I’m not very good at hiding from my thoughts. They follow me like persistent relatives, always vying for a turn at the center of my attention. I think about the future, about story ideas, about death. How could everything come from nothing? Why does Snoop eat grass even when not hungry? Nothing is off limits. Possibly a half dozen times in a given evening I’ll catch Tommy staring at me, mouth turned down at the corners, before he asks, “Are you okay?” 

“Just thinking,” I’ll say. 

I don’t know what I look like when thinking but apparently its cause for consternation. Tommy usually seems amused or concerned, as if he found me in the backyard considering a packet of cigarettes. 

When I became upset as a child I would slip out of the house and clamber to the top of the forest. Sit on a fallen tree trunk with my knees against my chest and wait for the tears to cool and my thoughts to rearrange themselves into an order I could endure.

In college I’d go to the rec center and shoot basketball until my lungs ached and my thoughts finally took a water break. Now as an adult, I feel cut off from both forest and basketball hoop and so I’m here, writing.

Life doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t seem to be logical, certainly not rational. The ideas that should stretch ahead with the precision of a line of dominoes don’t fall into place. There was one off, something you didn’t consider, couldn’t consider. These days my thoughts trend less towards the philosophical and more towards the introspective. I’m distracted by grief and disappointment. Frustrated with myself and my inadequacy, the world I long for as slippery as the silt at the bottom of a pond.

Maybe your thoughts go there too. You’ve lost the ones you really loved. You feel like you’ve failed, your body or your mind betraying you. Or you’re overwhelmed by the pressures of existence, the expectations we feel defined for us without ever having agreed to them. 

As I write I’m sitting outside with a mug of blueberry tea. A storm is coming. The clouds are moving quickly, dark and persistent. Not evil, but not benign either. Snoop is laying in the grass and every few minutes he lifts a quivering nose to the wind, as if he’s trying to assess how soon until the rain arrives. I envy his unconcern, his willingness to just accept this moment for what it is and not wish for something more.

Those monstrous clouds so far above me. The wind in the pine trees. The sun that is falling from view, literally millions of miles away. They all remind me of my smallness. That I am here and my two eyes can only see so much. On the other side of the world another person sips tea and thinks. Strange to realize that God sees both of us in the same instant, His view unhindered by mountains and oceans and the depth of human emotions.

It’s frustrating to have a limited perspective. Exhausting to think and think and never understand. 

Some people love to say, “Everything happens for a reason,” and others hate it. I can understand both – the desire for meaning and the longing not to sound trite. But we can’t explain away the unexplainable with five words, especially because we often never feel the reason. Maybe we catch glimpses. Pick up ideas of how this meant this and that meant that, but so often, we’re left in the darkness. Left hoping that all of this wasn’t for nothing. 

And it makes us angry. We hate thinking and never arriving at a conclusion, the same thoughts spinning in endless circles like a pinwheel caught in a storm. 

One of the first Bible verses I probably memorized as a six-year-old trying to please my mother was Romans 8:28 – “And we know that all things work together for good to those who love God, to those who are the called according to His purpose.”

While it’s honestly impossible to imagine all of the horrendous pieces of human existence – the wars and atrocities and hatred – coming together like a Charles Dickens novel, I think the alternative is worse. To think that God can’t use it. That somehow He’s inadequate, and my two-eyed perspective is as good as it’s going to get – both for the seemingly insignificant pain of my own life and for the wrongs of the entire world. 

Which brings me back to thinking. Have you ever thought about life and nature being one beautiful analogy? We think the life cycle of a flower is only about the flower when it actually provides a glimpse into the greater realities we don’t understand. There are secrets we grasp implicitly without explicit expression.

A snowflake melts in your hair and evaporates and condenses and falls again for someone else. The leaves on a tree breathe in carbon dioxide and give us oxygen. Matter neither created nor destroyed, only changing form. Nothing ever truly lost. A whole world created and sustained, every atom spinning, asking for us to understand. 

There are more than a hundred million cells in your eye enabling you to see the silver of the moon, the paper-thin wings of a butterfly, a child’s smile. It’s there. God saying something through science, quiet and urgent. The word on the tip of your tongue. The understanding at the edge of your mind. The words are there on the page but they’re blurry and you can’t quite make them out.

I don’t think the rain is coming tonight. The sky grows darker but it’s the purple shade of impending night. I hear and see and feel all of these things, and I want to understand. I want to know how each piece fits together. But I think tonight it’ll have to be enough to just know that they do fit. That they have been given reasons.

And while it’s frustrating to hunt for meaning like one might search for an owl in a dark forest, tonight I will just rest, content to hear the rustle of its wings, the gentle hoot hoot. To sense that it is there even without seeing it. 

Go to sleep, Thoughts. We can argue tomorrow.