I love a good conversion story.  My neighbor told me hers one chilly October afternoon, while we huddled on her front porch and watched our kids scoop the dirt with miniature shovels.

I’m slow to recognize patterns, but I’d realized that routines had shifted at her house; her husband’s truck hadn’t been parked in the drive in ages.  But I hadn’t heard anything straight from the source yet.

That October day she told me how late one night–just a few months before–she’d rushed her daughter off to bed and fled to the kitchen–the furthest room in the small house from where her little girl slept.  It had only just dawned on her that her husband was cheating on her, but he didn’t yet know she knew.  So she put on her favorite Sara Groves album–a gift from a friend–and sat down on the cold tile and cried.

The album was Past the Wishing, and the 7th track is Awakening:

…I’ve known for quite a while that I am not whole
I’ve remembered the body and the mind, but dissected the soul
Now something inside is awakening
Like a dream I once had and forgot
And it’s something I’m scared of and something I don’t want to stop…

And as Sara Groves sang, she felt Jesus come into the kitchen and sit down beside her on the kitchen floor and she just knew.  Her marriage sucked and her life was a mess but God loved her and he was asking her to follow him.

My neighbor was afraid I’d think she was crazy.  Of course I didn’t.  I’d been there, too.

I listened to her sadly joyful story and thought this is what it’s all about–God entering the wrecks of our broken lives and meeting us there on the cold kitchen floor–and instantly felt embarrassed about the faith questions I had been wrestling with of late:  helping my introverted kids cope with children’s ministry, finding my place in the church as a woman of God, staying focused on Jesus throughout the day and not just at 6:00 a.m.  These struggles seemed so small compared to my neighbor’s finding God on the kitchen floor.

Later that night, after I’d put my own kids to bed, I turned on Awakening in honor of my neighbor.

The divorce wasn’t final; she was still fighting it, but she’d probably lose.  I wondered what she was going to do next.

Next.

And it hit me:  there is a time for crying on the kitchen floor, waiting for God to come sit with us on the cold tile. But there is a time when we have to get up off the floor, and move on out of the kitchen, and figure out where to go next.

Those questions I’d been wrestling with–the ones that seemed so insignificant a few hours before–I knew they had to be explored.  I’ve done my time on the kitchen floor, but now I’m moving forward–expectantly–to figure out where to go from here.

This is my space to do it.

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photo credit: magro_kr