Yesterday did not go as planned. This week is our second in Portland as interns with Agape Church of Christ, and our day was meant to be spent downtown working with the church's homeless ministry, but a feeling deep in the pit of my stomach told me that had changed once I walked out of my room to grab breakfast and saw the flashing lights and bold headlines plastered across the television screen.
Breaking News: Police are responding to a shooting incident at Reynolds High School.
I don't think my supervisors had planned for this.
I don't think anyone had planned for this.
Over the hours we gained more insight into the tragedy. Though we hoped against them, there were deaths. There was horror and sadness, confusion and heartbreak. There were a lot of questions asked and too few answers given.
As we prepared to meet with a couple of families whose children experienced the lock-down at the high school, endless thoughts raced through my mind and numerous questions filled my head.
What do we say? What can we do? What can fix this awful, terrible, tragic situation?
The answer came from somewhere deep inside, from the strange and mysterious whisperings of the Spirit: sit with them.
So that is what we did.
We sat, we listened, we prayed, and we loved. We saw tears and smiles, we heard words and silence. Mostly though we just sat, because sometimes that's the best thing to do in times of tribulation.
Sometimes that's all you can do: sit in the sadness.
It might sound hard, and most days perhaps it is. Sitting with someone else in the midst of heartbreak, just sitting there and letting it happen is damn hard. It must be better than pretending that it isn't happening at all though, because somehow there is freedom in bearing our trials, in sharing our burdens with one another and grieving together in Christ-like love.
This world hurts. Our world is moaning and groaning with pains like childbirth, and it hurts, because we aren't made for this life. The Christian hope is in this: that one day God will wipe away every tear and take away every pain. Until that day, however, we are traveling a road filled with mountains and valleys and all sorts of experiences, both good and bad.
It fairs better, I think, to look at the darkness and call it what it is: darkness. Look at the real darkness around you, around us all and acknowledge it, because it's real and messy and confusing and present. The darkness is present; don't pretend it's not real.
As Sarah Bessey wrote here, it's okay to obey the sadness. A lot of pastors and churches teach that the darkness is bad, that one should never make it a home or choose to reside in such a place.
Don't give the darkness a foothold, don't open such doors. Don't be mad or despaired or angry or upset. Just rise up out of that grave and live the joyful life, because the joy of the Lord is your strength. Just have a little faith, and God will bring you peace.
Which like, I'm not saying isn't true. We are made for the resurrection life, and we aren't made for chaos and pain. We are made for Shalom, but we aren't living it fully yet.
This life we are living, right here, right now is hard. I'm only twenty-one, and already I've endured various struggles. They pale in comparison to those of many, but they're still painful to think back on, and it's taken me awhile to make peace with many of them. We've all experienced darkness, and the worst response we could have is to pretend that it's not as real as it quite obviously is.
And we should certainly never, ever preach that the reason someone is sitting in darkness, the reason for trials or hardships or sickness or pain, is because that person is lacking faith.
The reason for our present darkness is for one reason: because it's real.
One day, it won't be. The final outcome of this current battle we find ourselves in, the battle between light and darkness, has already been decided: Satan has been defeated. The grave has been overcome, and praise God for that!
Even now, in this life, I believe there are moments we experience in which heaven is colliding with earth. There are certainly days of sunshine and happenings of delight. There is also something to be said for leaving grief and moving forward, in persevering and living again because it's healthy and life-giving and beautiful and free.
I think we often forget that before resurrection comes death, and we need to learn to not rush ourselves through the sadness. Jesus was in the grave for three whole days, and I'm sure the gates of hell seemed as if they would never swing shut for many.
Before the Son of God rose, He was slain. He had to sit in the sadness, and many others sat in that space with him.
We have to learn to sit in the sadness, because when we refuse to acknowledge the darkness we create atmospheres, particularly within the Church, that are no longer safe. When we overzealously preach that the joy of the Lord is our strength and that all we need to do is have a little faith to be inside-outside-upside-downside-happy-all-the-time people, we aren't being realistic. We're just being naive.
Suddenly we become people that don't know how to address their own raw emotions. We become people that have nowhere to feel authentic and real (we're all putting up facades, it seems). We become people that keep every thought and struggle inside, because we don't feel like we can talk about our hardships to anyone.
We need to stop this now, before we silence ourselves into statues of stone. We need to teach that the darkness is real, and that it's okay to sit in the messiness of it sometimes. It's normal to have all the feels, and it's healthy to let yourself experience those emotions, whether good or bad. We all experience struggles, and we need each other to lean on in the midst of them.
