Giving thanks in sadness and loss

I have, of late, been sad.

I have lost a friend. No — not like that. I suppose it’s better to say I have lost a friendship. In the hot messiness that is humanity, that bubbling guck of relationships, where things get messy, somehow our relationship got mired down in hurt and silence. I miss her, and I am incredibly sad. There is a strange emptiness in the knowing that she prefers life without me, and I have no one to hear my stories. No one who gets the joke anymore.

I have a project — high profile, big leap of faith — that’s not going as well as I’d hoped. And I feel, once again, like a failure. Fist shaking at God, lamenting like Mary and Martha: If only you’d shown up, Lord! 

Praying the same prayers over and over again (Heal my friendship. Help the project. Please?) until they are bread for the birds, stale and crumbly.

And like an easter egg, I prefer to hide in the grass. To keep quiet and unseen so I can lick my wounds in peace, so I can fester in the sandy quagire of self-pity over prayers that don’t work and hurts that linger.

And then I think of my friend who is dying.

Another friend, who I barely know, but who is a sister in Christ, a student in a class I taught, who three or so weeks ago was given two weeks to live. Suddenly. Out of nowhere. Two weeks.

And she brought her tired and sick self to a worship service. And I went to this service too, evn though it was mid-week and not one I normally attend. And as she sat, head in palms, I did this weird thing — I loved from the center of myself and I put my arm around her.

This is weird because this is not me. I am not warm and fuzzy and I suck at people. To reach out like this is so horribly scary to me. So — uncomfortable. And she leaned in, she laid her head on my shoulder, and then the tears streamed down my face, as I held the head of this woman who is my sister, and my stranger, someone I hardly know and yet shared with me this intimate moment. A moment where it was just her, me, Jesus, loving from the center of ourselves.

Then she got up, this dying woman, my stranger-sister, and she lifted her hands in praise and worship, in thanksgiving. And all my crumbly prayers and sadness became staler still, paler in the proverbial comparison to my friend who was dying.

But God — I’m not sure he compares prayers.

I hope not, anyway.

I think of another friend, a third one, embroiled. Embroiled in this bubbly drama (not the dying one, the other one). She gave me, before the drama, a devotional by Ann Voskamp called One Thousand Gifts, and my own hurt, my own lack of forgiveness has kept me from opening it.

But today I did, thinking of the grumbling I do under my breath. Grumbling about chores and children’s messes, meetings and people, projects not going well and my stale bread-crumb prayers. I think of all the people who have crossed my path who I judged as ungrateful, and realize I am the most ungrateful of all, me, who does not love from the center of myself out of engrandized self-protection.

This loving out of the center, it is yucky. I do not like it. It is everything that hurts.

It is letting my friend go if this is what she wants and loving her anyway, not licking the hurt like an oyster’s pearl. Even now as I write what I should be doing, I want to nurture the empty space with the sting of her rejection rather than the joy of having known her. I suppose my center — this middle that I am supposed to love from — is not yet very big.

It is letting my stranger-sister die. It is not railing against God for the injustice of it all but trusting that he has a beautiful plan. It’s knowing that found within her smile and her certain statement: I’m walking with Jesus now! is all the peace we seek.

It is thanking him for what he has brought me and for the opportunity to believe him for big, amazing miracles in the not-going-well project. Even in the midst of my tiredness and loneliness, in the middle of being small in the big city of accomplishments and painful relationships that whither and die, it is giving thanks.

It is looking at the empty spaces where the laughter used to be, and instead of sighing at its void, it’s looking for the face of God there. There, in the empty.

It’s imagining that there, in the vast, white, snow-bound empty there is the tiniest shoot of spring, relentlessly and insistently pushing its way through the frost. It’s that little shoot that gives us hope; this frail-looking, easily broken green and juicy thing, a stem of sunshine pushing up out of the frozen earth.

It’s hope. And sometimes hope is all we can hope for.