Where Does It Hurt?

I’d prefer to not answer this question and instead spend the time listening to others spill their guts about where they hurt. Answering the question requires a check-in with myself when I prefer avoidance and pretending everything is fine.

Like many of you have also experienced, these past few years have been a bumpy ride with losses. Some that can be named in public – like the death of my grandmother last fall, and some private as they’re entwined with stories that aren’t mine to share.

Meanwhile, I’d much rather distract myself from feeling where something hurts. I’d rather keep busy and white-knuckle my way through to the other side. What I’m learning is that whatever hurts is still there – whether I choose to acknowledge it or not. It just comes out sideways when I don’t allow my body space to feel it and process it.

The stories we will hear in worship in these two weeks—Hannah’s story and the hemorrhaging woman-- are painful ones for me. Probably because they are adjacent to my infertility story, but my story remains unresolved and in flux. And these stories leave me with awkward questions for God who didn’t show up in the way I had hoped.

I tend to bottle up these questions, along with the disappointments and losses--probably as an attempt to not be “needy.” What I’m realizing is that in making space for myself to name what hurts and feel it – sorrow, anger and all, I make space for authentic connection because I stop hiding my humanness from myself and others closest to me.

And somehow weirdly, as I make space for grief, I’ve widened my capacity for joy.

In my journals lately, I notice the angry questions and lament tangled with wild delight and dogged noticing of simple moments of possibility and wonder:  flowers budding, the maple leaves turning red in my neighborhood, the sweet smell of the basswood in the breeze, the flock of juvenile turkeys greeting me on my way into the office, a phone call that promises a story isn’t finished quite yet.

As an unapologetic book nerd, here are a few resources that have been helpful in my own journey of naming and navigating loss this past year:

·         Grief Is Love by Marisa Renee Lee

·         No Cure for Being Human by Kate Bowler

·         What We Wish Were True by Tallu Schuyler Quinn

·         In the Shelter by Padraig O Tuama

- Beth McGrew-King