Two Things Can Be True At Once

As my husband and I drove our firstborn child home from the hospital, I sat alongside my daughter in the backseat. Terrified, exhausted, exhilarated, confused, hopeful — I was all of these things at the same time. I gazed at her, this magnificent little creature whose face was both familiar and strange to me, thinking: She is exquisite. She is the future. She is life.

And then I burst into uncontrollable sobs.

“What’s wrong?” my husband cried, panicked, glancing in the rearview mirror.

“She’s — going — to — die — someday,” I blubbered, choking on my own tears.

“Ohhh, honey.” I’ll never forget the tone of his voice as he clearly debated turning this car around and taking me back to the hospital for an emergency psych evaluation. “I think you might be tired.”

Ten years later, it’s a memory we laugh about. I hadn’t slept more than four hours in four days. Postpartum hormones had lain waste to my senses. Here, on the threshold of new life, all I could think of was death. It’s funny. It’s absurd.

But it also makes a lot of sense.

Love and hate. Hope and fear. Joy and sorrow. Death and life. What lasts forever, and what is even now passing away before our eyes. To be human is to know that these feelings, these realities, can and often do occur at the same time. To be Christian is to know that it means something — even if we cannot understand what. Not yet.

In every moment of his earthly life, Christ shows us that two things can be true at once. A virgin is a mother. An exile is a king. The temple will be destroyed, and it will last forever. The world is ending. The world is beginning. The cross is death. The cross is life.

©LPi