always locked.

When I asked about the locked door several years ago, the court folks shrugged and said that’s just what they’ve always done.

Many’s the time I’ve watched a courtroom visitor push on the locked door at the end of a hearing, only to look around in bewilderment when the door wouldn't open.

People whack their knees on the door, knock into it with their shoulder, or stand outside the courtroom uncertainly, wondering why they’re locked out.

A few months ago, after substantial pestering from a certain reporter we don’t need to name, the judge on the bench used a break in a busy court day to give me the OK to — insert drum roll here — unlock the locked door.

With a click, the metal rod holding it shut slid back, and the door swung outward.

Now gloriously wide, the doorway stood open and inviting, its two doors swinging freely and no longer a bonk-hazard.

Gotta say, it was a nice moment.

As the doors closed, the once-locked door skidded against its partner, the doors’ edges improperly aligned so they wouldn’t both close without an extra tug.

Court staff nodded and aha-ed. So this was why the door had been locked.

At a nod from the judge, the bailiff re-locked the door, and the next hearing began.

Possibly, the troublemaking door could be rehung, or its edge could be sanded and refinished so both doors swing smoothly.

Possibly, the court could decide to put up with doors that don’t close properly to make the courtroom more accessible to everyone.

But, at least for now, the door remains locked on court days, and people keep bonking into it.

Courtrooms ain’t the only place where people keep doing things because they’ve always done them that way.

And they ain’t the only place where it’s easier to let a problem be than to fix it.

I hope I’m not the only person who will walk past a protruding nail in my house for years before taking eight seconds to whack it flat with a hammer.

When I ignore the pile of paperwork I keep meaning to put away or never reach the tomorrow on which I will start healthier behaviors, I’m cheating my future self.

More harmful, though, are the doors I don’t fix so that others don’t bonk into them.

Like when I mean to kick my habit of putting my own feelings first but continue dragging my self-absorption like a shroud, shedding stress in my wake.

Or when I see ills around me and think someone should take a stand against them, forgetting that I could be that someone.

Or when I love some people but keep one door locked against others, unwilling to forgive imagined slights or accept people who don’t look like me, dress like me, think like me.

God doesn’t do locked doors.

While humans bicker and fuss and lock doors against one another, He made sure anyone — ANYone — can get to him.

With a cross and an empty grave, He not only fixed the door, He ripped it off.

We can walk right into the courtroom, where the Judge calls us utterly unworthy of freedom, then removes our shackles and pulls us to Him in a welcoming embrace.

With all my good intentions, I know I’ll keep pushing doors shut, afraid of change, afraid of trying, afraid of doing the hard work of keeping my heart and hands open to the world God gave me to love.

And my eternally patient Father will keep loving the heck out of me, anyway, walking beside me as I go and do and open doors.

First published in The Alpena News on Nov. 19, 2022.

The chipmunk and the giant

The sunflower seeds under my toes first caught Hernando’s attention.

The chipmunk who became my summer companion had amused me as he scoured for snacks to add to his underground larder as I sat on the porch swing.

Curious how close he’d come, I tucked a treat under my feet and waited.

Hernando darted closer and closer, nose twitching, until he was tickling my toes with his fur and stuffing his cheeks with seeds.

(A pause, here, to acknowledge what you may be thinking: Rodents. Destructive tunnels. Disease. Bad. Yes, yes. I know.)

Hernando — if you knew him, you’d understand that he simply LOOKS like a Hernando — quickly came to see me as a bottomless source of that sweet, sweet manna from heaven, sunflower seeds.

I’d settle onto the swing and, within minutes, Hernando would appear, eyes bright and eager.

Graduating from my feet, he soon took to hopping onto the swing next to me and then became a regular on my lap, sometimes skipping across my laptop keyboard and fingers in search of seeds.

When I’d flop over onto my back, Hernando stood on my torso, where he delighted in a constantly replenished pile of seeds.

Head propped on a pillow, I watched, giggling, as the silly creature stuffed seeds into his bulging cheeks with his tiny hands.

Many a summer morning began on the back porch in this human-rodent partnership, he eagerly accepting all gifts and demanding more, I willingly providing the good things he craved.

