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.