Originally posted in my old newsletter, “It’s Hard Being Human,” on December 11th, 2021
If you’ve been following me on Instagram, or you know me in our personal lives, then you may know that the Sunday after Thanksgiving, my beloved grandpa went to be with Jesus. I’ve written a lot about grief here in these letters, but man, I’ve never known grief in this way. While a lot of it comes from a place that misses him, what I’m noticing is that most of it is this overall sense in my whole being that knows it’s not supposed to be this way — death happens to all of us, but it’s not supposed to be natural. We grieve so hard when we lose people we love, either to death or an end to a relationship, because something has been severed that was never meant to be severed: oneness.
I’ve come to see, however, that this kind of severing happens all the time:
- Love and oneness are severed when our childhood innocence suddenly becomes a faint memory.
- Love and oneness are severed when our closest friend turns their back.
- Love and oneness are severed when we stop showing up to our relationships.
- Love and oneness are severed when the one we promised to have and to hold till death us do part, parts, and takes half of ourselves with them to Eternity.
- Love and oneness are severed when we sit with ourselves long enough to notice a longing so deep, so innate, and know it can never be realized or met on this side of heaven.
Love and oneness are severed in broken places. We grieve so hard and pine for perfection because something’s been broken in us, too.
But praise be to God, this existential threat is not the end of the story, because Jesus comes with a promise:
Abide in Me, and I in you…as the Father has loved Me, so I have loved you. Abide in my love (John 15:4, 9 ESV).
Here’s a way back to Love Himself, a love, a oneness that can never be taken or severed, one that remains in the grief —
the kingdom that has come while we wait for the kingdom that is not yet —
a Love that makes hope burn, not without pain, but with confidence in the promise while we pine and we wait and we live in the middles.
We can still love because He first loved us when we severed it in the Beginning.
So, we remain soft and forgive and forgive, and show up and rest and wait, for this is how the kingdom of Love works —
this is how the world will see God —
Emmanuel, God with us, crowned in humility and honor, dressed for a war not with the humans, but with pride and condemnation and mockery; self-righteousness and legalism and god-complexes; deception and unfaithfulness and apathy.
We make war on what isn’t supposed to be this way with a Love that is bigger than ours, that keeps loving after loss.
“I hate waiting and I hate middles,” I said recently to someone.
“So she said in the middle of Advent,” she replied.
Hope, faith, joy, peace, love — these are available to us while we wait in the kingdom that is here, and prepare, with expectancy, for the one that is not yet.
Help us, O God, to love and keep loving, for in waiting and in wilderness You always come through, and we’ll never regret the moments we chose to love, even at the risk of great pain.
Thanks be to God.