As long as I made no sudden moves, Hernando seemed fearless, occasionally appearing on my shoulder or nosing under the palm of my hand, oblivious to my bigness.

It amused me to think that Hernando anticipated our meetings with pleasure and considered me not only a food machine but a friend.

I know better, of course. He’s a cute little turkey, but he’s still a chipmunk, and chipmunks can’t comprehend human-sized gratitude or human-sized affection.

That doesn’t mean I can’t care about a chipmunk.

Call it foolish, if you like, but I have true affection for that small animal with the stretchy cheeks and greedy appetite, scurrying about meaninglessly and always in such a hurry.

He may be too little to love me, but I’m not too big to love him.

****

The lyrics of a song on one of the local Christian radio stations float to my ears as I flip through stations on my drive to work.

“I love you, Lord,” the singer croons, heartfeltly.

It’s not wrong to say we love God. Hearts and minds struck by who God is and what He does ought — truly — to fall in awe and gratitude and tremble with the deepest love a human can muster.

I can’t help thinking, though, that our love is that of a chipmunk, stuffing his cheeks and completely incapable of understanding that he stands on a giant.

We humans can’t feel feelings or say words big enough to make us worthy of the attention of One who knows our undermining ways, our sicknesses, our destruction.

We can’t understand how big God’s love is, because, each the center of our own little backyard world, we can never know how small we are.

And yet He loves us.

He gives and gives and gives us our daily bread — not only the food of our mouths, but the strengthening of our hearts, companionship and hope and peace where no peace belongs and tears that heal and struggles that mend.

Daily he comes to us, sits with us, waits for us to see Him, holds out to us the cross and the love that hung there, urges us to come to Him with our tiny needs so He can feed us and delight in us as we scamper this way and that, thinking we matter.

And, we do.

Because He loves us, we do matter, little as we are.

Today, I’ll once again poke my nose into the world, listening for trouble and dashing about, blissfully unaware of my insignificance.

And my Maker will hold out His hand, loving me with His big love, ready to give me all that my heart needs.

First published in The Alpena News on Oct. 15, 2022.

Too big for a box

On the brown wall above our brown couch, a canvas suspended on a nail reminds me I once visited the ocean.

More than once, actually.

When I was in single digits, my West Coast cousins and I danced over wavelets and built elaborate sand sculptures on the Oregon shore.

Other times, too, I’ve gazed wonderingly at the big waters — from the boardwalks of Atlantic City, from the confines of Alcatraz Island, from miles in the sky enroute to Germany.

In the most recent visit, the one captured in a rectangle on my wall, my family explored Rialto Beach, in the northwest corner of Washington State.

Barkless white trees lay like felled giants, tossed carelessly landward by errant waves.

Gray, perfectly round stones luxuriated in the sand, coyly coaxing caresses from passersby.

At the far end of the beach, lingering rock formations stood firm against the relentless waters that had worn away the rock of ages that once stood sentry on the ocean’s edge.

Innocent clouds turned blue, then golden, then pink and purple as the sun finished its rounds, sending orange ribbons of water lapping against our toes.

A starfish — creepy, sinuous, a glove come to life — stretched a star arm down the side of a rock in a tide pool as my children gasped and pointed.

Our voices hovered metallically in the wide-open air, at once far away and intimate. The sun sank lower, and I pointed my camera and clicked, trying to snatch up the moment and pack it away for safekeeping.

Now, an enlargement of one of those photos hangs on my wall. Orange waves tug at the rock formations’ feet in the dimming light.

It’s pretty, sure.

But it could be one of those photos that come with a store-bought frame, the glossy images you discard and replace with your own attempts to capture something far too large to fit in a box on the wall.

In the book I’m currently reading during my lunch break walks — “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” by Robert M. Pirsig (it’s not really about the motorcycles) — a character gives up on trying to photograph the wide-open, wind-stirred landscape of the Great Plains.

“As soon as you put a border on it, it’s gone,” he muses.

So much of the life we encounter each day can only exist in uncatchable wholeness, impossible to shrink down to one little bite.

Nature’s beauty.

