Sara Hagerty

A tree doesn’t survive the winter without healthy roots. I remember that bleak February morning when my husband and I loaded up our car and drove through the stripped-bare forests of the Blue Ridge Mountains to move into my parents’ basement. I left their house only for brisk runs through Ohio’s suburban sprawl, and I came home to more winter as I watched my dad decline. What I didn’t know then was that this was a holy winter.

My best friend and I slid each other Bible verses on scraps of paper in between class, just to remind one another to “stay the course. Both of us had had our typical high school experience interrupted by this God-man — the wide-eyed nature of young adulthood was still working its way through us. Walking across the stage, receiving my diploma and still professing Jesus felt like a tremendous mile-marker. I’d survived high school and was still reading my Bible.

For many, that means nothing, but when you grow up in middle America (where the best of life happens under the Friday night lights), homecoming court makes celebrities out of seventeen year-olds. In the seventh grade, I saw my sister sitting next to the cutest boy in the school, atop a decorated convertible, circling the football stadium for the whole town to applaud, and I wanted to be her. My friends rode the convertibles with the cute boys while I leaned against the fence that lined the stadium track and watched. I’ve since distilled high school down to one box of photo albums, varsity letters, yearbooks and an old pair of Birkenstocks, but the memory of my friends circling the football field while their names reverberated through the PA system into the autumn-night sky still hangs in my memory.

We were 23 minutes late for the party that was only planned to last for two hours. I know, because I counted each minute that passed and had eyes only for the digital clock in my car at every single stoplight, calculating and re-calculating the time we might arrive. all holding full plates of food with their manicured hands and with their children playing, happily, and who seemed already to be carrying an ownership over this party that wasn’t theirs. Less than two hours later, a handful of sweaty-bodies with sticky fingers piled back into the car and I pulled away from the party wondering: what happened?