Two different ideas
At the same time
I admit that most days I straddle between gratitude and grief.
There’s something truly divine and transformational about a heart that is filled with gratitude. It not only transforms what we have into enough, but it changes our perspective, our outlook, our decisions, and our destiny.
But gratitude and grief, they can exist side-by-side. We can be thankful for what remains, and still grieve what has been lost. They don’t cancel each other out. Gratitude doesn’t make grief go away. And grief doesn’t make gratitude go away. It’s okay to feel different things at the same time.
I was chatting with a dear friend yesterday, and she shared that someone told her that she should be over something. It was apparently past the time that she was allowed to cry about something. It was a bit of judgement that was spoken in a church context, and I felt so sad hearing that from her.
It taps into my own experience of grief that never seems to roll in the direction I think it will, it never seems to behave in the ways I wish it did, and it stubbornly repeats itself when I truly had thought I’d moved on. Many of you all know that my mom passed away about ten years ago. While the initial grief has subsided, there is brand new grief that spills into my heart when I wish she were here, in my current life, in my dad’s current life, in my kids’ current life. I know for sure that my kids would have learned Korean, they would have loved her cooking, and their hearts would have been eternally warmed by her laughter, prayer, and hugs. But she’s not here, and that grief is fresh at unexpected times.
Like today. I really wished I could have talked to her today.
It is this way that grief kind of shrinks and expands with time that confirms for me that as long as our hearts are big and alive, we might always be crying about something this side of heaven. There is no time limit that seems to make sense on that.
And this grief lives alongside of what we celebrated today. Easter is the day in the Christian faith when we celebrate Christ’s resurrection, i.e., when he literally came back to life from the dead. His life, death, and resurrection break every chain and shame that keeps us from the life we were always meant to live, and frees us and heals us to connect directly to the God of the universe. He is the hope that breathes me back to life. This is the work of a God who loves us far too much to leave us suffering alone in this broken world.
And I guess this is another example of trying to hold two different ideas at the same time. We are restored and rescued from this broken world, but we are still in this broken world. There already, but not yet there; both present and future.
It’s getting late, and I’m certain I didn’t do this idea justice. But I hope this makes sense enough today to at least give us all some permission to let go of the need for perfection and instead to simply be the complex, messy, beautiful humans that we are.
Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when Christ appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is. (1 John 3:2)
Yes.