[Pictured: Me at a low-point in 2020.]

Anyone who would cite Job or try to compare themselves would be deserving of the ensuing eye rolls, but throughout the last week I've kept thinking of the line "the Lord blessed the latter end of Job more than his beginning". I kept waking up overwhelmed with gratitude and just praying a silent, repeated thank you. It was a quiet week, but I think it was the best of my life.

In the early months of the pandemic, I deleted my social media because I didn't have anything left to share. My seventeen-year marriage had met its catastrophic end; I'd left the charming little country house I'd called home for a decade in favor of a run-down apartment in the shadow of a feed mill; my job had joined a few others on the chopping block as COVID wrecked the college's budget.

And now here I found myself, waking in an apartment overlooking one of my favorite blocks in Manhattan, its bedrooms occupied by a pair of sons that think I hang the moon. I made decisions, good and bad and most all of them reckless, that contributed to this, and plenty that should have precluded it. But somehow, in tabulating the ledger, Providence credited more than it debited and I find myself occupying a life vastly fuller than the sum of my efforts.

I recently read a book my church's rector had recommended to me: The Will of God by Leslie D. Weatherhead. A line that stuck out to me reflected on loss and hopelessness, and compared it to what the Apostles must have suffered upon the death of Christ: "But they were wrong, weren't they? [...O]ne day, like them, you'll find out how wrong you are and be sadder at your despair than at your loss."