You can’t put autumn leaves back on a tree. And you can’t heal your broken self. Even when you have all the pieces. When you glue so carefully. Sit so prayerfully. You. Just. Can’t. Do. It.

You can’t fix yourself.

Like the summer Scott cut Luke and John’s hair. A daddy shaving two little boys down to the skin. Young brothers staring at each other in shock. It was eight-year-old Luke’s idea. A friend. A movie. Who knows what prompted Luke to ask for a buzz. Three-year-old John wanting to look just like his brother until all that red hair lay around his bare little feet on the patio. John inconsolable. On his knees gathering his hair. Desperately trying to stick it back on his little, white head.

So I got a Ziploc, swept up the soft, toddler hair, and handed it to him. For a week, John carried his hair around. “Please, Mommy fix it.” Patting the top of his head, big crocodile tears in those wide blue eyes, holding that baggie of hair. “I can’t fix it,” I told John with tears in my eyes, too. “It has to grow back.”

The way grace grows in a life. Slowly. Daily. A leaf or two at a time. Come spring. After fall. But not before you do winter.

“Time heals all wounds,” she told me when I was young and hurt. I pictured time as an old man, white-bearded and wise, leaning on a shepherd’s staff.

In Germany, the old shepherd with his staff lived down the road from the young army wife I used to be. Sheep grazing in green, rolling fields around a castle on a hill. Homesick, I would bundle baby Cami into an ancient, tank-like Mercedes and drive down to see the shepherd. He didn’t speak English, I didn’t speak German, but we both spoke in smiles. He reminded me of Jesus, tenderly tending his little flock day after day after day. So faithful. He was always there. Fear not little flock; for it is the Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom. Luke 12:32.

“His good pleasure to give,” Margaret Feinberg said at the women’s retreat this weekend. This Margaret Feinberg the book writer with breast cancer saying, “When I got that diagnosis last year, I knew I would never be the same.”

And I thought, yep, cancer changes a person.

So does a breakdown.

But we weren’t at the women’s retreat to talk about cancer or breakdowns.

We talked about God.

I went to this gathering seeking Him. Carrying my hair in a bag. Not really my hair, but all my broken pieces. The pieces I have collected since leaving the hospital last year. Sitting alone early in the morning in the prayer chapel at Redwood Christian Park crying, “God, fix me.”

You have to grow back. I don’t use shattered pieces. I make all things new. 

Not words I audibly hear, but an impression settling into my spirit over time. Over the retreat weekend. Even over Monday morning as I sit here writing this blog.

Something growing out of my prayers. Out of my thoughts. Out of my need to give something from the retreat to you.

My tribe.

My friends.

You are dear to me.

I call you friends, but feel awkward sometimes when we meet. When you tell me to my face something I’ve written speaks to you and sometimes this is the first time we’ve met in person.

“I feel like we’re best friends,” a reader says one day at the post office. And I think to myself, I’m a terrible friend because I don’t really know you, and yet your affection wraps around me like warm, tender arms and I stand all awkward in line to mail my letter because it’s hard to hug you back when I feel so naked. Not without clothes naked, but without masks naked.

You know how broken I am because you read my blog. And as you walk away after mailing your package, I love you.

I love that you are on this ride with me. That we can hold up our arms together on this roller coaster and laugh and scream and cry, “Dear God don’t let us down!” On this wild and sometimes scary roll of life needing a God who won’t ever let us down.

Never, ever, ever let us down.

“I’m ready to put this down,” three-year-old John says after a week of carrying his bag of silky baby hair around. Orange stubble now covers his little head. A head on fire. My red-haired boy with fire in his soul.

And sitting in that tiny Redwood Christian Park prayer chapel (the chapel seats 25, but usually I’m the only soul there) this weekend I feel God’s fire enter my soul. Fresh wind and the fire of the Holy Spirit.

The Wind and Waves still know His name, a woman sings at the retreat later that day. This name that calms the storms that knock the leaves off our trees.

That autumn, John’s new hair grows back thicker. Stronger. Baby hair gone, a boy’s hair in its place. I teach this little boy the name: Jesus. “When you are afraid in your bed at night, say His name out loud,” I instruct my son. “When you call for Jesus, He will answer you.”

The last night of the women’s retreat, the worship leader, Jessa Anderson, sings the song: Whole. Tears streak my cheeks because I so long to be whole again.

Yet, I now realize before my breakdown I was only pretending to be whole.

I don’t pretend anymore.

I was never whole. Not in my own terms. In my own strength.

Only in Jesus are we made whole.