That Sounds Fun by Annie F. DownsSample

DAY 2

What We’ve Lost Can Be Found

Job 8:21; Psalm 51:12; Matthew 7:7; Luke 6:21

We need a way to find hope, to believe what we have lost can be found. I think it can. But only if we go where our stories ask us to go. We cannot be afraid here—or at least, we cannot let the fear win. Let’s all be brave, right? 

When I first blinked back to that memory of my childhood, that day when my little legs were crisscrossed on the cool cement, I wondered why it had been so long since I felt that feeling. It zipped across my memory while I sat on a friend’s porch, and for a split second my childhood was so close. 

There’s something to those moments, something worth paying attention to. If you have eyes for providence, you will always see it. If you look for God’s movement in your daily life, you will see Him. 

One of the kindest things I’ve done for myself in the last decade is learn to pay attention to myself without judgment. When memories like that come to the front of my brain, I notice. They matter. They aren’t something to be squashed or ignored. As soon as that front porch memory ran through my mind and changed my heart and affected my stomach, I realized I felt the loss of it.

We may not have the words, or the exact knowledge of what those moments bring up, but we know something feels off. Even though we haven’t been to Eden as it once was, we feel the loss and assume the feeling of emptiness it brings is a companion for life on Earth.

If we have to walk into our pain on the way to Eden, then so be it. Let’s rebuild a foundation that used to exist just under our feet, so we can add layer upon layer of the good stuff, the heartbeats, the loud laughs, the tears of joy. Because that sounds fun to me.

When you think of joys you have lost, what keeps you from trying to reclaim them?