It doesn’t matter that I have been out of school for ten years: no matter what, life still seems to run on somewhat of an academic calendar. May continues to feel like a season of transition and marking the end of something, while the fall often feels like a new beginning. I have thought about this a lot as I approach my own season of transition and endings/beginnings with getting married this year.
One thing that has surprised me is that even in the midst of great joy and anticipation of marriage to the person I love, I have been feeling a fair amount of grief as well. Though I have been looking forward to this day for a long time, I am also acknowledging that with every YES we give (regardless of how emphatic it is), it comes with having to say NO and letting go of other paths. After ten years of living alone, I am saying YES to cohabitating with my partner, and I grieve as I let go of my home that I bought myself and carefully furnished exactly as I wanted it to be. I am saying YES to sharing life with another person, and I still wrestle with saying goodbye to the quiet comfort of solitude to which I have become accustomed. It’s GOOD grief, but still grief.
In my role as a pastor, I am very comfortable with walking alongside others and helping them accept the conflicting feelings that come up in big moments in their lives: sadness and relief when a loved one dies after a long, difficult illness; anxiety and joy when a family finds out they are expecting a child; excitement and grief when a colleague accepts a new call to ministry and wonders how to leave well. We rarely, if ever, feel just one pure emotion: it’s usually a complicated mixture of many different ones all at once. I am happy to be the person who gently reminds others of this reality. Funny how it’s always harder to extend that same grace and acceptance to myself!
As people of faith, we live into that constant in-between of the “already” and the “not yet”. We live and breathe in those seasons of in-between, transition, and conflicting emotions. We are a people who embrace the many shades of ambiguity, even when we desperately wish life was more clear-cut.
I think about Ecclesiastes 3, which says there is a season and a time for everything under heaven. There is a time for giving birth and a time for dying, a time for planting and a time for uprooting, a time for crying and a time for laughing, a time for mourning and a time for dancing. What I often fail to remember is that often those times are not mutually exclusive. We live in the messiness of overlap when we are both crying and laughing at the same time, or when we are dancing with joy even while we mourn. I get to be simultaneously sad and happy about my current situation; the God who is always with us meets me in the complexity of these dissimilar emotions.When I feel like I am holding so much that I don’t know how I could possibly keep from spilling over, I give thanks that God is there in the “both/and” of it all.
Through each transition of life, I pray that we will each give ourselves and others permission to feel it all. May God meet us in those spaces of fullness and contradictions. And may we be the fellow travelers who remind one another that we do not carry these feelings alone.
