Revealing Grace

We tend to think of tragedy as those awful moments by which we can chart our lives. Thankfully, for most of us, those moments are few and far between- a one to five occurrence at most. But for a lot of "my" kids who live on the White Mountain Apache reservation, tragedy is commonplace. It comes knocking so often that eventually they just leave the door open. It becomes an expectation rather than a fear. It is always around the corner. Death, tragedy's best friend, strikes young and hard on the reservation I love. It isn't a thing reserved for grandparents or the occasional accident. It happens monthly. It affects people weekly. Young people on the reservation die in numbers that are unacceptable. The youth suicide rate on the reservation I love is 13x higher than the national average. That is beyond heartbreaking. In my four years working there 3 girls in their teens were brutally murdered. One woman was killed just a few yards down from our youth center while we...

There is this thing that happens when life changes suddenly. For a while everything is chaos. All you think about is where you have been and how you got here, and every present moment just seems to be a moment of transition. Your life past isn't here, but your life future is still to come. The mindset of transition colors every idea, thought, and emotion.   There is this thing that happens when life changes suddenly.  It turns out that it is hard to get used to peace when you have lived in chaos.   I lived in chaos. The lives of the kids I cared for were chaotic. My significant other was chaotic. Our life together was chaotic. And when everything blew up, the chaos seemed to reverberate in my eardrums and my vision became jarred with flashbacks. Because I was still stuck in the chaos.   Even in peace, I didn't know what it looked like to live without the constant barrage of everything constantly being one tiny step from completely falling apart. B...