We wake in the morning and from first moments know the needs, and we hear the cries and see the holes that are everywhere.

We pull on our work gloves and our laser focused eyes and set to patching and covering, trying to fill. We scramble to fill.

We madly load shovels of sand into bags, and we wedge them into the spaces we see so the wall won’t break through.

We just can’t let it break through.

But there’s another. Always another hole, and it comes rolling in.

We can’t keep up. It is just too much, and we throw up hands and wonder how we ever found ourselves here because clearly we are not made for this.

Sometimes we pray and ask for more strength, more rest, more resources to fill these holes that won’t be filled.

On days we feel better, we think we may have this figured out. We create systems to control and methods of thinking to master the holes.

And so when the holes break wide open again, so do we, and we believe the lie that we are failures, that we’ve missed the magic formula for filling holes that everyone around us seems to know.

We wander around looking for a purpose because we don’t know what else to do, and in those moments — when confidence, power, creativity have withered dry — we look up.

That’s when we see it.

The canopy under which we’ve been walking all this time with its leaves like lace, mottled with color, and the light breaking full glorious through the gaps between them.

The light between makes the leaves’ dark edges come to life, and the leaves themselves glow alive. And the pattern at our feet — it is lace, and our feet are not tangled up in the holes.

We might even dance in these lace shadows.

Back in our usual, everyday places, sometimes we remember to remember the canopy of lace and the lace at our feet. We try to see the holes as not our enemies but maybe something else.

So it is in a rare quiet space that we find ourselves fingering a handed-down crocheted piece and looking into the holes. And it’s the unique pattern of textures, loops, lines and holes that make this piece what it is.

That make this life what it is.

Those holes don’t loom large and ugly for we know in a moment that those places where our need, our mess, our human limitations show — those very gaps are the places where Mercy light may enter.

The very place where Grace may just pour in.

And we won’t be able to stop it.

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