Something More

9pm and snow had been falling since late afternoon. Dark, except for a clouded moon and street lights. Quiet. The air completely crystal clear. Everything and nothing at all could be heard and felt all at once in the sort of silent stillness enveloping me and the dog and a winter’s night. I felt my heart give way to strange, brief, restorative peace.

And I remembered–there is always something more.

****

8am and though the snow ceased hours before, a deep cold had settled in over the wee hours of a long night, the dog and I both bracing against it as we set out for a quick walk. The gray of last night’s snowy sky had given way to the bluest of Kentucky skies, and sun so bright I immediately regretted forgoing sunglasses. Between work–at-home and school-at-home, the neighborhood was mostly still sleepy, the sidewalks and yards untouched, and within seconds I could see it–millions and millions of tiny diamond-sparkles, just where the sun hit the snow, the whole length of my street dazzled, as if Tinkerbell had set loose her own army of tiny fairy lights against the darkness of this COVID winter.

And I remembered–there is always something more.

****

Something more than COVID-forced isolation.

Something more than the internet blinking in and out just exactly when she has 8th grade Algebra and I have a Zoom meeting.

Something more than the hatred of those not like us and the way social media breeds contempt and loathing.

Something more than the selfishness. Something more than fear. Something more than grief.

Something more than toilet paper hoarding and vaccine anxiety and missing the warm grace of being folded into the arms of your most beloved people.

Something more than missing my voice joining hundreds of others in prayers I know as well as my own skin on a Sunday morning.

Something more than longing for drinks with my best girls and aching to pack a bag and travel to anywhere but here.

Something more than every single awful thing that has made the last twelve months of any and everyone’s existence so inexplicably difficult.

There is always something more.

In between silent nights and sunlit mornings, in between hasty breakfasts and takeout again because you didn’t plan well, in between the monotony of endless days at home and the blessing of having that home, in between the pain of a world on fire and the grace of every moment some blessed bit of water lessens the flames, in between the pain of everything we’ve lost and the possibility of what we might do better on the other side, in between our broken hearts and the very things that put them back together…

…there is something more.

Call it mercy. Call it miracle. Call it the unending and incomparable love of a God who spoke us into being and has not yet left us to be entirely destroyed…

…there is something more.

And because there is something more, we know for sure that all is not lost and we are never alone.

Something more keeps us, still.