I'll never forget the feeling of pulling out of our driveway on Christmas Eve 2019, leaving behind our 2 year old daughter Emery Grace with all of my wife's siblings and my mother in law as they assembled around a beautiful bountiful meal ready to be consumed. My wife and I were on our way to spend the night and the holiday in the hospital.
Jess's water had broken much to the active disbelief of our gathered relatives, minutes after getting home from Christmas Eve service. Our new daughter wasn't due to make her debut for another two weeks but apparently she had heard rumblings of the approaching merriment of the holiday and wanted out.
Excitement, panic, and hunger that was really 'hanger' in its purest form pervaded in the both of us, as the Christmas dinner we'd been looking forward to all day fading away in the rear view.
But that was small potatoes in the grand scheme of things.
Within the next six hours, we'd welcome our second healthy daughter, at precisely 12:04am on Christmas Day. What followed in the days after was one of the most special and surreal holiday times one could imagine, with the entire host of our immediate families from in and out of town being able to welcome Reese Holloway Jones to the world.
I took paternity leave for the first couple weeks of the new year, and by late January we slowly fell into the new normal of life with two kids. (Thankfully, Reese was then and remains an absolute champion sleeper, so that helped matters.)
I remember being in a sort of crazed, energized fervor coming off of the anything but normal Christmas season. On my first day back to work as Creative Director at Impact Church in Lowell, MI I started arranging the rock orchestra arrangement of Handel's Messiah I had slated for Christmas of 2020 as our holiday service offering that year.
I felt fresh wind in my sails coming off the heels of welcoming new life to the world. Our version of Handel's Messiah enmeshed with other original compositions and shredding guitar covers from some of my favorite video games soundtracks of yesteryear was to be the kind of unexpected unparalleled experience I'd dreamt of, and it was going to happen in in eleven months.
I continued on this way for a good few weeks through the month of February while savoring moments with our newly minted family of four between. Then we went on vacation and got some sun the first week of March 2020.
And when we returned, the world was locked down.
I have admittedly grown weary of hearing from others and even out of my mouth how much things have changed since Covid. How hard everything was through that time, and all the other conversations birthed out of such national and worldwide tumult. I want to move on and move forward and not live in the sea of societal excuses that flood our culture now.
That said, there is no denying that it shook all foundations everywhere to their very core. Looking back upon such shattered ground often offers the best perspective--especially concerning times when doing just about anything felt akin to drawing blood from a stone.
As the confusion set in and one week for the eradication of this new disease turned into weeks and months, there was a part of me that didn't know what to do with myself. With all my schemes and plans. With all the momentum that was suddenly wrenched away, I felt like a 1970 Dodge Challenger doing 90mph on the highway, whose engine was suddenly wrenched from the chasis by some giant malevolent magnet in the sky, interested only in combustion cylinders.
Somehow though, I didn't crash. The RPMs lowered and the wheels slowed on a straightaway with no traffic to collide into. (Literally and figuratively during that time.)
All of the sudden my paternity leave resumed, and I got to spend sweet time with our infant and Jess and Emery. Weeks and months that would have never been afforded me otherwise. Looking back offers memories that are indeed a gift from on high.
In short, there was honey in the immovable rock that was the sudden onset of a global pandemic.
How many times in life do we bemoan our circumstances, deflate instantly into defeatism and despair of our very existence in the face of what lies in our path? It's easy to feel like the wily coyote, boulders plummeting from some teetering plateau above to squash your plans for the minuscule myopic schemes they are. If you are not crushed, those geologic behemoths now block your happy way on a road previously believed to have been paved for you to keep chasing that roadrunner, always just out of your grasp.
But what if there's a way to press in and to chip away and to break through that stone? All the more, what if in so doing you get the core of the thing--the once molten heart--and discover the sweet amber of honey glistening within. It is sweet to the taste and sustains you, energizes you enough to be able to press through the density of the beast. It offers provision that grants you vision to see the way out, the one you didn't see until now. The one that gives hope despite your already calloused, cracked and bloodied hands, worn from chipping away at the stone with any tool available to you. And sometimes that's only your bare knuckles, down to the bone and marrow.
Eventually you can break through to the other side. When you do, the road ahead is clear.
For how long? Who can say?
Remember that big Christmas production of Handel's Messiah infused with all the shredding guitars and a stellar light show and all the trappings Trans Siberian Orchestra laden Christmas dreams are made of? There was a big fat boulder dropped on its head, and its name was Fall Surge 2020. The pandemic came back swinging and just like that, it was cancelled. (More like postponed to the following year, but I wanted to wallow so cancelled and wasted and destroyed felt better to my commiserating soul.)
It didn't take long for something to become crystal clear to me though, and that is this:
Provision, goodness and sweetness unparalleled are found right in the middle of the heaviest, most difficult circumstances. That golden ambrosia provided you in the midst of it can carry you for a long time, if only you can commit to the deepest parts of your memory it's taste, and recall it from the wells of your insular cortex time and again to to be re-savored. I look back upon those quiet days and weeks spent with my family in the cold heart of the pandemic through the golden tinted lenses of caramelized amber, offered to me in the core of that that stone.
Whatever shape it takes, you do not draw blood from that stone in your path, for it cannot bleed. But you will shed your own blood while breaking through it, breaking it down through your pain. Your blood will be upon the shattered remnants. Your mark of scarlet left behind to tell your tale.
More important though is that taste of sweet nectar it provided you along the way, lingering still upon your lips and upon your tongue if you let it. It bids you tell of its finding, so that others might find honey in the rocks which inevitably fall along this wearied, hopeful path.
"But you would be fed with the finest of wheat;
with honey from the rock I would satisfy you."
- Psalm 81: 16
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