A woman I know found out her husband had six months to live on the same day her youngest left for college. She told me she spent that first night sitting in her car in the driveway, just sitting there. "I couldn't figure out how to walk into that house," she said. "How do you start a road like that?"

One night 3 weeks later, she and her husband were sitting on the porch, not talking about anything important, the light hit his face a certain way, and she saw him the way she had when they were 23 and nothing was complicated yet. Just for a moment, then it passed, and they went inside and dealt with the insurance paperwork.

"That moment centered me," she said later. "When things got bad—and they got bad—I'd go back to that porch in my mind to remember what was true."

I think about her when Lent rolls around and we hear about the Transfiguration because the timing of that story is similar to when Jesus takes his closest friends up a mountain, and for one impossible moment, they see who he really is, and then they come back down, and he tells them: Don't talk about this. Not yet. You'll understand later.

He knows what's coming, and he gives them a glimpse, something to hold onto when the road gets impossible.

We do this for each other all the time, when someone we love is about to start something hard—a deployment, a chemo regimen, a difficult undertaking—we try to fill their bucket up first. We're packing provisions for their journey.

My father did this the weekend before I started a job I was terrified about. He drove four hours to take me to dinner and didn't say anything profound. He just told me stories from his own career like the disasters, the near-misses, the times he'd felt completely out of his depth and by the end of the night, I wasn't less scared per se but I felt less alone.

The glimpse is meant to be fuel. You still come back down from that mountain and walk into whatever's waiting for you, but you're carrying something now that you weren't carrying before.

The good moments aren't separate from the hard ones. They're how you survive them and maybe that's what this season is for--to receive whatever glimpse we're given, whether in prayer, an unexpected kindness, or a moment of real presence with someone we love for the road ahead.

This week, maybe we could be that glimpse for someone else. Someone in your life is staring down a hard road. Show up and pack their provisions.

God Bless.

FF