too big

That’s today. Too big. The world, its people, the demands, the pressure, the nonstop expectation that you as a human being and a teacher and a friend and a patient and a person and a wife and a mom will be able to just keep going…It’s too big today. Usually I manage it all pretty well. Usually I can handle each crisis as it unfolds, and I can respond with just the right amount of oomph to keep things going. But today, it all catches up with me and I’m not sure if I can keep my head above water for much longer.

Last week school announced that Wednesdays would now be following a two hour delay schedule. The purpose was to give teachers enough time in the mornings to complete some prep and grading and what not. I was excited about this change because it also means shorter class periods for these days, so naturally less expectation regarding an assignment and whatnot. As exhausting as yesterday may have been, I felt hopeful that today would be a breath of fresh air.

But then I arrive at school only to realize 2020 is like a capsized boat, sinking as the water rushes in to fill any lingering pocket of air. I’m the one with the hole in the bottom of the boat and as much as I try to bucket the water out and preserve what little hope I can, the water keeps draining in and the boat keeps sinking until eventually there is no more air to breathe.

Super hopeful, I know.

There is a place in the Adirondacks of New York that my family goes to every summer to spend a week together. We’ve been going there ever since my grandparents were a young, married couple. Arriving at camp each summer, smelling the pine trees and openness, feeling the sun beat down from a crackling blue sky, seeing the lake shimmer the sun’s reflection off its mirror glazed surface…This camp has been a place where you don’t just rest, but you also find yourself restored. Enough time spent here with family that you can squabble and laugh with, jest and journey, you leave more whole than when you arrived.

I remember one summer, we arrived at camp to find out that one of the camp’s workers–a young kid from the city who had come up to to get a summer’s worth of experience in the great country–had drowned in the lake a few days earlier. He had gone canoeing with this other employee. It was their day off and they canoed a few hundred feet from shore. Something motivated them to jump out of the canoe and try a little bit of swimming. Given the wind, though, the canoe started to drift and Anthony, the young guy, wasn’t strong enough a swimmer to make it back.

We could still see the row boats and canoes surveying the area where he had gone under. They watched diligently over the course of those first few days, waiting for his body to eventually surface. It did, on a Thursday.

I thought about that boy a lot that summer, what it must’ve been like for him to know the air was slipping away, that he was sinking deeper, that the surface was getting farther. For death to enter such a beautiful place as this camp I’ve only ever known as a haven, it provided a cruel reminder of just how small we are. I think about him now, too. Maybe I shouldn’t admit that. It is dismal; it was a long time ago. But I do nonetheless. Full of life one minute, adventurous and excited, and then sinking. Water filling every pocket of air. Suffocating. Gone.

The camp holds daily chapels, and there is a song my family looks forward to hearing the chorus sing each week. “We Will Remember” by Tommy Walker. The end of the first stanza reads, “We will remember the works of Your hands. And we will stop and give you praise for great is Thy faithfulness.” Usually this song is performed with great gusto and cheer, a celebration as you remember everything great God has done, every wonderful work completed by His hands. The week Anthony drowned, this was a song sung in grief and mourning. Even though we didn’t know him, even though he was a stranger, we felt this loss. And we sang “We Will Remember” because loss does not undo God’s faithfulness. Grief does not unravel God’s tapestry.

It’s still too big, this day. But I guess now I can also remember He is bigger. Bigger and still faithful.