“There are so many stories more beautiful than answers.”
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My oldest son got diagnosed with moderate hearing loss three months shy of his fifth birthday.
It was the answer to so many questions for us at the time. I felt like I had wasted so much time trying to find that one answer, that one solution to make everything okay. I felt guilty for not knowing years 1-4.
But the truth is, now, over three years later, I am realizing that there were so many beautiful things that happened because that one answer didn’t come quickly.
Because it didn’t come when I wanted it to.
This month, I had three articles published on cannonball moments in celebration of the Ignatian Year. In the first one (for the Ignatian Spirituality Dotmagis blog), I talked about my terrible last final in engineering that propelled me forward into becoming someone else. In the second one (for @beldredge98’s Into the Deep blog), I talked about our difficult decision to move my oldest to a new school for the upcoming year.
Today, in celebration of the Feast of St. Ignatius of Loyola, I wrote for Busted Halo about “cannonball moments” in general and how it originated from Ignatius’s literal one to the leg 500 years ago.
But I also talk about a third cannonball moment in my own life, the one where I sat in a vinyl chair behind a thin curtain and learned of my son’s hearing loss for the first time.
(Disclaimer: It is not the loss that is the cannonball. He is perfect as God made him to be.)
Here’s an excerpt: “Truth be told, I didn’t see this one coming. I didn’t know how hard the first few years of parenting would be, and I didn’t know how beautiful my life would become because of both the before and the after. That’s what “cannonball moments” are after all — pain and beauty all rolled into one. They are the moments that matter — the ones that bring us closest to the person God created us to be.”
I hope you take a chance to read it today and contemplate your own stories that are often far more beautiful than answers.