When I heard several months ago that Douglas Kaine McKelvey was working on a new Every Moment Holy book, this time about death, grief and hope...I was filled with hope.
Praying his liturgies the past several years have brought a lot of truth and healing to sore and snagging places in my life, and this season has been one of death, grief and hope.
My copy finally came Monday, and in the first moments of thumbing through it, this liturgy grabbed my attention: When Someone Thinks You Should Be Over It By Now.
Grief is more like a long journey
into a wild waste, and you alone, O Christ,
can shepherd me through it,
for you alone have mapped it all
and trod the width and breath
of every rise and fall of its unsettled topography,
acquainted as you are with every grief.
The seeds of "when are you going to get over this and stop talking about Haiti?" I have felt from others have mostly then bloomed in myself. The main person disappointed in my inability to move on has been ME.
I have hated feeling paralyzed, hated feeling alone. I have despised feeling hopeless, feeling helpless, feeling so sad, feeling so weak. I have hated mourning, hated transitioning, hated losing the stability I have known for so many years in who I am, who He is, why I'm here.
As I have longed to be moving forward, my heart has been longing to move back, and this place of stuckedness has been brutal.
With all my identities gone, I've been having to figure out who I am in Him without them.
With all my subjects changed, I've had to listen...does He still has something to say?
With all my plans shifted, I've had to determine if His plan depended on them.
With all my offerings rendered small, I've been seeking to know who I am without them, just in Him.
This grief is not a thing to be quickly mended or wished away. Grief is more like a long journey.
I have been unable, as McKelvey predicted, to edit or trim my grief to fit the tidy space someone else (like me) has allotted for it.
So how do you move on without quitting? How do you find new and keep old? How do you serve different and serve still, how is He faithful in fresh ways, when the old ways are deeply etched markers, but history?
I stood in the river knee-deep one day in 2004, stretching my back in the hot sun with a heaping red bucket of dirty t-shirts and skirts and jeans by my side. Haitian ladies bent all around me, scrubbing and straining and twisting and rinsing and chattering as we worked, my feet numb in the icy water, sweat pouring down my neck.
For over a year I had been drowning in the shock and sorrow of losing my mom, and no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't seem to find which way was UP.
Here I was, wandering...I lived with a family not my own. I was in a country not my own. I was doing work not my own. I was even washing clothes not my own.
I was utterly empty handed in every way that day, arms outstretched to the heavens as the women around me chattered and laughed.
And that day, that moment, that river, as I searched only for small ways to love those who were hurting, too, He met me strong, with healing in His wings. I felt Him be enough for me, Christ alone.
Let us begin to give ourselves
to attentive caring, to small,
perceptive acts of kindness that meet real needs,
learning how just to be
in the presence of deep grief,
knowing the what we most desire now
will be found ultimately and only in You.
These last few weeks, I am remembering that day...remembering His time, His way of reminding me--as I sought to love others well-- that He loved ME well, that He was with me, after all, and that He would always be enough.
This last year He has been at work in my very woundedness, kindling more eternal yearnings, and I am learning to let Him accomplish those sanctifying labors in me.
Today as we loved practically and prayerfully on a new family, leaving their life's ministry and community in the Salvation Army to join Wesley Biblical Seminary in Mississippi, moving from one job in the kingdom to a different one, taking a giant leap of faith and feeling the bruises, I deeply understood, and realized they are where I once was, not that long ago.
I realized that while I have been among this new Mississippi family not my own, in a country not my own, doing work not my own, empty-handed in every way, that somehow, His power in my weakness, His movement in my paralysis, I am not there any more.
Let my own experience with this sorrow
make me in time
a better lover of others,
that I might serve your sorrowing people, Jesus,
as together we are built up into your body,
the Church, ever learning
what it means to be
your merciful hearts and hands
to one another
amen
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