Like a rubber band stretched too far, we sprang back from the Pacific toward home. All of us were feeling that tug to be back in place, our proper place, and we’d reached the part of the trip in which we felt slightly less gracious about each other’s shortcomings. My estimation of the trip’s success plummeted, as the force and frequency of the fighting escalated, until I finally hit my travel rock-bottom: “This was the worst idea. I will never go anywhere with y’all again.” (If you’ve been following our travels, this may sound familiar.) After my rant, there was silence in the car, although I could still hear faint protestations in the very back, as two siblings quietly continued to trade abuse. When we pulled into our Palm Springs hotel, which was straight from a Mad Men set, I barely registered the toothy grin and winking chit-chat of the host as he described the heated pool and Friday night drink specials. “We’ll just eat our leftover bagels,” I pronounced gloomily, “and go to bed.”

The next day, I reclined on an over-sized, orange bed by the pool watching two brightly restored military planes hum above my head. Towering palms dipped forward slightly to frame an otherwise uninterrupted sky, and in and out of the fronds darted tiny, gray hummingbirds. I wondered why I could so easily judge the whole trip a failure as soon as some moments proved less perfect than others. Did it all mean too much to me, or did I give it the wrong meaning, or both?

We’d been capping-off Jane’s philosophy class by listening to Tim Keller’s The Reason for God. Keller had described how we make idols of very good gifts, things that ought to be thoroughly enjoyed, by finding our identity in them. If we lose that good thing, or fail at it, or it fails us, we lose our sense of self and self-worth. Only Christ, he contended, is reliable enough to build an identity upon. Keller said Jonathan Edwards called Jesus our sola bona, our only good. I’d stopped the audiobook and told the kids how I freaked out when I got close to marriage because I was afraid that Brandon wouldn’t meet all my knight-in-shining-armor expectations for a husband. I almost wrecked the whole thing, and it wasn’t until I acknowledged that he couldn’t and shouldn’t be my “everything,” that I was able to marry. As I considered what a slow-learner I am, a large figure shadowed my blue sky. Brandon leaned down, smiling, and presented a coffee with one hand and bagel with the other.

From Palm Springs, we drove to Tucson to see the giants in the Saguaro National Park. A rodeo family took us on a guided horseback tour, and then we ate at one of those steakhouses where servers named Maverick cut off men’s ties and hang them from the ceiling.

Our last stop, before picking up the repaired RV, was El Paso.  Brandon grew up there, but none of us had ever seen it. A mounting urgency to reach home convinced us that a drive-by would suffice. El Paso has doubled in size since he moved away, but the towering Franklin Mountains, which divide the city in more than geographical ways, and the view of Mexico: dusty hills dotted by tiny houses behind a trickling river and a tall fence, was just as Brandon had described. We rode past his boyhood haunts, while he told about shaking scorpions out of his towels and catching big air on homemade skateboard ramps and chasing the family’s enormous (and fast) Afghan hound. We imagined Aunt Melissa’s terrified face as a grocery cart, which the neighborhood kids had convinced her to ride, sailed down the street powered by a bedsheet full of wind. We tried to think of them, Melissa, Brandon, and Jason, smaller, younger, and more carefree. As we struggled to envision those former incarnations, my stomach twisted with the uncomfortable foreboding that is always present these days. Our family is changing.

Back in Lubbock, many of our friends were inexplicably trading holiday celebrations for mourning rituals. We were driving home through the desert, but I kept thinking of our time in the ocean. Sorrow really does roll over a person like “sea billows.” Sometimes it is the steady rocking motion of the tide: constant news headlines that are terrifying, but still distant and somewhat unreal. And sometimes it is a powerful breaker crashing directly overhead. “The thing that I dreaded is upon me.”

I thought of a toddler I once knew, cruising the furniture in my living room with more self-assurance than a new walker ought to possess. That boy is tall now, with a deep baritone voice and a compelling confidence in the sola bona. Under a recent Instagram photo from his dad’s hospital bed, he wrote, “Whatever happens to my [earthly] father, I know that my Father in heaven has it all under control. I love both my fathers. Very, very much.” Corrected and instructed, I grabbed some extra Kleenex and went out to meet the next change.