Some Things Are As Good As You Hoped They'd Be by Sarah Clarkson
Every Wednesday night since I have been home this summer, I have ground my fresh wheat berries, whipped up my pancake recipe, crisped some turkey bacon, (Clay’s preference), filled my cakes with roasted walnuts or pecans, and we have feasted out by our little fireplace on our deck. It truly couldn’t be any better. It is a perfected recipe and so wonderful, you feel at one with the world and life—at least for a few moments.
I read some thoughts from my Sarah and thought they were worthy of sharing again—because when we have a grid that says, “I will indeed look for the beauty, the good moments, the ways in which I see the faint hint of a perfect life created by God, and waiting for us to experience in eternity.
Some things are just as good as you hope they'll be.
I walked through an English village near our home yesterday, delighted by the medieval houses and the delicate opulence of the late summer gardens. We had tea and cake in a 16th century cottage, and picked blackberries from the hedge as we walked to a Saxon church whose silence is so rich with ancient hush I almost cry upon entering it.
I love these idyllic moments. England is many things and I know its foibles and failures well; but it's just as beautiful, just as steeped in story and tea and gardens as I always thought it would be. There are many things about England that are painfully foreign and I live in the suburbs, not a village, but the good things here are every bit as good as my idealist of a dreamy-eyed self imagined they'd be.
Things are sometimes, you know.
I was thinking as I walked yesterday that there's a jaded spirit abroad in our age that wants to belittle ideals, that meets excitement or exuberant dreams with reductive weariness. Nothing is really as good as you think, it says. There's always a catch. You can't expect to have your hopes met in a world like this. Don't be naive, whispers that knowing voice.
But you know what? Marriage is just as good as I hoped it would be. So was getting to study at Oxford. So is having sweet babies and living with them in a little house near the Sussex downs. The fact that these things are imperfect and also hellishly hard at times or disappointing or lonely in no way reduces the real, bone deep goodness I taste in their presence.
We need to be able to say that things are shockingly good precisely because we are fallen people living in a broken world who are fighting to believe that redemption is possible. Flattening everything doesn't make things better; it steals our capacity for hope, it bankrupts our ability to imagine something beyond our brokenness. We need to yearn and mourn. To dream wildly and find that some dreams really do come true is to taste the goodness that began us and the grace that aids us and the kindness that draws us on toward the healing of all things.
Because that really will be better than we could ever have hoped.
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