Something redemptive this way comes

I went on a ghost tour in Charleston when I was 7 years old and didn’t sleep for the rest of the year.

Staying awake was silly: I was scared of seeing a ghost, and if I had been asleep, I wouldn't. But what do 7-year-olds do that makes sense? They're ignorant of most things. They’ll believe anything.

I felt like ghosts were coming for me, haunting my every step. Sometimes, I'd have to go pee, which meant I'd have to to leave the safety of my bed to get to the toilet. I wasn't scared of a ghost hurting me. I was terrified of what I would feel if I saw one.

I don't think ghosts are real. I've never seen one (that I know of). But they felt real enough back then, especially when I was the only one awake at night.

I'm 32 now. It's late on a March night. I'm the only one awake in my house, and I'm not scared of seeing ghosts. The late winter wind on my house sounds like dread whispers, and there are no leaves on the branches of the trees yet, so they are thwack, thwack, thwacking against the vinyl siding. But I’m not scared.

I worry if other things you can't feel in your chest or see with your eyes are real — redemption, love, student loan forgiveness. Is feeling something and believing in it the same thing? It's a silly question regarding ghosts, but when you think about redemption, it means everything.

Redemption: broken things being put back together — that having been shattered and remolded by faith, hope, and love, they are better than they were before. I hope it exists. I can't prove it. I think I've seen it, and I wake up most days hoping I'll see it again (often to my disappointment).

Maybe my hope in redemption makes me more like a 7-year-old who believed a Civil War soldier's ghost might try to sneak up on him in the middle of the night while he's going pee. I wonder if I need more of that 7-year-old. He'd believe in anything, and he felt everything he believed. He was wrong about the ghosts, but that doesn't mean he was wrong about everything.

I hope redemption is haunting my steps. I hope it's sneaking up on me while I'm going pee in the bathroom. I hope there's part of me that's petrified of how I'll react when I see it, really see it, because I'd be witnessing something that feels so beyond our world. I hope the wind whispers to me about it. I hope the empty branches, already budding with the blossoms of the coming spring, thwack against my house in hope.

For now, I'll try to go to sleep. But it's beautifully eerie tonight, and something is coming for me — I can feel it.