Not every journey is planned

​Many of you know that behind the scenes I am working on a writing project. In many ways, the story that project tells began 16 years ago today. Recently, I wrote this entry in the story. It is worth sharing today.

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I remember his birth as powerfully as if it was my own. In many ways, it was.

She told me once, when Elliott was born you went on your own journey. And you didn't invite anyone to go along with you.

I look back and see truth in that. It's not like I planned a vacation and decided I didn't want any company. I just think it's possible to get well into a journey before you realize you are on one. You wake up one day and you're miles down the road, all alone, without a clue as to where you are and how you got there and from where you've come.

Not every journey is planned. Perhaps, very few of them are.

It was the middle of the afternoon on December 18th, 2006. I looked into his incubator in the NICU at Pitt Memorial Hospital in North Carolina. There was an older nurse standing next to me and she said, "there he is."

And indeed, there he was. Elliott Thomas Cartwright. My first born.

I stuck my hand through a hole in the incubator. Our eyes locked as he saw it coming. There is no other microscopic second in time that I remember with great clarity; I am writing this book about memories I recall with widely varying levels of clarity. That's the nature of memories. Time and experience can disrupt them and reconfigure them.

But that second - that stare - I remember it as if it's happening once again. Right now.

There was this feeling. And there was the voice.

The voice said, "now you know how I feel about you every single second of every single day of your life."

The voice was God. People ask when I tell that story, did you really hear God? And what they are really wondering is, are you suggesting you heard God's actual voice? Did you hear the kind of sounds one hears when they talk to one another about life over coffee at their local Starbucks?

No. I didn't. If I had heard a voice I could hear at Starbucks, then I don't think I would have considered it the voice of God.

All I know is that I heard it. And in the moment of feeling an unimaginable love for another human being, I heard a voice that made me feel an unimaginable love for myself. It wasn't like the love I felt for that child; it was something much stronger. It cut through decades of guilt and shame and hurt and anger and it said you are lovable.

There is something very powerful about feeling lovable for the first time. I wonder if that baby in the incubator was feeling that as we stared at one another.

Was he feeling love?

I didn't know it then, but the voice of God was inviting me on a healing journey. I didn't know it then, but I accepted God's invitation. I accepted the chance to heal my relationship with humanity, and with God.

I don't think I ever knew that humans could heal together. If I knew it, I had never experienced it. Maybe that's why I traveled the journey alone. Maybe that's why it would be a decade into the journey before I discovered that humans can not only heal together, but that's one of their greatest strengths.

A strength gifted to us by the God who wants us to be constant reminders to one another that He feels unimaginable love for us every single second of every single day. He created us - humans - specifically for that reminder. Healing may be the official voice of that reminder.

The reminder shows up in an incubator, but along the way healing often loses its voice and it is hurting that takes over the conversation. Hurting one another.

But it is never too late. That's the reminder. It is never too late to show up and love one another back together again.

I've discovered that on this healing journey. A journey that began sixteen years ago. A journey that many days feels more beginning than end. More broken than fixed. More wrong than right.

But I am forever grateful for the reminder that showed up as a baby in an incubator. Baby Elliott. The constant voice and constant reminder that we can love one another back together again. I can still feel that looking into that baby's eyes.

And more than ever, I am thankful for the baby in a manger. The baby who showed up to remind us that there is no more powerful way to love each other back together again than forever echoing to one another the voice of the God who never stops saying, oh how I see your beauty.

And oh how I love you....

Every single second of every single day.