Man’s depravity.

The surrounding-ness of a city I love as I breathe it in from my perch on the roof of my workplace, moved to inexplicable tears by a curve of brick and the pigeon strutting on a metal fire escape.

The ideas in my head, the ones I long ago gave up trying to express because a tiny box of words could never hold them.

The inextricable interconnectedness of indifference and poverty and hopelessness and crime and heartache and addiction and trauma and clawing upward and sliding downward and hope in the darkness.

You can’t take a picture of big stuff.

You can try — you can say, “See, here, this small thing is that big thing.”

But it’s not.

It’s not even close.

The angry fist, the rude comment, the obnoxious and politically charged tirade are only snippets of the whole.

The voices echoing off downtown buildings during a signs-held-high march ring beautiful in some ears, ugly in others, and capture only a fragment of a complex and wide-spreading set of truths that intermix and intermingle and burst the bounds of the labels that try, and fail, to contain them.

Snapshots give glimpses — crucial glimpses, for without them we see nothing — into issues and stories and truths too important to overlook.

That photo on my wall reminds me of my capacity to experience breathless awe at the perfectly round stone in my hand.

But what fits inside the box is only a fragment of the whole — a path inward, for those who choose to follow it.

My Maker doesn’t fit in a box any more than He fit on a tree.

The leather-bound Book on my shelf gives me a glimpse of the divine, a portal into ever-new discoveries of the heart-whopping realization that I can’t not be loved.

The cross on a silver chain around my neck gleams like a crack in the universe, a wholly inadequate but still precious representation of the epic battle between good and evil and acceptance and rejection and life and death when love resoundingly won, because love always wins.

Small is easy. We spout off in a faceless social media comment or snidely push aside the other side of the story, holding out our snapshots as indisputable truth.

But truth is what lies beyond the border of the picture, and you have to climb inside to see it.

People who have poked their heads inside Scripture and been bowled over by the oceans of love that lie therein should be first in line to look beyond the label, beyond the grubby face or criminal record, beyond difference or strangeness.

There’s more to our story than what others can see.

And there’s more to the snapshots around us. Infinitely more.

We just have to be willing to look for it.

First published in The Alpena News on August 6, 2022.

Being OK

A towheaded bear cub with an inexhaustible grin, my youngest from the time he could walk tumbled through his childhood with glorious abandon.

As a preschooler and then a kindergartener, Jonah hurled himself headlong into any bit of fun, oblivious to danger and frequently leaving broken toys or household items in his wake.

The not-infrequent sound of a crash somewhere in the house meant the young adventurer had, once again, toppled something — or someone — in his enthusiasm.

Invariably, the sound of the crash was followed by a young voice calling, “I’m OK.”

At first alarmed by our son’s frequent misadventures, my husband and I soon grew accustomed to the pattern. Crash, brief silence, then a cheerful, “I’m OK,” letting us know all was well and our youngest was back to happily conquering his world.

And Jonah usually was OK, accepting the occasional clunk on the head as a matter of course and shrugging off the bumps and bruises that might have left another child in tears.

When he stepped on and broke a glass window ornament, slicing his foot open, he watched with interest as we washed and bandaged the deep cut.

He put up no fuss when a doctor had to glue shut a gash above his eyebrow after an overenthusiastic dismount from a chair.

Jonah was about 5 when he slipped off a coffee table in the living room.

The fall seemed no worse than any other, and his blond head bobbed up from the floor with the usual, “I’m OK!”

He wasn’t, though. Blood oozed from his mouth where the edge of the table had smashed into one of his front incisors, shoving it out of its socket so that it hung at a sickening angle.

I don’t remember what we did right then and there — when you’re a parent, you just jump in and tackle the emergency as best you can and hope you get it right.

I do remember the dentist’s office, where a woman in a white coat said the tooth couldn’t be saved.

Perhaps it’s standard practice in such cases, but I was — and still am — deeply impressed by what the dentist did next.

She asked me to sit in the dental chair and helped me hoist Jonah onto my lap.

She had to pull the tooth the rest of the way out of its socket. It might hurt, and it might be scary, and she wanted Jonah to have his mom right there, arms around him, helping him feel safe.

