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There is a kind of year you don’t see coming. You only recognize it in the rearview.

Sandpaper doesn’t do its work gently. It catches. It drags. It creates friction by design – because friction is the only thing that removes what doesn’t belong. I’ve been thinking about that a lot this year – standing on this property at daybreak, coffee going cold in my hand, watching the light come through the 150+ year old oaks and wondering how many women reading this are in the middle of their own sandpaper season and haven’t yet found a name for it.

This is mine.

The Year That Refused to Be Small

The last twelve months handed our family – and I mean our whole family, children included – more than one household should reasonably absorb in sequence. I won’t name everything. Some of it isn’t mine alone to tell, and some of it is still too close to the bone to lay out in full. What I can say is that it included the kind of accusation that makes you question what is real, the kind of medical scare that reorganizes your priorities in a single afternoon, the kind of loss that doesn’t have a category, and the kind of humility that requires you to receive help when everything in you would rather be the one giving it. And through all of it, the work continued – because the work doesn’t pause just because your heart is full of something else.

I’m not telling you this for sympathy. I’m telling you because there is a particular loneliness that comes from carrying something heavy in public – from watching your life look complicated from the outside while holding it together on the inside, and quietly wondering if anyone else has ever stood in exactly this field.

Some of you have.

What the Land Kept Saying

I didn’t go looking for signs. I was doing something ordinary when I looked out the window and stopped. There was a fawn tucked into the lantana beside the birdbath. Spotted. Still. Looking back at me with the kind of calm that has no idea what our week had been.

Catholics have a name for this. The sacramental imagination – the understanding that the physical world is not separate from the spiritual one, that matter carries meaning, that creation speaks if you learn to listen. The fawn didn’t show up because I asked for a sign. But she showed up when I needed one. I’ve stopped splitting that hair too finely.

In 2022, a doe gave birth to twins on this property. I called the kids over to watch – what a miracle, we rejoiced. Then, just as quickly as they arrived, we lost them both to predators. In the middle of a torrential downpour. Momma led me to their bodies. She looked defeated and I shed more tears than I care to admit. I knew once she showed me the second baby, the moment she walked off, I’d really have no way of knowing her apart from the other does that flock to our property. I have a fierce heart for babies – all babies.

But I digress.

This spring, she came back – or one of them did, the way you can never quite be sure but somehow always know. And she brought two, or so we thought. Until we saw three.

She didn’t come back broken. She came back with more than she lost. And the way she moves through this land now – momma is rarely with them, because she trusts the land enough to leave them in it. Anyone who has raised children knows exactly what that is. That is the slow, deliberate work of teaching something young that the world will hold it.

She came back. She brought three. The land that held the loss is the same land holding the return. That’s the whole sermon.

The Turkey, the Cardinal, and the Ones Who Just Come to Drink

And then there was the turkey.

He is not majestic. He has the face of someone who has been to a lot of meetings and found all of them unnecessary (this could have been an email). He showed up during one of the worst weeks of the year and stood in the middle of the lawn with the energy of a man who has reviewed the situation and found it unimpressive. I laughed for the first time in days.

God uses the absurd. He always has – a burning bush, a corrected donkey, a fisherman falling out of a boat toward the person he loved. The holy arrives sideways sometimes. The thing that makes you laugh is also the thing that loosens the knot in your chest just enough to breathe again. The turkey has become, in my private theology, a small patron saint of equanimity.

Then there are the quieter ones – the Black-crested Titmouse and the cardinal at the fountain. One arrives without announcement. The other arrives in red and stays long enough to make sure you saw him.

There is a tradition – not doctrine, but the kind of thing passed quietly between grieving people who needed something to hold – that cardinals carry the presence of those we’ve lost. The Church doesn’t teach it and I won’t pretend otherwise. But I won’t dismiss what happens in me when he lands on that fountain in the middle of a hard week. The theology I can offer is this: God is not limited in what He uses to bring comfort. And consolation, when it comes, is real. We have lost three babies we will meet in heaven. I have stood at that window and not needed to resolve what it means. I have only needed to receive it.

Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they?
– Matthew 6:26

They come because the water is running and they are alive and that is reason enough. There were days this year when that was the entire sermon I could receive.

Job, Abraham, and the Last Possible Moment

If you want a biblical companion for the year that refuses to be small, Job is your man. He lost everything in a sequence so brutal the text reads like someone making a point. His friends showed up to explain it – surely he had sinned, surely this was consequence wearing the clothes of calamity. The ancient version of “everything happens for a reason,” delivered with confidence and zero comfort. Job didn’t buy it. He argued with God directly, sat in the ashes and demanded an audience – and what he got wasn’t an explanation. What he got was the voice from the whirlwind.

Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?
– Job 38:4

Not an answer. Something better – a reorientation. Your suffering exists inside something larger than you can see from where you’re standing. The scope isn’t cruelty. It’s scale.

Then there’s Abraham on the mountain. Carrying the wood, the knife, the impossible instruction. I’ve given birth eight times, and there is a moment in labor every mother reading this knows – where you are completely done, no way back, no way out but through, and the voices around you sound like they’re coming from another room. Your body has surrendered. Your mind is catching up. That is as close as I can come to how Abraham must have felt with the knife already raised – feeling the loss and the surrender simultaneously, knowing there is no version of this where you don’t go all the way through.

And that is exactly when the angel speaks. Not before. At the precise moment of full surrender. The ram was already there, caught in the thicket. It had been there the whole time. Abraham just couldn’t see it yet.

And neither could I.

When Someone Lies About Who You Are

There is a particular assault that comes with being falsely accused. Not the mechanics of it – the filings, the deadlines, the responses, the calendar entries that land like stones. Those are (eventually) manageable. What is not manageable is what happens to your sense of self when someone puts your name on a document that describes you in language you do not recognize.

You know it isn’t true. And yet.

The enemy doesn’t need you to believe the lie completely. He just needs you to hold it long enough to lose your footing – to spend five minutes in the middle of the night wondering if maybe you are the person they are describing, if that version of you is somehow more real than the one your husband knows, the one your children grew up with, the one that has shown up at Mass and built something from nothing for fourteen years and loved imperfectly but without pretending otherwise.

That is satan’s handiwork. Not the accusation itself – but the whisper underneath it. What if they’re right about you?

Here is what I have learned: you cannot answer that question alone. The people who knew you before the accusation – who hold the longer record, who remember who you were before someone decided to tell a different story – they are not peripheral to your defense. They are essential to it. Go to those people. Let them speak. Choose, actively, daily, as an act of spiritual discipline, to believe the witnesses who have actually been present for your life.

The father of lies has one move. He names you wrong and waits to see if you’ll answer to it.

Don’t answer to it.

You are my servant, I have chosen you and not rejected you.
– Isaiah 41:9 

What the Property Has Been Saying All Year

I have come to understand that this land was never just land to us. It was a place where God kept showing up – in a fawn tucked into the lantana, in a doe who came back with three, in a turkey who has seen worse and found it unimpressive, in a cardinal who arrives in red and a titmouse who arrives quietly, both just coming to drink.

He showed up in the hard things too. In the friend who texted out of nowhere to say “I am praying for you – you’ve been on my heart.” In the unexpected door that opened when we’d stopped hoping it was still there. In the Eucharist – the only reliable constant. Every trial I walked through this year, I walked to Mass first. Not because I always felt like it. Because He is there whether I feel like it or not, and that is what sacraments are – anchors that don’t depend on the weather of my interior life.

A house does not a home make. We have tried to be faithful stewards of what God placed here – to notice it, protect it, refuse to take it for granted on the ordinary Tuesday when everything is hard and the light comes through the oaks anyway and a titmouse lands three feet away and doesn’t flinch. The beauty here is not ours. We did not have to go looking for Him. He was already here, in the home we chose to make from this house.

Whatever you are carrying right now – the trial you didn’t ask for, the grief that has no good explanation, the lie someone is telling about who you are, the year that refuses to be small – the land is still talking. Creation is still speaking. The ram is already caught in the thicket.

You just can’t see it yet.

He who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion
until the day of Christ Jesus.
– Philippians 1:6

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