“There are so many stories more beautiful than answers.”
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.
