Once upon a time, my love for God was a vibrant, shining thing.

After growing up in a Taiwanese immigrant home as a rational-empiricist atheist, I became a Christian as a high school senior. The next fifteen years or so of my Christian life were largely “up and to the right,” as they say — growing in my knowledge of God, my experience of his love and presence.

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I have just spent the last four weeks of school teaching ten-year-olds how to add and subtract fractions. This math skill strikes fear in the hearts of students and teachers alike with good reason; it is rife with opportunities to make a tiny error and mess everything up. My group this time struggled mightily with the concepts, and I found myself saying over and over, “You have to slow down and pay attention. There’s a lot going on in these problems, and you can only do one step at a time. Pay attention. Watch me. Let’s do the first step together. I know you can do this hard thing.” Slowly their skills improved, and I loved watching them gain independence and confidence as they tackled each new fraction aspect. I was so proud of them.

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I am a caregiver. I come by this naturally since I am a “2” on the Enneagram personality profile: The Helper. I am also a caregiver in fact, providing daily care to my ex-husband who has lived with me since his original cancer surgery three years ago. One might imagine the wide range of emotions I have experienced in this role, as well as the times I have had to put his needs ahead of my own. Have I always done this with grace and with a peaceful heart? Hardly.

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In Mark Twain’s novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Huck wrestles through a moral dilemma about demonstrating true friendship to a stigmatized person of his day — a man who bore a dual stigma of being black in a racist society and enslaved in an exploitative one. To help his friend Jim escape meant violating not only human law, but also divine law as it had been interpreted in that society, because to help a slave escape meant stealing property from his or her owner. Not only did Huck worry about God and about going to hell for obeying the impulse of his heart, but he also worried about what people would think of him. “It would get all around that Huck Finn helped a negro to get his freedom; and if I was e’er to see anybody from that town again I’d be ready to get down and lick his boots for shame.”  But such worries did not prevent him from doing what he knew to be right.

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We started 2017 knowing we were pregnant, but had no way to grasp what that would mean. We started the year with one definition of what love was and are ending it with another. With that in mind, this is what being new parents has meant for us and our understanding of love.

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I’ve spent my whole life in church (Sunday school, flannelgraphs and all), and it was good — until it wasn’t. It was fine when I was little and didn’t pay attention to all the things women weren’t allowed to do. But then later, through a series of events, everything imploded and my perception of being made in the image of God was shattered. It started to seem like men were more the image of God than women were. And it seemed like God loved women just a little less.

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Love is the basis of every great story, every heartfelt song. It’s a great money-maker for Hershey’s and Hallmark every February. It is often portrayed as simple, romantic, beautiful.

I’ve never been very good at simple, romantic, or beautiful. I really wish I was. I’ve never been a gambler either, until suddenly I was.

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Here is an old story about joy. I promise it is about joy, but it may not seem so for a bit here. I would have been 23 when this whole thing went down. It was at the end of my time in college. I was housemates with three beautiful girlfriends. We had lived together in this crummy old house, off campus for two years, and had been close friends for four. In the last six months of living there, all three of them got engaged. In addition, three other very close friends also got engaged. I was MISERABLE. There was nothing I wanted more than to end my years in college with a wedding. My own wedding.

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First thing I think of when the subject of joy comes up is my grandchildren. When they are very young, falling asleep on my chest. As they get older, coming in the front door, running to me with a big smile, for a hug, or watching them playing together, with one another, when we all get together. That is a joy that warms the heart, joy of the most natural sort.

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The doctor led me into a tiny room off the nursery at the Chicago hospital where our second daughter, Amber, was born. A sad-faced nurse entered and put the very still little baby in my arms.

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So, joy is one of those ubiquitous terms we hear in church. People talk about it, claim its importance, sing songs about it, and some people have it down in their heart, or so they say. The problem comes in when we never really get a good explanation of what exactly joy is. It’s almost like a secondary trait. If you do x, then you’ll experience joy. If joy is in your life, then y will happen. Joy seems to almost always be described in its relationship to something else.

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I'll be honest, this has been hard for me to write. 2017 has been a rough year for many, including me, so that the very idea of peace feels like a pipe dream. The concept of peace is on my mind a lot, but what that looks like changes day to day. Some days, the peace I want is nothing more than some peace and quiet — a negative peace that is just the absence of conflict. To just tune it all out and take care of myself.

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Knowing that God set this trip to Puerto Rico in motion gave me peace. The timing was perfect. I had just finished a two-month commitment to do extra help with our young granddaughter. Three days of great training for emergency disaster relief with Salvation Army were finished the last weekend in October. I was able to use the two-day course in Emotional and Spiritual First Aid so often on the trip.

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As far back as childhood, my most fear-filled moments have always come in the dead of night. I remember watching The Wizard of Oz as a child of perhaps 7, and that night becoming Dorothy, swirling in a dream vortex of monkeys, a wicked witch, and my home uprooted and falling apart at the seams. I made a bed on my parents’ bedroom floor, and didn’t sleep alone for at least the next 12 months. This was when I started memorizing scripture. Proverbs 3:5-6 was my midnight mantra when I was awake with no company. I believe that in those moments of earnest silence, I began to know God.

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As someone who resonates highly with Enneagram type Nine, “the peaceful type”, peace has always been important to me. But what exactly do we mean when we say the word “peace”? As with many words in the lovely English language, the nuances are vast. Peace of mind. World peace. Justices of the peace. Rest in peace. Peace treaty. Peace and quiet. Peace offering. At peace.

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