NeuroDivine

This morning I travel north again.

The road from Leinster toward Antrim has begun to feel less like geography and more like pilgrimage: a long ribbon of motorway and memory carrying me back toward the small room where my father, Brian, rests now at the edge of the great crossing.

In recent days, I have found myself returning not only to hospital corridors and family conversations, but also to words already written long before this week arrived.

Back in January, as we gathered to celebrate my mother Mary’s 80th birthday, I wrote a hymn in thanksgiving for her life. Reading it now, I realise how deeply my father’s presence was already woven through it: the Scottish country dancing where they first met, the years of steadfast devotion, the life and home they built together across decades of joy and strain. Long marriages become like that. One story cannot be told without the other quietly appearing beside it.

Then, only days later, I wrote another hymn:

At the time, I wrote of colour, texture, vigil, and the ways neurodivergent souls often encounter God through pattern and sensation before words. I wrote of black that keeps vigil solemn, of Christ binding all things together in love’s design, of lives becoming Spirit-woven textiles shaped through time.

I did not know then how closely those images would come to mirror these present days.

For now we keep vigil indeed.

A family gathered again in a small room, much as we once gathered around my own hospital bed at the beginning of dialysis in 2018. Back then, we were told there was uncertainty ahead for me. Eleven years earlier, we were told my father might not survive the night. Yet he did. He survived lymphoma, strokes, impossible predictions, and long years of frailty borne with quiet endurance.

Some lives become testimonies not through grandeur, but through persistence.

As I travel north today, I find myself thinking less about endings and more about threads:

• the threads of marriage stretching toward a golden anniversary;
• the threads of sons returning home;
• the threads of Scottish reels danced decades ago;
• the threads of engineering plans and careful hands;
• the threads of prayers whispered beside hospital beds;
• the threads of hymns written in the early hours while machines breathed softly nearby.

Perhaps this is one of the hidden gifts of vigil. It teaches us to see the pattern more clearly.

Not perfectly. Not without grief. But enough to glimpse that love itself is what holds the weaving together.

And at the centre of it all remains Christ:

• quietly present in the room,
• quietly present on the road,
• quietly present in every threshold crossed between darkness and dawn.

May all who keep watch beside those they love know this:

your presence matters.

Your small acts of faithfulness matter.

The threads you carry matter.

And may the God who weaves earth and heaven together hold all who travel difficult roads today in tenderness and peace.

Copyright (c) 2026. Michael McFarland Campbell.