An Age of Grace

How does one talk about time? 

Let us begin with the representative clock, ticking incessantly across the white plane of its existence, endlessly the same. Or time could be a single thread, stretching back a million miles farther than we can see and unrolling inexorably into the unknown. But no thread, no life, is untangled from every other thread. If I am more honest, perhaps time is woven or knitted—threads knotted and looped, connected to and through so many of the others. An entire scarf may be knit from a single strand of yarn swerving the whole way from one side of the weave to another, crossing and recrossing, looped to itself, prone to unraveling. And as linear as time may seem to our instincts, memory and even memory loss will loop us around, tying us to the moments that came before in ways that change and morph with, well, time. 

I turned thirty this year. Involuntarily, the simple turning of the decade brought layers of memories, old images and ideas wheeling through my thoughts. They seemed unconnected, then gradually, I found most of them pierced through as with a needle, strung on a thread of grace and gentleness. 

When I was eight-ish years old, I wanted to change my name. Gianna seemed so unusual, so different. I didn’t want to feel unusual and different. I remember the moment that I finally spoke it out loud: summer, standing by the back door of the garage. There was the soft sound of crickets around us before I burst it out rebelliously to my mom in the damp dusk.

In their wisdom, my parents promised me that if I still wanted to change my name in ten years, I had full permission. Time did its work, and my name slipped its way from some strange outside thing into what it was meant to be; a part of myself. Gianna means “God is gracious.” I did not know at the tender age of eight how often I would need that knowledge stamped like a tattoo into my very identity.

Twenty-two years old. Another birthday, this one in the middle of a years-long battle with shame and self-doubt. Midwinter, mid-morning sickness. Time had surprised us with a pregnancy two months into marriage. The small apartment building smelled of the neighbor’s dog. I read through birthday wishes on Facebook, wondering how these people could love me. Fear’s work is to unravel—doubting myself, doubting I could be loved, doubting I could love well. 

Years later, the boy who was our sweet surprise is six. He watches as I pack for a weekend away, and his eyes fill. 

“Don’t leave yet, Mommy, I’ll be right back.”

I see him grab a piece of plain paper and a pale yellow crayon. Will I even be able to read what he writes? But it does not matter much. I load the car slowly, thinking of the notes I’ve packed in his school lunches, writing large letters and using only words he can read for himself. He runs after me as I walk to the car, and he’s waving the paper. “Don’t forget me this weekend!” 

I read it painstakingly that night, squinting to decipher the almost invisible letters beneath a yellow lamp just before bed. “I luv you soo much.” 

With that note, the thread of grace reaches back those seven years, to when I used to whisper to him before I ever saw him, when he was no more than a swell of promise and a lost appetite. I love you. The needle of memory pierces back to when I was eight, rebellious against my name of grace in the summer night, and then further. Thirty years ago, another mother whispers over a child. We’ll call her Gianna. I love you, Gianna. Grace embedded in my name; grace spoken to me and over me anytime anyone called my name. 

I have felt the fear so common to mothers and maybe all parents often since those first stirrings. Nauseated by the smell of wet dog, wondering if I was too broken and unlovable to love my own child and left in my fears for too long, this note reaches across the years. The paper and its yellow crayon words reassure me, and grace smooths out the wrinkles in the tapestry of time. 

I begin to recognize that I am not the only one weaving these strands together. The Lord knit this school-aged boy together just as He knit me, just as He knit our lives. In His hands, time bends back on itself, looping new stitches into the old ones, smoothing out the years with the winding thread of grace. 

Five years ago on a warm spring afternoon, I laid down on the couch to rest, battling another round of morning sickness. My two-year-old boy played quietly. I tried to keep my eyes open. When I looked up from the pillow next, there was yarn all across the floor—yarn that was still curled from where I’d knit it into the beginning of a baby blanket. I swooped down tired and dizzy, and looped the silver, cabled needles back through the stitches that were left, reclaiming what I could of the half-raveled blanket. 

This is the last image that comes to mind; the way I patiently remade the stitches he’d pulled out, twisting each strand back into place day by day until a whole blanket lay finished in my lap. This is the work that stretches across the years—the grace of time crossing gently back and forth, weaving new stitches more sure and tender than the ones they’ve grown out of. 

God has picked up the tangled strands of the hard and fearful things; the fears of motherhood and years of anxiety, the youthful questioning of identity—He has woven them together and it’s terrifyingly beautiful. Tangled skeins which the enemy meant to leave unraveled on the floor of the world, He has re-knit. He holds those years out to me in His scarred palms: “It is a gift. Take it.” I do; I take both the gift and a promise: if the past can be remade, so can the future.

The featured image, “Joy,” is courtesy of Ariel Lovewell and is used with her kind permission for Cultivating.

Gianna Soderstrom

Gianna Soderstrom is a contributing writer to Cultivating Oaks Press and the Anselm Society, and she serves as Assistant Director of the Anselm Society Arts Guild. Adventure-hearted, but also a connoisseur of cozy, book-ish evenings, she is delighted by coffee and cocoa but shockingly, not tea. She is equally fascinated and challenged by the myriad ways that small and steady faithfulness transform a strange place into a home. She is a writer, dreamer, wife to Grant, mama to E1 and E2, and more than the sum of her parts, just like you. Gianna writes here and everywhere else to mine hope out of our ordinary moments.