Deus Caritas Est

The English graduate students at Southern Illinois University in Edwardsville, Illinois, used to meet on Fridays at a local bar and grill to unwind after a week of writing papers and analyzing literature. I met my husband at Shenanigans on just one of those afternoons.

John sat beside me and asked about my set of keys. I looked down at the mess of keys and laughed. “That’s a metaphor for my life right there.” There was a key to a house that used to belong to me. The last time I’d used that key was the previous Thanksgiving holiday when I backed up a U-haul and packed up my life. There was a key to a car that used to belong to me. Now it belonged to a tow truck driver in Atlanta. The man-who-was-not-my-husband-anymore had sold it for a little bit of nothing one day when the car stranded him in downtown Atlanta. In aggravation, he’d sold the piece of junk on the spot. There was a key to the car sitting in the Shenanigans parking lot – the only real asset I had besides my three children. And there was a key to my parents’ house, which they so graciously permitted me to call home during this unfortunate phase of life.

There were other keys, too, which I could no longer remember what they opened or turned on. And then, there was a key chain that I kept just because it was the metaphor that reminded me that there was always hope. No loss was so horrible that I couldn’t get through it. No rejection so terrible that I couldn’t keep going. Despair was not an option.

“God is love.”

That’s all it said. But that was enough.

And it still is.