bleeding out loud

Last week I was working on a piece of writing about suffering well. The piece was nearly finished, but I was racking my brain trying to figure out how to end it. Endings are the hardest for me, and that seems to be true pretty much across the board; sermons, writing, relationships, etc.

I was wrestling with the question that all communicators would do well to wrestle with. “So what?” I wanted to find a way to show what suffering well looked like and why it mattered, but for whatever reason nothing was coming to me. And I had the sense that the words, the image, whatever it was ultimately going to be, was something I already possessed. I just needed to locate it. “Just wait. You already have what you’re looking for. It’ll come,” the Spirit seemed to say. So I shut my computer and headed for home.

When I walked through the doors, I saw this.

“Can I show you what I did?” Trisha asked. In a little less than an hour, some friends were coming over for a Christmas party. Throughout the Fall we’d gotten together six or seven times with three other couples, mostly to drink wine and to spend intentional time with each other. All of us have kids and don’t have much time or energy to be intentional with but still felt that being with other people on purpose was something we needed to do. Our goal was simple: Get together six times in the Fall, drink wine, and answer two questions: What in the last year has been really great? What in the last year has been really hard? I don’t think any of us expected it to be so holy.

So as Trisha was putting the house together for the party, she wrote a series of short prayers on little pieces of paper, prayers that gave a subtle nod and wink to the things that each of us had shared.

She placed the prayers around some lit candles and in the center wrote a prayer that said, “We call upon your name. We bless you. We ask that you would be near to us and walk alongside us as we enter a new year. We love you.”

It was so moving to me. We remember…we remember…we remember…we remember. Our conversations through the Fall had been a form of suffering well, and these prayers of remembrance were an extension of that. But what struck me about these prayers is that they were a particular kind of remembering. Not the selective memory kind of remembering that shuts out the bad and only chooses to remember the good but an “and yet” kind of remembering that sees the bad exactly as it is, and goes on trusting that life can still be full even in the midst of those hard things.

“Be near to us and walk alongside us” the prayer in the center said, and surveying the dirty dishes and the half empty wine glasses later that night, it occurred to me that God had done just that.