The procedure didn’t take long, and he did great, and he spent the next few years charming everyone he met with his gap-toothed grin.

But, for those few minutes when things weren’t so OK, he got to lean on the mom who loved him endlessly and wouldn’t let him go through his tough time alone.

I like people to know that I’m OK when life bumps me around.

Though a heart-on-my-sleeve type with a regular need for facial tissues, I try to keep a smile in my pocket so those who love me don’t have to worry about me or feel burdened by my tough stuff.

And, no matter how teary I sometimes get, I really am (usually) OK.

Except when I’m not.

Not gonna lie — lately it’s hard to feel OK.

I’m not one to say that this time or that time or any time in which we currently live is the worst the world has ever encountered. Any study of history will turn up dozens of periods in which folks had it really rough and society seemed to go haywire.

But there’s something about now that has put a knot in my insides. It’s everything. All of it. It’s just so much. It scares me. It makes me feel extraordinarily not OK.

How I cling, when the not-OK-ness gets too close and too strong, to that memory of holding my child on my lap, chin in his hair, his back against my chest, wrapping him in my love even if I couldn’t take away his pain.

I’m the child on the lap.

I’m the not-OK.

I’m the one wrapped in arms bigger than mine and leaning against a strength more solid than mine and OK even though I’m not OK.

I’m going to keep getting knocked down, often by my own bumbling stubbornness and overzealous charges in the wrong direction.

I’ll keep getting back up, too, shaking off the emotional bumps and bruises left by a rough-and-tumble world and marching toward the next day and the next, because that’s what we humans do.

But the One who went toe-to-toe with death for me and won, stronger and bigger and more full of love than I could ever fathom, doesn’t leave me in that world alone.

He holds me close, wraps me in forgiveness, and quiets my shaking as I lean into the comfort of His nearness.

And I’m OK.

First published in The Alpena News on July 2, 2022.

Words we don’t say

The average American English-speaking adult only uses about 10% of the at least 200,000 words that make up their language, according to a random sampling of internet experts who sound like they know what they’re talking about.

That leaves a heck of a lot of unused words floating around out there, never getting the love they deserve.

Lexico.com — a language website drawing from well-respected dictionary sources — offers a list of weird and wonderful words that rarely see the light of day.

In a quick dip into the list, I learned, to my delight, that I could be using the word “keek,” which means to peep surreptitiously.

Ain’t that great?

The list also taught me that I am a mouse potato who raised three screenagers.

If someone tells me I look peely-wally, I can say there’s no need to kick up bobsy-die or get into a fankle about it.

I worry that I’m a blatherskite, but at least I’m not a snollygoster, and, if I’m a hoddy-noddy, I certainly hope someone tells me so I can try to do better.

And I definitely expect a wayzgoose from my employer this summer.

So many lovely words that never get said — famulus, spaghettification, guddle, even floccinaucinihilipilification, although learning to pronounce that one would probably prove worthless.

I can’t help feeling a little sorry for all those words that never pass my lips because I don’t know them.

Other words, on the other hand, I choose to exclude, because using them doesn’t feel right.

For example, I decided a while back to limit my use of words like “crazy” or “insane.”

A lot of people struggle with mental illness, and my word choice doesn't need to imply that there’s something wrong with that.

I try not to use words that turn intimate body parts into insults, and I don’t use as expletives phrases that portray sex as an act of violence or aggression.

Recently, I learned that a word I considered harmless is seen as derogatory by some people.

I don’t want someone to hurt because of what I say, so I don’t use that word anymore.

Heck, I’ve got a couple hundred thousand other words I could use, instead.

Alongside the words I don’t know and the ones I prefer to avoid are the words I should use but don’t.

It’s astonishing, really, how words you need to say can get stuck in the throat and won’t come out.

Please.

Thank you.

I’m sorry.

I forgive you.

Please help me.

Tell me how I can help.

I love you.

I love you, too.

Blockaded by fear or anger or stubbornness, the words we don’t say can stand between us like a wall — one that could instantly fall if only we opened our mouths to speak.

