Redux
“My experience of life is that its a mixed grill. It’s not predictable. It’s not pretty. It’s messy. You can have very deep faith and still experience deep disappointment and confusion. Jesus doesn’t promise to take away the pain, confusion or disappointment. But he’ll enter into it with you and keep you company till you cross over to the other side.” —Anne Lamott
I’m doing something I’ve never really done here before, which is reprint a previous post. But these past couple of weeks have been such a rollercoaster ride of dizzying highs and lows, that when I sat down to write about it, the words that kept coming to my mind were the same words I had written a few years ago, when I had experienced a similar season of extremes. So if you will allow me this indulgence, I decided to just revisit those words here today.
The recent lifetime honor the industry paid to Russ at the Dove Awards was an indelible, humbling, indescribably sweet moment for this family. It was followed all too quickly by the death of Russ’ beloved big brother Marvin in California, as a result of a landslide of complications following a routine knee replacement surgery. Our 8 month-long frustrating, often heartbreaking quest to move to a smaller rural community as we inch (kicking and screaming) towards those inevitable ‘empty nest’ years, has suddenly blossomed into a unexpectedly PERFECT (for us) potential home in the why-didn’t-we-think-of-this-sooner, familiar and much-loved little village of Bell Buckle, TN.
See what I mean? Highs and lows, blessings and loss, uncertainty and answered prayers… A mixed grill.
Such is life, but dang– it can wear a woman out, you know?!
So in honor of ALL of our ever-changing circumstances, here is an encore presentation (complete with soundtrack) from September of 2009:
The Perfect and the Broken Hallelujahs*
I love it when life feels full of possibilities! You know that hopeful feeling, when it seems as if you’re poised on the brink of something good, maybe a new job or a new friendship or a new season in your life? Actually now that I think about it, things have sort of felt that way around here, lately. It’s like a honeymoon, that brief giddy period before reality sets in. Yeah, I love that.
So it stands to reason that my least favorite feeling, what I hate the most, is when all of those promising dreams have been dashed and I’m left standing in the smoking ruins of disillusionment– angry at myself for daring to hope or believe in whatever it was that has now let me down, and angry at God for letting it happen.
I’ve spent a lot of my life somewhere in between those two places. Not wildly careening back and forth (I’m not really a “careening” kinda girl), more like cautiously basking in the ‘full of possibilities’ days and doggedly struggling to survive the disillusioning ones. Optimistic by nature, I’ve never lingered in the Land of the Hopeless long enough to really set down a taproot, but I have definitely spent more time than I would like to admit wandering around in the State of Numbness– detached, listless, emotionally muted. It’s like drawing a big ol’ self-protective cloak around myself, except that of course, it never works. It doesn’t actually protect me from anything, it just serves to delay the feelings that I am trying so hard to avoid. And then when I do inevitably have to face my grief and sadness, it’s as though they’ve gathered strength in the meantime like one of those tropical storms that hover out over the ocean and develop into a Category 5 hurricane before they return to land and flatten everything in sight. Sadly, the numbness never really seems to last long enough to soften the blow. At best, it just buys me a little time between initial shock and grudging acceptance.
You’d probably think that someone who hates disappointment as much (and as melodramatically) as I do would be very leery about daring to hope again, wouldn’t you? Well, you’d be wrong. For better or worse, before I know it, something or someone will show up on my metaphoric doorstep and I will sense that stirring in my heart, that lightening of my spirit, that feeling that once again, life is full of possibilities. And I will happily allow myself to be seduced by it– because honestly, who wants to live in a world without hope? Not this middle-aged blonde.
I need to believe that the horrible, shot-thru-the-heart moments in life are survivable. Not only that, but I need to believe if we allow God to work that alchemy that only He can do, the devastation those experiences leave in their wake can be born again as wisdom, compassion and yes, *she says in spite of herself*, even victory. I need to know that I am not left alone in my sorrow, that Someone is there even when I can’t feel Him, rooting for me, waiting for me, empowering me. And I need to know that the universe, for all of it’s mystical inscrutability, does still contain some absolutes, some things that have proven to be true again and again– and the most important one is that God does indeed love me, beyond all reason. He can’t help it, it’s who He is. After all, the primary message of the gospel is redemption, it’s what God does best. He takes something that has died and breathes life back into it. My job is to simply believe that even when I don’t understand and wholeheartedly HATE what is happening to me, there is a power greater than myself at work. If I allow myself to surrender to that power, the anguish and despair will eventually fade and what remains will be a hard-won faith that I can call my own. Because even though grace is free, sometimes faith has a price.
I’m so grateful for each of those crystalline, rose-colored, gloriously expectant moments in my life. And reluctantly, I’m also grateful for each of the shatteringly sad, desperate and disenchanted moments, too. I’ve learned to recognize and accept them both as the ultimately redemptive gifts they are– the perfect, and the broken.
Hallelujah.
(*I borrowed my title from my favorite Leonard Cohen song, which I realize everybody in the free world has heard ad infinitum/ad nauseam. But here’s a bunch of Norwegian guys performing the best version I’ve ever heard–)
