Advent Week 2: Waiting for Peace

Because I’m bringing all these pieces home. I’m integrating what I once abandoned. I’m learning that peace is not what arrives after everything is fixed — peace is what meets me in the unraveling…

Healing is not linear. The world wants you to think it is — point A to point B to point C, predictable stages of grief or recovery, tidy arcs with closing chapters. But if you’re anything like me, healing is more like a descending spiral. I get a notion, an idea, a feeling tugging at the edges. I sit with it. I live my life. A week passes. Or a month. Or years. And then, suddenly, I’m back at the same thing again — only deeper. Another layer gives way. Another piece integrates.

And so, in a very real way, I’m always waiting for peace. Nothing is ever fully resolved. At least not entirely. Even when I think I’ve put something behind me, I return later and find there’s still a little hum of charge beneath the surface — softened, yes, but alive.

Since the divorce, I’ve been in a deeply integrated phase, excavating my whole life. I’ve watched movies and read books and listened to music from my childhood. And most recently, I’ve found myself stuck in the 90s. I’ve listened to almost nothing but Sheryl Crow for three months. My Apple Music Replay confirmed it — top artist, Sheryl Crow; top seven albums, Sheryl Crow. Something in me is healing through her. Something from that era of my life is humming along with those chords and that voice, being nursed back to fullness in ways I don’t yet understand.

I also rewatched Matilda—more times than I’ll share. The peace it brings me is almost surprising, except that it isn’t. I remember the summer it came out— 1996. I babysat my nephew Mick all summer, and every day we went to the Dollar Movie to see Matilda. He loved Matilda. I loved Miss Honey. It’s only recently that I learned Miss Honey is a lesbian icon. I was not the only one in the 90s who adored her. Now it makes perfect sense — a gentle, traumatized, loving woman living in a cottage, offering safety and scones and soft light. Of course I loved her. Of course she felt like a promise.

Revisiting all of this — the music, the films, the fragments of who I was — feels like reclaiming pieces of myself I didn’t know I left behind. I’m beginning to see that I was part of a larger awakening happening in that era, one that I didn’t have language for at the time.

There’s something stirring in me now, but I don’t know what it is yet.

My nonfiction book is like that too — started, restarted, paused, reimagined. It isn’t ready to take shape, so I’ve stopped forcing it. I’m letting my days unfold inside whatever mystery I’m moving through. On the other side, the shape of my life—and book—may look entirely different. Or not.

I don’t know where I am on the spiral. I don’t know how many layers of my own history I’m still gathering up. But I do know this: as we approach the longest night of the year, as winter deepens and darkness descends, I am more myself than I have ever been.

Because I’m bringing all these pieces home. I’m integrating what I once abandoned. I’m learning that peace is not what arrives after everything is fixed — peace is what meets me in the unraveling, in the mystery, in the dark.

“We do not obtain the most precious gifts by going in search of them but by waiting for them.” — Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace

This is why Advent is my favorite season, even when nothing feels settled. Even when the world does not look the way I thought it would. Advent reminds me that God descends into the darkness with us.

Peace isn’t the absence of struggle or pain or loss. Peace is the presence that holds us inside all of it.

In the waiting, be my peace.

“You will keep in perfect peace those whose minds are stayed on you.” — Isaiah 26:3