I’m not sure how many words are in God’s vocabulary.

I do know He talks to me.

He says quite a bit, calmly admonishing when I do something I oughtn’t, whispering hope when skies grow dark, murmuring comfort when I lay my head on His shoulder and weep.

Some words, though, He doesn't say.

I reject you.

You are unforgivable.

I don’t want you.

You are not mine.

I know my unworthiness to be loved by One who sees my insides, knows the scars and divots of my heart and the wayward wanderings of my mind.

I struggle to see the good in me, but, good golly, I sure can see the not-good, and I know God shouldn’t want me.

I’m not good enough.

That’s why His Child, the One who WAS good enough, hung on a tree.

Because God had words He didn’t want to say.

He didn’t want to reject me — reject you — so He rejected His Son, and then, death defeated, scooped Him back up again to be my brother.

We keep on being not good enough, keep pushing each other away and stubbornly stomping about, refusing to speak words of love and grace to one another.

But, because of Jesus, God keeps on holding out His arms to us, smashing through walls, calling us His.

You will never be not wanted by God.

Never.

Those are words He simply doesn’t say.

First published in The Alpena News on May 28, 2022.

All about you

My eldest was young when he looked his grandmother in the eye in the middle of a conversation.

“Grandma,” he said gravely, “it’s not all about you.”

“Dead serious,” she described it later. “If that doesn’t bring you up short …”

My darling boy had heard those words many a time from his mother.

“It’s not all about you” came in handy when my offspring fussed over childish wants or pouted about decisions that didn’t go their way.

Humans enter the world designed to be self-absorbed. Their world truly is all about them — their hunger, their tiredness, their need for physical contact and closeness. It’s how they survive.

After a while, though, a kid’s gotta grow up.

“It’s not all about you,” I told my kids time and again as they worked their way out of infantile self-absorption toward maturity. Possibly not the world’s best parenting strategy, but the words carried one of life’s most important lessons, and I figured they might as well hear it from me.

Not that I’m always the best example.

You’d think, from the way I sometimes sigh over niceties I can’t have or fume because of some trivial slight or grump when others don’t follow rules I concoct for them, that life is, in fact, all about me.

Traffic diverted because of construction is about inconveniencing me, not about the people working hard to make my road safer.

The store clerk’s impatience is a direct attack on my importance, not a sign that she’s had a tough day and could use a smile.

We all trod along in our own bubbles, living lives only we can live and shaped by experiences only we have experienced. Truly, in a sense, we inhabit little worlds that do revolve only around us.

But we also partake of the big, all-in world, full of other people in the center of their own bubbles, each of us bumping about and jostling for position and forgetting over and over that it’s not all about us.

In fact, from a high-up perspective, ain’t none of it about any of us.

We, the foolish beings who fill a tiny fraction of the universe, are infinitesimally small, here for a moment and gone like a puff of smoke.

We fuss and fume and raise our tiny fists, making barely a squeak in the vast mass of humanity that carpets the planet.

Our tears add no volume to the ocean of human sorrow, our sighs wisp into the wind and disappear as nothing.

In my kitchen, at my desk, behind my steering wheel, I’m my own all-in-all, but amid the 7-plus billion people on the planet, I am merely a speck — and a small one, at that.

It’s not all about me.

But, on Easter morning, an empty tomb gave a different message.

For the sake of scrambling, digging, me-first mankind, our brother and friend set aside His crown and let a whip fall across his back.

To soothe our nothing tears and tiny hearts, He hung and hurt and forgave those who killed Him.

Though we should be no more to our Maker than ants in a glass-walled terrarium, our Savior charged into epic battle with death and won, handing each of us His crown and calling us His own.

It’s all about you, little ones, God whispers, telling us daily of His love, His acceptance, His presence in our tiny lives as he slips through our bubble walls and walks alongside us, insignificant though we are.

A loving Father at our side, we can lift our eyes to those around us, walking through their own bubble lives.

We can set aside our self-absorption and notice others’ worries and fears, pay attention to the love behind their actions and extend a hand when they feel alone.

We can stop using words that hurt, even if we’re not the ones feeling their sting.

