Victory Song

Easter has always been one of my favorite holidays.  As a kiddo, it meant a visit from the Easter bunny and going to my grandparents house for our now infamous Easter egg hunt.  When I say infamous, what you need to know is that this Easter egg hunt has been going on since before I was born.  Everyone is required to participate.  So, as kids, my brother and I would have my other grandmother do practice Easter egg hunts with us so that we would be ready to compete against my aunts and uncles.  This Easter egg hunt is serious business, and we all still participate.  Last year, I finally laid claim to the title of winner.  It is a tradition that I look forward to every year with excitement and the proper amount of respect for the competition at hand.
Easter has been different this year.  I know that this statement is true for pretty much everyone else as well. We did not get to have our egg hunt.  We did not get to gather as a family.  We as Christians did not get to gather in churches to celebrate a day that is about far more than just bunnies.  We all had to find new ways to celebrate and new traditions to implement.  I don't know about you, but I needed Easter to be different this year.  I am sad to not be attempting to defend my egg hunting title and celebrating with my church family, but I needed Easter to be different this year.  I needed Easter to be about more than bunnies, candy, egg hunts, and Easter dresses; I needed it to be more than gathering with my church family to remember and celebrate the risen Lord.  I need Easter to be real.  I need it to be as real as the air I am breathing. I need the hope of Easter as the anchor of my soul.  For so many of us,  our souls have been and are currently being tossed about by the waves of this world.  It seems like every time I turn the news on there is more grief and more pain than the day before.  Also, for the record, 2020 has been a highly traumatic year for us collectively as human beings, and that's not even mentioning the personal traumas we have lived through.  My heart and soul are weary.  My heart and soul need an anchor.
When dad passed away nine months ago, I was in the middle of teaching a class at church.  I had been planning different pieces of the class in a notebook that I had gotten from one of my favorite companies that makes devotionals.  The notebook had been created to accompany the Lent study from the year prior.  The notebook went with me many days to the hospital, and it was what I had on hand as we made funeral arrangements.  In the middle of the notebook is a quote from St. Augustine.  "We are an Easter people and 'alleluia' is our song."  This quote, in a strange way, became a lifeline for me.  It reminded me that even in  the shadow of death, we can still sing because we are an Easter people.  It reminded me that death does not get the final say because Jesus stepped out of the grave crushing death and its power on the way out. Easter means that all of those that I/you have lost this year and years previously are not lost forever.  One day, there will be a great feast, and we will all be reunited.  We will cry and laugh and sing and shout and be filled with joy unending because death died that day.  It may win battles now, but its fate has already been decided and sealed.  Easter means that we can rise in the face of death because it does not get the final word.  Easter means that we can constantly have a victory song on our lips because victory has been handed to us through Jesus.  His work set us free.  Easter itself is the hope that anchors our soul, but it is not just our hope, it is our victory song.

Loss, Grief, and Pain

It's been a long time since I've posted, and the honest answer as to why is life.  In full disclosure, life these last 8 months has been incredibly painful.  It started with the sudden and painful loss of my father in July.  My dad was 58.  It was never supposed to have gone that way.  Two weeks after that one of my mom's cousins lost her daughter in a tragic car crash.  Over the next several months, there have been other losses, just of a smaller scale.  Most of them being associated with having your world turned upside down by trauma and grief.  This whole process has been very strange as well because I am living through it as myself, but I'm also living through it as a licensed therapist.  I started having flashbacks a few weeks after dad's funeral.  For me the human, those were difficult to live through and could sometimes lead to panic attacks.  For me the therapist. I tried remembering that those could eventually go away because I was not six months removed from the traumatic event and that this was probably just my brain trying to process.

I got to go on a lovely weekend trip to Colorado that was so soul refreshing to come home to my dog of 15.5 years taking a turn for the worse.  I also ended up sick from my trip, and a few days later found out that my office building had been sold, and I would need to relocate. After a month of caring for my elderly dog, he passed away a few days before Christmas. Going into the new year, I had hoped life would be different, but it has seemed that the losses keep coming.  Last month my mom lost a close friend, and Monday morning, I found out that my counselor of 4.5 years had passed away.  My heart was already broken going into Tuesday when I awoke to the news that parts and people of my city were gone.  So many lives were lost, and parts of the city I love have been destroyed.  I am blessed because I am not directly affected, but at the same time it feels like another loss. I hurt because my city hurts. I hurt because beautiful people are now gone and so many have lost everything else.  And my heart keeps asking the question can I get up? How do we rise?

I turned 30 in June right before all of this.  I was feeling a little apprehensive about about "being so old," so I turned to the Lord to frame it for me.  I asked him for a word.  I wanted a word that would reign over my 30th year of life.  He immediately gave me celebrate, not the noun version of celebration, but the command and verb, celebrate.  Normally, the Lord is kind enough to give me a verse to go with my word, but this time, I did not get one.  That is until the beginning of this year.

"Yet, I will celebrate in the Lord; I will rejoice in the God of my salvation."  

Habakkuk 3:18 

Right now, in my life, I feel like I have lost so much, and in my city, there are people who have lost so much, some, literally everything.  How does one celebrate in the face of such tragedy?  How does one celebrate in the Lord, especially when you are even potentially questioning his existence or goodness? But, then, I remembered to take a step back and zoom out on that verse in Habakkuk.

"Though the fig tree does not bud, 

and there are no grapes on the vine,

though the olive crop fails, and the fields produce no food,

though there are no sheep in the pen

and no cattle in the stalls,

yet, I will celebrate in the Lord; I will rejoice in the God of my salvation." 

Habakkuk 3:17-18

Verse 18 is written after the writer listed everything that was going horribly wrong.  I mean I don't have fig trees, but my world has been shaken to the core. I have not lost everything, but sometimes it feels that way, and some truly have. The command to celebrate is not about God saying ignore the pain.  I feel like, for me at least, the command to celebrate is a way of rising up in the face of pain, tragedy, loss, heartache, grief, all of it.  Celebrating in the Lord is about looking at the horror and not ignoring it, but looking beyond it to God.  It is a deep clinging to the hope and faith of who God is and all that He can do.  It is looking to Him to bring beauty from the ashes and rubble, to rebuild and restore, to make us ones who are known as people who can rebuild anything. I have to choose to celebrate in the Lord.  I have to choose to rise up.  I have to look at the beautiful flower and receive its beauty, even with the tornado damage behind it.  Although, it feels like I have nothing, I have to remember that I can still celebrate in my God. And, sometimes we celebrate with tears in our eyes and an ache in our hearts, but none the less, we celebrate.