A lot can happen in three hundred and sixty days.  Yeah.  Random.  Where did those five days go (actually, did we leap this year?)?  Well, I am not counting a year, just the time between two different events.  It just so happens to be one year less five days.

First let me tell you something funny that happened tonight.  Something funny and miraculous.  I think I fell asleep at the wheel.  I seriously do not remember half an hour and the entire drive is in a fog to me.  But I remember being confused all of a sudden because, by combination of missed turns and wrong turns unknown, I ended up in Barrington.  After turning around twice to reorient myself southward, I was tasked with staying awake and not ending up in Naperville or Sugar Grove or Iowa.  Windows down.  Radio blasting.  Screaming.

And somehow that got the malnurished me home.  I then glance at my odometer (that little thingy that tracks how many miles you have gone) and my fuel gauge.  I always reset my odometer when I fill up for gas, so I was surprised to see a number well into the four hundreds.  My car’s puny gas tank and mediocre mileage usually have me filling up in the 360 range.  Yes, there is that number again.  I am basically out of gas, but God was somehow at work:  Not letting me crash yet still giving me enough juice to get home.   It just took a lot longer than I thought it would.

I took a drive three hundred and sixty days ago.  I was young, naive, foolhardy, you name it.  But I took the wheel and just started driving.  And… I think I fell asleep, because what I remember is all foggy.  Sometimes I do not even believe the actions and tragedies I read in my journal.  How I have basically injured everything from knees to elbows to biceps to teeth to my head.  How I fell in love… twice.  How I had the nerve to preach.

My Dad asks me how I can be so hard on myself when I have already experienced a lifetime of bearing fruit and receiving grace.  I hesitate, because only eternities of sin are revealed to me. 

I see that I kept driving.  I must have missed a turn or something.

I still write letters to Anna.  Every day.  The holidays hit me like a freight train:  Usually me Dad is the grinch, but this year, I was so sour.  I was sad that I never got to see her in the snow.  I never got to see the snowflakes draped through her hair or softly laying across her eyelashes.  I never got to throw a snowball at her or bump her into a drift or slip on ice with her.  The hole in my head is one thing… but this hole in my heart…  I sleep outside and wish the temperature to keep dropping.  I hope that I freeze to death so I can be with her.  But I know better.  I know I have survived colder, and that God is not done with this one, yet.

And that old friend… we do not even know each other’s names.  I just want to go up to her and say I was stupid.  I want to ask her not to throw me away like this.  I want to say that this is not the way things were supposed to be.  I want to say there is nothing standing in the way of us just forgetting and starting over.  But I can’t.  And I can think of three different reasons.  I might have given up; I might be so afraid; I might not believe in her anymore. 

I know that I am a witness to miracles and grace.  I believe in my heart that God has made some extreme error in my favor by giving me this life.  So why do I consider myself the saddest person on the planet when only three hundred and sixty days ago I was so joyful?  Why is every yes a no?  Why is it so foggy when it was as clear as crystal?  Why has my life pulled a 180?  When will I turn that other hundred and eighty degrees… and when will I find my way back home?