I’m not the center of the universe, and neither are you. 

And that’s OK.

The God who knows all about us and loves us anyway looks us in the eye — dead serious — and brings us up short with the image of His son on a cross.

Darling child, He says, it’s all about you.

First published in The Alpena News on April 23, 2022.

Going for the gold

“Therefore encourage one another and build one another up, just as you are doing.”  -- 1 Thessalonians 5:11

Oh, baby, it’s Olympics season.

Every four years in my youth, every two years more recently -- or, lately, whenever global pandemics allow it -- the world gathers around various electronic devices and watches incredibly talented humans give their all in the name of sport.

Glorious.

Not that I have a strong affinity for sport, in general. My one personal brush-up with athletics consisted of a season of fifth-grade basketball, during which I fervently prayed that the ball would come nowhere near me and my coach called me “Grace,” full irony intended.

But the Olympics. Oh, baby. They’re so great.

I’m all-in for whatever sport the jazzy commentators want to put in front of me. Curling? Sure. Speed skating? Absolutely. Skeleton? Hey, man, whatever. I’m down for it.

Tiny little teenagers and gray-haired veterans from all corners of the earth, stretching to their utmost, thrill me with their strength, their fearlessness, their years of dedicated work and failure and slogging to reach the world’s biggest sports stage and -- for a shining few -- to stand on a podium, hand over heart, belting the words to their national anthem.

One night, early in this year’s games, I soared alongside women competing in the snowboard slopestyle event. What “slopestyle” means I do not know, but those ladies have learned how to fly.

The event’s final contender, New Zealand's Zoi Sadowski-Synnott, was the last barrier that might stand between the then-leading scorer, American Julia Marino, and the top of the podium.

As Sadowski-Synnott zoomed down a fake-snow-covered hill, launching off of ramps to perform breathtaking feats in the air, the announcers roared with approval, their surfer-cool expressions barely adequate to convey the awesomeness of the New Zealander’s “massive” run.

When Sadowski-Synnott whooshed to a halt at the bottom of the hill, Marino, the woman she had just dethroned, raced forward, hurling herself at the new queen of slopestyle and tackling her to the ground in a frenzy of joy and celebration.

It didn’t matter that the women were from different countries. 

It didn’t matter that one had bested the other.

There was just jubilation, and congratulation, and a joining together in the us-ness of something going really well.

Man, I love the Olympics.

They remind me there’s more to life than the top of the podium.

All of us have an instinct, I suspect, to react badly when someone else’s accomplishment threatens our sense of self-worth.

A coworker receives a word of praise from the boss, someone takes a better picture or gives a better speech than ours, and we bristle, snapping to defend our little territory and looking for a way to drag them down to build ourselves up.

Had a fellow slopestyle rider (in the imaginary world in which I have mad athletic skills) just flown past me, smashing my accomplishment into pieces, I think I’d have had to blink back tears as I clapped politely without meaning it.

How much more fun would it be, though, to be the person racing in for a tackle-hug, not caring about my own place on the podium but spilling over with happiness for another human being in their moment of accomplishment?

One of the many weird things about God is his persistent insistence on putting humans at the top of the podium.

I mean, come on. He’s God. The Boss. The big cheese. The 100% gold-medal guy. If you’re God, you're number one, by definition.

But, throughout Biblical history, God-Who-Is-Great continued to lift up the humans He made, despite their erring and foolish ways.

Try as we might to earn the medal we too often feel is our right, we continue to slip, and stumble, and tumble head-over-heels, our imperfections ever standing between us and glory.

But this weird God, washing feet and dining with the underdogs and hanging limp on a cross, picks us up and gives us the award we don’t deserve, running to grab us up in an embrace just because He loves us.

I want to be like that.

I want to reach out and pull others up, cheering their successes, even at the cost of my little pride.

It ain’t easy, fending off that instinct to protect ourselves by tearing others down. But we don’t need to battle for the top.

The Boss already made us number one. 

It’s Olympics season. Hand over heart, anthem of being loved on our lips, whaddaya say we try some celebratory tackle-hugs now and then?

That’s a video clip I’d watch on repeat.

