Bri K

Saturday, February 6, 2010
C.S. Lewis in “A Grief Observed,” reflecting on the death of his beloved wife said that no one ever told him that grief felt so much like fear. The idea has stuck with me. I sit at my favorite coffee shop at such a strange and undirected juncture in my life looking out the window and poised with a pen. I realize that I am so incredibly full of fear…and that this fear is my grief. In fact, I find myself grieving my story because for the past seven years it seems that the good keeps dying. Time after time things have begun in beauty and ended in ashes–began in hope and ended in disappointment. I review these years and see break after break, wound after wound, death after death…spiritually, relationally, physically, emotionally, in ministry. I’m grieving that my story is not what I hoped for…grieving that my perpetual hope for a season of singing is fulfilled for a time and then ends in another season of mourning. Sometimes I feel like a rat in a cage running after a heart that won’t break, a world without pain. I think I’m grieving that my story may never be written as I want it to be (or at least as I think I want it to be, if I even knew my own true want). I think I’m grieving again that I’m not the Author. I’m grieving what I am afraid of. I grieve fear. I’m grieving that still in my heart is even an inkling of distrust after all these years and after all His faithfulness. I’m grieving that it’s so hard to hope anymore. I grieve that I fear hope. I grieve that I’ve begun to expect only brokenness from life or from Him or from some mixture of the two. I grieve that I’m so afraid of pain. I’m at a loss about loss, I’m breaking over brokenness, pained over pain, disappointed over disappointment, grieving grief. Why? Bonehoeffer says it well,

“We have said that what is pleasureful and good is submerged in that which is painful and evil, and vice-versa. But exactly what is painful in pleasure? It is that in all pleasure man desires eternity, and that he knows pleasure is transitory and has an end…What is the evil in good? It is that the good dies. What is the good in evil? It is that the evil dies. What is the division, the torn condition of the world and of man in tob [full of pleasure] and ra [full of pain]? It is the dying, in pleasure and pain of man himself.”

I think for the past seven years the Lord has been teaching me how to die…die long, die deep and receive from Him both pleasure and pain with full faith in His goodness and the crazy depth of His love. And in the dying I’ve been learning Him, knowing Him and truly knowing His love as I never have before.

Seven years ago I spent a summer in Washington D.C. Long story short, I met a woman on the street named Coletta and the Lord changed my life through her. She burst out of the Starbucks I sat in, weeping like you just don’t weep in public. I followed her. I asked questions. I listened. And the deep sorrow of her heart and the questions in her pain plagued me. Even as I spoke of hope somehow it seemed somewhat shallow or naive. When I got back to Portland the Lord spoke very clearly a commission that has marked the years since, “Bri, I want you to be gripped by the pain of this world and the questions people ask everyday. I want you to be gripped by this pain to the same extent that you are gripped with the truth of my Word, otherwise you will never communicate truth in a way that meets the depth of human need. You will offer band-aids for festering wounds. I want you to be gripped with pain–gripped with the questions.”

So I think that in these past years I’ve been gripped by pain in my own life and in the lives of others, asking questions not as theological constructs but from the depth of human experience as desperate heart cries. I’ve been learning to die. I think that all along Christ was teaching his disciples how to die…trying to tell them that following meant dying…that true life meant death. I think He does the same now. And I really do believe, even if I do not feel, that this death is my life, this sorrow is my joy, this desolation is my rebirth.

Right now I think the Lord is asking me to embrace the reality of my story…of the story He is writing in me and through me. He isn’t asking me to resign and be defeated by the pain and brokenness of these years and huddle up in a corner because perseverance is so crazy exhausting. He is asking me to fix my hope firmly FOR Him and accept the lack of resolution and all the unanswerable questions that brokenness often creates–that life often brings. But He is asking me to do so as a conqueror, to do so in victory, to do so in joy. And this is one of the innumerable and utterly difficult paradoxes of faith. I’ve never known so many paradoxes as I have found in discipleship, even while I know that it is only to us that things even appear to be paradox. My incongruent vision.

Bonehoffer continues his thought,
“The man who knows of tob [pleasure] and ra [pain] at the same moment knows of his death…death is never nothingness, but is only the living God…there is indeed no such thing as nothingness…the promise of death is never nothingness, but only means of life, Christ himself”

Death is never nothingness. My sleepless nights started when I was really young. I used to lie in bed as a little girl, think of heaven and be scared to death because all I could envision was the LACK, the ABSENCE of life. All that I could picture was nothingness…an eternal void. But if I have learned anything as the brokenness cyclically penetrates to bring me further into His grace and deeper in the freedom of submission, it is this: death with Him, as excruciating, miserable and even hopeless it feels to be, is ALWAYS more life. Always it is Him. Love wins.

Extra excerpts that remind me of THE story:
C.S. Lewis “The Problem of Pain”: “We were made not primarily that we may love God (though we were made for that too) but that God may love us…Our highest activity must be response, not initiative. To experience the love of God in a true, and not an illusory form, is therefore to experience it as our surrender…”

The prophet Hosea, Chapter 14 Verse 4 “I will heal their waywardness and love them freely…”

Paul’s second letter to the Church in Corinth, Chapter 5
“For Christ’s love compels us, because one died for all and therefore all died. And he died for all, that those who live should no longer live for themselves but for him who died for them and was raised again.”

The Revelation of John, Chapter 21
“He said to me, ‘It is done, I am the Alpha and omega, the Beginning and the End. To him who is thirsty I will give to drink without cost from the spring of the water of life.”

The prophet Isaiah, Chapter 62
“For Zion’s sake I will not keep silent, for Jerusalem’s sake I will not remain quiet, till her righteousness shines out like the dawn, her salvation like a blazing torch. The nations will see your righteousness, and all the kings your glory; you will be called by a new name which the mouth of the Lord will bestow. No longer will they call you Deserted, or name your land Desolate. But you will be called Hephzibah (My delight is in her) and your land Beulah (Married)…The Lord has made proclamation to the ends of the earth: ‘Say to the Daughter of Zion, ‘See your Savior comes! See, his reward is with him and his recompense accompanies him.’ They will be called the Holy People, the Redeemed of the Lord; and you will be called Sought After, the City No Longer Deserted.’”