The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases,
his mercies never come to an end;
they are new every morning;
great is your faithfulness.
“The LORD is my portion,” says my soul,
“therefore I will hope in him.”
Lamentations 3:22-24
By Amanda Nicol | Ministry Intern serving at Gresham UMC in Gresham, OR
Please forgive me, but today I want to talk about grief.
It is a new year and, we are told, now is the time to start over with a clean slate. New goals, new opportunities, and new adventures – everything appears bright and shiny with fresh possibility. We are enticed by the siren songs of more and better: do more, be more; do better, be better.
Rather than confidently striding into the New Year, I kind of dimly wandered across the line between 2014 and 2015. After a month of crazed holiday build up, the abrupt manner by which Christmas ends in our culture always leaves me feeling a little bereft and emotionally off-balance. Couple that with an unexpected death in my family just days before Christmas, and I have found myself spending a lot of time contemplating the mysteries of grief and feeling a little less than bright and shiny.
Before I had ever really experienced grief, I used to think it was an emotion linked exclusively to the death of a person. A little time and experience has taught me that we can actually grieve over a whole host of things, some of which may appear silly in retrospect. But I am a fan of the poet Rumi, who encourages us in his poem “The Guest House” to graciously embrace every emotion as a “guide from beyond.” Grief reveals something about our humanity…and about God.
[quote_box_right]Letting go is a painful process, even if you are just letting go of a series of imagined futures.[/quote_box_right]When I first began sensing a vocation in Christian ministry, one of the major reasons I resisted the call was because I was afraid to relinquish older, more cherished dreams. Admittedly, this resistance came from a desire to maintain control. But it also came from a very human fear of discomfort and sadness. For a while I stood at a crossroads, and I knew I had to choose a path, but I could only choose one. I never doubted that God would be present along any of those paths, but choosing just one meant I would have to let go of the others (at least for a time), and I was afraid of how it would hurt to watch those visions of my future selves diminish and fade away. Letting go is a painful process, even if you are just letting go of a series of imagined futures.
And guess what? I was right; it does hurt. I wrote a friend recently that I often feel rather disoriented and saddened by the strange, sharp turns my life has taken since I finished college. Some days I am hesitant to completely embrace the stirrings and signs of God moving in my life because I know that every step of affirmation in my call, while exciting and beautiful and confirmation of God’s presence, takes me further away from the other things I once dreamed I would be and do.
It is human nature to wonder about and mourn over what could have been. Throughout my residency, I have tried to allow myself the emotional space to grieve over all the changes I have experienced because I believe it does a disservice to our humanity to stamp out our uglier emotions. God created us to feel widely and to feel deeply. To ignore the suffering in ourselves and our world is to ignore the biblical mandate to mourn with those who mourn and to carry each other’s burdens.
[quote_box_left]Christian joy is not about faking happiness in the face of pain and sadness.[/quote_box_left]Christian joy is not about faking happiness in the face of pain and sadness. Rather, it is about acknowledging that while we will all meet difficulty in this world, we can still look to the future with hope because Jesus has overcome the world (John 16). As Lamentations reminds us, the Lord’s mercy is endless and His faithfulness will surpass all our expectations. When sadness and grief come, I give myself permission to feel them so I can more fully appreciate the hope I have been promised and not take for granted the Lord’s mercy.
Now that we are a couple weeks into the New Year, I find myself looking to the future with hope and anticipation (and a little trepidation) of the next chapter God is writing in my life. I also find myself looking back on the past year with sadness for the things I must leave behind in order to move forward. I am grateful to have a community of people around me who acknowledge this bittersweet season and never dismiss my feelings or try to hurry me through them. Maybe in February I will feel brighter and shinier. For now, I will rise every morning and thank the Lord for all the ways He is stretching my soul to greater empathy and deeper love.
Amanda is a twenty-something Spokane, Washington native recently transplanted to the Portland, Oregon area. She graduated from the University of Puget Sound in 2012, where she was actively involved in campus ministry. When she is not reading too many books or watching too much Netflix, she is learning how to let herself be surprised and loved by God as she explores what it means to be called as a Christian in the world today. She is currently serving as a Ministry Resident at Gresham United Methodist Church in Gresham, Oregon under the mentorship of Dr. Steve Lewis.
