Here is the world.

Beautiful and terrible things will happen.

Don’t be afraid.

• Frederick Buechner

I live in a farmhouse that is over one hundred years old.

Things fall apart.  Ancient dirt rises from the splintery wooden floors.

What starts out as white, seldom stays white.

But in this dusty home abide five of the most interesting humans I have ever known.

There is a six-year-old with his filthy boy feet resting right on top of my clean pillow.

He stops me, mid-sentence, all the day long to profess his love for me.  Not even an hour usually passes without kisses and hugs and back pats from my Wilde Fox.

Rainy weather without end and errands no one wants to take breeds sibling unpleasantness and grouchy attitudes for what feels like the absolute entire day.

Yet, this morning I was waking up the kids with a song when Mosely and Piper quietly and sleepily, in sweet girl voices, joined me in singing —-

The sun comes up, it’s a new day dawning.

It’s time to sing your song again.

Whatever may pass, and whatever lies before me,

Let me be singing when the evening comes.

The suburban has 258,000 miles on it and it constantly smells of kids dirty feet and wet dog.

But in that maroon, sticker-laden ride we listen to great stories as a family that are shaping our collective memories and our world view.  Stories that entrance us all – like our most recent, Into the Woods, that’s inspired Otto and Piper to color together for hours as they recreate the houses of the characters in the book – Dr. DeWilde and Bee Bumble.

Our sweet Ryder is sporting a gigantic scar seven or more inches long and he is sequestered in a giant kennel until December.  We have to walk him every few hours and he can’t be allowed to run (a four month old puppy!) for ten more weeks.

The kids have taken incredible care of him, taking shifts and turns of walking him on his leash for bathroom breaks and keeping him company in the laundry room.  I’ll find a kid curled up in the dog kennel with him, reading a novel or petting the lion-looking gentle giant of a canine.

It’s the beautiful and the terrible.

It happens in between the rising and the setting of the sun, in the very every day parts of living and breathing and trying to be a human in a really hard world.

It’s the understanding and the not understanding the complexities of what we are asked to do and what we are asked to endure and what we are asked to sit through with the people we love and the people we don’t even know and the people we thought we knew.

The beautiful and the terrible.

It will rip you up and break you down and build you up and trick your brain and hurt your heart and heal your wounds and it’s everything you think you know and everything you know you don’t and at the end of the day it leaves you a little breathless and a little more and a little less.

Here is the world.

Beautiful and terrible things will happen.

Don’t be afraid.

• Frederick Buechner