Accumulating Shadows

Just as you share in our sufferings, so also you share in our comfort.

—2 Corinthians 1:7

If you stay anywhere long enough, it will start to accumulate some shadows. And those shadows make it no less beautiful. It makes it something like home. It anchors you there in ways that a steady diet of pleasantness never will. I remember sitting on the steps of the blue house in South Haven when a friend told me her marriage was ending. One year, when a friend and her kids arrived, while our kids yelped and hugged, my friend cried with me on the porch, caught off guard by the memory of announcing her pregnancy the year before, only to have it end in miscarriage weeks later.

One summer I sat with a friend while she sobbed about a breakup, and on that same porch, I had one of the hardest conversations of my life with another friend. We looked out at the street, not at each other, sitting shoulder to shoulder as I told her that I thought her drinking had gone too far, and that something big had to change. Life unfolding, rich and broken and beautiful and heartbreaking, in that town, under those trees, along that stretch of beach, on that porch.