First published in The Alpena News on Feb. 19, 2022.

No spoilers allowed

 Got spoilers? For heaven’s sake, keep them to yourself.

I’m lookin’ at you, Steve.

Ever since my coworker saw the latest Spider-Man movie, he’s practically had to duct tape his mouth shut to keep from blurting out the juicy details to the other superhero nerds in the newsroom.

Steve saw the movie on its opening weekend, and that made him dangerous. For weeks, I yowled if he so much as said the word “spider,” terrified he would spill the beans and give away the movie’s plot twists.

In the months before the big-screen release of “Spider-Man: No Way Home,” I fastidiously avoided online mentions of the movie, afraid of accidentally learning its secrets prematurely.

The day after I finally saw it, Steve bounded to my desk, nearly exploding with eagerness to trade notes.

Not three minutes later, Darby walked into the room ― Darby, who, as of this writing, has STILL NOT SEEN THE MOVIE.

Poor Steve had to stop mid-sentence as Darby hollered and stuffed her fingers in her ears, forbidding any newsroom Spidey-talk until she’s seen it ― and, my goodness, I hope that’s soon, because I don’t want to be the one who lets the cat out of the bag, especially about that one scene where … ahem. Never mind.

Great movies will still be great even if someone has dropped a spoiler, but it’s hard to match the thrill of walking into a theater not knowing what to expect, and knowing you don’t know.

Eyes wide with wonder, you nestle into your seat, popcorn at the ready, and slide into the world before you, ready to be surprised.

You laugh, you gasp, you grab for a tissue, you thrill with each twist of the story, the not-knowing making each new revelation all the sweeter.

As December fades away and the calendar makes a fresh start, a multitude of unknowns crowd the beginning of a new year.

I don’t know what I may be doing by the year’s end.

I don’t know where I will be.

I don’t know who I will be.

I don’t know what walls stand in my path, what stones wait to make me stumble, what fogs of heartache hover over the road ahead.

Nor do I know about the sparks of joy hiding just around the bend or the glorious beams of sunshine in which I will bask, jubilant and grateful.

Perhaps it would be easier if we could see what’s coming. Maybe we would prepare differently, steel ourselves for the hard times and pull along with more hope if we could see the glimpses of light that await us.

But I find a thrill in the opening credits of January, with its mysteries and secrets, even knowing that some of what lies ahead could be less than wonderful.

The last two years certainly held their share of not-wonderful. People died who shouldn’t have died. People acted badly, hurt each other, grew angry and bitter and sad.

But, in the midst of the undeniably bad, I witnessed good. 

I saw people finding strength they didn’t know they had. I saw people displaying unprecedented kindness, digging into their inner resources, discovering they cared.

Babies came into the world. People fell in love. Good happened.

The ahead, with no spoilers to hint at what it may bring us, looms intimidating on the horizon.

It’s not all dark and scary, though. Surprises lie in store, plot twists we can’t know but can await with wonder, ready to gasp, to laugh, to be shocked by the blessings we never saw coming.

Ask me tomorrow and I may want to kick my optimistic self in the shins. 

But, at least for the moment, I like waiting to be surprised.

Perhaps that’s because I know Someone who loves plot twists as much as I do.

God is really good at surprises. Always with the unexpected, that one. 

Manna and grasshoppers. Water into wine. Majesty in a manger.

King on a cross.

Death into life.

The unending shock of undeserved forgiveness.

Plot twist upon plot twist, surprise after surprise. He’s one director who will always keep us shaking our heads in wonder.

Will 2022 be as tough as the last few years? No idea. 

A year from now, we may be heaving a collective sigh of relief, grateful to be done with another rough one.

Or we may look back ― even through challenges ― and remember the good. The magnificent surprises. The joys. The quiet and glorious scenes where kindness persevered and truth stood its ground and love won.

I’m glad nobody can spill the secrets of what lies ahead. The unknown may be scary, but it’s exciting, too. 

Deep breath, folks. Nestle back, grab your popcorn, and look up. The movie’s just getting started.

And I think it’s going to be a good one.

First published in The Alpena News on Jan. 8, 2022.