You see, the struggle is part of the story.
And we all have stories to tell.
Don't get me wrong: when the sadness becomes an ocean, we might need to start learning how to swim. When it's a pond, however, I find it quite freeing to simply allow ourselves to sit in the midst of it.
I'm not sure what this means for you, except that maybe you need to hear that it's okay to let your walls down. If you're hurting, then let yourself hurt. Find someone and speak it out. Find someone who can handle the darkness, who will sit beside you and abide in the struggle.
You can stop the facade and shake off the sugarcoated layer of sprinkles.
You can stop the facade and shake off the sugarcoated layer of sprinkles.
You're a person; not a cupcake.
Maybe you know someone that is experiencing hard times. There may be nothing you can say, nothing you can do to change the situation. The problem might not go away.
But you can sit with them through the sadness.
***
I'm in the process of creating a new blog that I will publish while in Graduate School, and the words below are from a post I've written for that blog. My plan is to, sometime over this next year, wrap up my current blog, College Christianity, which I have published for about three years and transition into my new blog (name to come). Anyway, I found this post appropriate for my thoughts and feelings I've been having this week, so I wanted to share it.
It's really hard to be vulnerable, but to do so is to experience freedom absolutely unexplainable. This morning I sat across from a woman, a friend, and listened as she poured out her heart and her past, and as she spoke all I could do, through tear-filled eyes of my own, was admire her for the bravery, strength, and vulnerability she was engaging with during our time together.
She spoke of abuse and violence, of anxiety and depression. Her words were hard and messy and nothing short of infuriating. I wanted nothing more than to wrap her in a hug, wipe away her tears, and chase away every problem that had ever plagued her sweet soul.
As cumbersome as the hardships were to bring to the light, both she and I knew that better to speak them out than to let them fester inside.
You see, the struggle is part of the story.
And we all have stories to tell.
When we begin to tell these stories, magical happenings being to take place. Where before there was hurting, healing begins to form. Where before confusion existed, understanding starts to come.
Each day I live and breathe, and with each intake and exhale of oxygen my story is progressing. My story is being told day by day, and yours is too. These stories are not sugarcoated fairytales, as much as I wish they were. They are, however, magical. Our stories are full of substance, bursting at the seams with color and passion and adventure. Our stories are tragic yet also redemptive, just as all the best stories are.
I'm not old; my years are only twenty-one, and I consider that quite young. Looking back on my short life I like to think I've gained one lesson: I cannot live my story alone, and I do not think I am meant to. Community is most certainly life's sweetest gift, and though it is difficult to open up and embrace authentic relationships, it is more than worth it.
We need each other, you and I.
Communing helps us grow.
Communing helps us learn.
Communing helps us heal.
Communing helps us love.
I'm a dweller: an experience will take place, whether good or bad, and I will get stuck like Princess Buttercup in a vat of quicksand. Moving on and leaving the past in the past is one of my weaknesess, and I need other people to give me a push or a pull every now and then. There have been too many times where, if the decision had been left up to me, I would've chosen to remain stuck on the same page rather than to move on to the next chapter in my life. The people closest to me in my life, the ones that know me deep and real inside and out, they push me hard, because they know it's what is best for my story.
And I do the same for them.
You may not be a dweller, but I'm sure you're similar to me in that you are made for community of some sort.
You are a Child of God, and you're made to love and be loved.
To love is to be vulnerable though, and that is no easy feat. I can only promise you one truth: it's more than worth it.
You are living a story, and though you may not understand every page of it, your story is meant to be told. One day perhaps we will all understand our stories and the ones of everyone around us. Until that day comes, I hope we can learn to share our hearts. I hope we can learn to listen to the words of other people.
As we learn the art of storytelling, as we gather 'round campfires and sit in coffee shops and lay together under the stars real bright, I think we will find understanding and redemption waiting for us in the most sacred of spaces, and as we travel, hand in hand, down such roads we will live our way into healing and beauty and all kinds of redemption.
And for all of our lack of understanding or our cries of why shit happens, we will at least be sure that we are made to live our stories together, for in the midst of traveling farther into woods, in the middle of fighting dragons or scaling mountains or sailing oceans we hear this one word sung, loud and clear: freedom.
"There's so much more to life than we've been told
It's full of beauty that will unfold".
-Josh Garrels, Farther Along
