Leah Perrault

It is a January deep freeze in Saskatchewan and my three-year-old buries himself in his blanket in the morning and says, “It’s cold and I’m tired. I’m not getting out of bed.” He just says what the rest of us are feeling.

For the first holiday outing in our new city, we headed out for the tree lighting in the town square. (It felt very Stars Hallow, for the Gilmore Girls fans, with lots of twinkly lights and a mayor’s words and Santa arriving by fire truck with all the usual characters.) After a line for sleigh rides, a queue for hot chocolate and another turn to take to see Santa, my little girl exclaimed loudly that “Mostly tonight, we were waiting in line!”

Interrupting is a bad habit I have been working to break for a long time, with some success and more work yet to do. And every struggle has a flip-side strength: While I need to stop speaking over people, the weakness is driven by a persistent perseverance that can also be a strength. God has been asking me lately to interrupt some of the patterns in my life that are not serving me well.

Thanks is a word and a way of being. It seeks out the gift in what is. It assumes there is a gift to be seen here. In the hardest seasons of my life, thanks has been a ladder out of darkness. A therapist once reminded me through my tears that what we focus on is magnified. When we actively practise gratitude, the gifts of the present become easier to see.

I have been listening to people within my (Catholic) faith community wrestle in a deeper way with Truth and Reconciliation this summer. The reckoning has been too long coming. Saskatchewan columnist Doug Cuthandrecently wrote that Canadians may be waking up to face our collective residential school history.  I hope he’s right. And I hope that the same will be said of the Catholic Church in this season.

It has been my experience that defence often follows discomfort when reconciliation is needed. In my Catholic faith tradition, the discomfort can be understood as a gift that invites us to turn back, to repent, to make right. And defensiveness is a self-protective strategy to avoid taking responsibility. Defences divert us (for now, or forever) from being in real relationships with the ones we have had conflict with.

It has been a profoundly difficult few weeks to live in Treaty territory and the homeland of the Métis. To live in a land that welcomes people to safety but cannot guarantee it.

Holding, as an attribute of God, sort of fell out of the sky for me this month. I was looking out the window with wonder at just how many stars we can see without leaving the city in this new-to-us, small(er) city we now call home. As I juggle all the new things, I wondered why I hadn’t thought of it before. The Creator of the Universe is holding time and space in an eternal trajectory.

Imperfection and I have had a rocky relationship. For years, I pretended she didn’t even exist. When she showed up unexpectedly, I dressed her up in different clothes and tried to pass her off as someone else. I recognized, eventually, that she was actually a roommate I despised. And in more recent years, I’ve been trying to be reconciled to my sister. Imperfection has gifts I need, and she has been much more gracious with me than I deserve.

Mess is not a new way of living for our family, but moving has a way of making figurative messes real. Our house is full of boxes, waiting for certainty that we will not need to move again soon.