Yesterday our small group, with whom we've been meeting for well over a decade (part of that group for 15 years now) got together as we are starting our Fall schedule. These are the people with whom we've done life. We've been through long-suffering with this group, as well as great joys. Somehow, sitting around with a group who has permission to ask the really probing questions just tapped the faucet for me. I deeply felt the pain of this summer, the loss, the weight of responsibility I shoulder, the weariness of our weekly forward march. I felt the exhaustion of having very little margin in our lives. I felt the cabin fever of invalids. I felt the loss the kids have experienced, my limits as a parent. The continued loss of the littlest things that pile up together.
I remember years ago Virginia Friesen saying that we don't as a culture allow ample time for post-op. Our bodies desperately need the time to recover, even when we think we feel "normal." We feel weak and sheepish if we are not back up on our feet right away. This is true of our minds and emotions as well. I think because so many things in our life had achieved a new routine, a new normal, I no longer had a place to grieve, to feel, to shed tears. I'm not sure I wanted to. I felt sheepish, indulgent, and ungrateful. And I've been doing what I myself preach against--comparing my suffering to the great suffering of others and belittling it in comparison.
When we were still at UCI, Steve was more emotional than he's ever been in his life. The meds he was on made him exceptionally emotional, not to mention the trauma. As he and I were crying together over the realization of some of the losses, Denise Geringer in her great wisdom said to us,"Tears are a gift to us. God gave us a mechanism of release for those emotions so that we don't store them in our bodies or our minds."
So today I am thankful that God is providing space for those tears to fall, reminding myself that there will be tears for some time to come. I think as an outsider looking in, seeing Steve's progress sets things into order, and checks off a box. With the advent of more global media, we develop sympathy fatigue and simply do not have the capacity to carry that much second-hand grief on our own shoulders. So as a culture we cling to good news and allow ourselves to check it off. Oh, your cancer isn't fatal? You had the surgery? Awesome, you're all done, back to normal. And yet, a part of yourself, an irreplaceable season of your life, is gone and can never be retrieved. The slate is not clean.
So as we bear one another's burdens, this does not mean that you must feel every feeling that your community feels, that you cannot feel joy that their prognosis is good. You do not have to enter completely into their suffering. As Ecclesiastes says, there is a time for everything. So if there is a time for tears, that also means there is a time for NOT tears. But we must also allow those who are suffering the space to shed the tears, even if it is far past the impact of their grief. It is okay not to cheer them up, but to let them shed the weight of grief a little bit. To exercise that gift God gave us of tears.
As for me, I will try to let others help me more, so that I can allow myself the time to feel what I need to feel. To give myself the space for those tears. If I don't, I can't make room for the joy God has in store for me as he gives us back more than we have lost. And in the end, he will indeed wipe away every single tear I've shed, and redeem this time a million-fold.
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| My view from Secret Spot #2. Cloudy today, so no Catalina for me. |
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