Five Days In, and the Only Job Is the Next Small Thing

Five days ago my son Thomas David was born.

I am not going to post much of him. That is not what this is.

But there is one honest thing I want to put down, because somebody reading this is standing where I have stood, and it might be worth something.

I expected the hard part to be the noise

It is not the noise.

It is the sameness.

The days do not have edges anymore. You feed him. You put him down. You stand there a minute longer than you need to. You do it again. Somewhere in the middle of all that the sun comes up.

Most of my adult life has run on adrenaline. Storms. Rescues. Courtrooms. Deadlines. Build sprints that went sixteen hours and felt like twenty minutes.

Adrenaline I know how to do.

Ordinary is the part I had to learn.

What the quiet does to a man who has been locked up

I am going to be straight about something.

When you have spent years somewhere that every sound meant something, your body does not just quit doing that when you get home. Nobody flips a switch.

I still track doors. I still count exits. I still come up out of sleep at a noise that turns out to be the ice maker.

Here is what is different now.

When I wake up at nothing, there is a reason to be awake that is not fear. I get up. I check on him. He is fine. He is always fine.

And then I go back to bed instead of sitting up until four running the tape.

That is not healed. I want to be clear about that. That is managed. There is a difference and I am not going to blur it to get a better sounding sentence out of it.

The only job right now is the next small thing

I am not measuring these days.

I am not turning them into content. I am not mining them for a lesson. Some things you are just supposed to live, and this is one of them.

The next small thing is the whole assignment. Warm the bottle. Change him. Take the trash out. Answer the two emails that actually need answering and let the other nine sit until tomorrow.

Genesis 50:20 says that what they meant for evil, God meant for good.

I used to read that verse like a victory lap. Like it was about the ending. Like the good was going to show up as a headline.

I do not read it that way anymore.

The good is a slow morning in East Texas with a five day old asleep on your chest and nowhere in the world you have to be.

That is the good. That is what got carried out of all of it.

If you are still in the loud part

Somebody is reading this from inside the loud part. Waiting on a hearing. Waiting on a call back. Waiting to find out.

I am not going to tell you it gets quiet, because I do not know your situation and I am not your lawyer.

I will tell you this. The quiet is real. And when it finally gets to you, you probably will not recognize it, because it will not look anything like winning.

It will look like a normal day.

Hold on for the normal day.