My daughter Grace, who is an adult with disabilities, says she is depressed. This is nothing new. I hear this every day. The same laments, the same discouragements, the same complaints. But today, as I drive her to her little job, she says, “On the outside I look happy, but on the inside I’m sad. There are so many reasons.”

Grace always sits in the middle row behind me, even though she’s the only passenger. I glance at her in the rearview mirror. I know she’s flooded with unprocessed fears and a merry-go-round of thoughts that her crippled emotions just can’t handle.

“Can you just list five things you’re struggling with?” I ask. I’ve heard them all before, but I think optimistically, that maybe if we at least organize them we can sort them out.

She starts, but quickly covers her ears. She’s tired of saying the same old things over and over.

I tell her it’s good to say them out loud because when the thoughts are floating around in her brain, they seem bigger and worse than they actually are. 

So she stammers and stumbles in her words and eventually names three: her life isn’t working out the way she hoped, she doesn’t live in her former town of Grand Ledge, and she’s afraid of dying – of everyone she loves dying. 

I drive quietly, thinking about how normal these fears and sorrows are for such an abnormal girl. I think about how her disabilities and meltdowns mask her humanness and how much she shares in common with the rest of us.

We tackle them one by one.

I tell her I know that her gifts and passions are not being realized because of her disabilities. Grace has been an avid atlas reader from her earliest days – she knows more geography than most of us, even than her teachers. More than that, she decided long ago she wanted to become a missionary, and fasts and prays for unreached people every Friday. But the Joshua Project is about as close as she gets to the field. And each year signals another step away from reaching her dream.

It’s sad for sure – but really not uncommon. I was having coffee with a friend earlier today who also feels her life was derailed so many years ago when she made that one decision. This fallen world is full of setbacks and unfulfilled hopes and storylines we didn’t write.

Don’t I know it.

“But Grace,” I say, “You have the most important Meaning of all. You belong to Christ. He chose you, and opened up your heart to him even as a child. And some day this whole life will seem like only one day…that happened a long time ago. Who knows what work God will call you to then! Grace, you need a bigger theology of Eternity.”

We talk about death and dying and those awful goodbyes. Grace says she’s afraid to see her Momma die, and reaches out her hand to me from the back seat. As I reach back and touch her fingertips, I’m reminded that these are fears and sorrows I too share.

“But Grace, this is exactly what the gospel addresses….” How soon our goodbyes will turn to — ‘I’m so glad to see you again!’ and hugs and kisses and forever Hellos. C.S. Lewis captured it so well when he wrote, “They were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read; which goes on forever; in which every chapter is better than the one before.”

I struggle to know what to say about Grand Ledge, Grace’s childhood town. What is underneath this longing and obsession with the past?

“Grace, why do you like Grand Ledge so much? What is it that you want?” I wonder aloud.

I know she loves the library, and the familiar paths we followed in the evenings after the heat of the day. There is that one little wall we sat on while licking ice cream and counting cars as they came around the bend. The bridge, the ducks, the river, the iconic water tower – all these images conjure up a nostalgia for a time when everything was just right.

Grace says, “I was young then. And everything was the same. I felt secure. And when we came home from vacation, we came back to the same house.”

Home. Who doesn’t long for Home? Adventures have their place, but only if you can come home again.

Taking another page from C.S. Lewis, I suggest slowly, “But what if this Grand Ledge is just a Shadow of the real Grand Ledge? What if the Grand Ledge library, and the Island Park, and the Lickety-Split Ice cream shop are only Shadows of the Real City we are headed toward? What if the days of our youth, our childish joys, our daily and yearly rhythms that gave shape and stability and security were all given to prepare us for our Real Home? What if our nostalgic memories frozen in the past are actually a tantalizing taste of something in our future?”

Grace is quiet, thoughtful. But I know something is sinking in. For later that night I have nine or ten notifications from her on Facebook saying how I am the best mom.

And the next day we drive to Grand Ledge for a treat — taking pictures and laughing, eating ice cream on our favorite wall and swinging in the Island Park. We can enjoy it freely, because today we remember that Time can’t ultimately hurt us… and Forever is not so far away.