The Beautiful Year We Lost Everything

In the same black year, I had two male friends get burned in relationships they thought might end in marriage, one female friend smacked down by unrequited love, another friend file for divorce, and not to be outdone, I surpassed my personal record of dating rejections. Among my friends, breakups were followed by new relationships, ending in new breakups. My brother, a married man with expenses, lost his job, one couple moved apart for scholastic reasons, a friend nearly died in a freak accident, and two husbands entered the military as their wives learned to be single moms for the duration of basic training. I attended no weddings that year. Only funerals.

Movies and social media lead us to believe in fairy tale relationships with happy endings, but even those who seem to have it all, who marry their high school sweethearts and dress up together for Halloween, have struggles and hardships we know nothing about. The rest of us hurt in more obvious ways. We try to believe, but there is no guarantee relationships will get easier or better, whatever our definition of better happens to be. 

We want to believe life won’t screw us over and we’ll be happier later, but sometimes it does and we aren’t. The beauty and joy of life mix with the fear and pain, and no one leaves without scars. Your path is just as hard for you as mine is for me, and though my path is perhaps littered with more poetic irony, we each have a difficult road with pain striking us in ways no one else can understand. 

God always seems to know what will hurt the most. He did not spare His Son, and He does not spare us. When God overtakes someone’s life, He asks for everything, but especially those things we care about most. Abraham spent his whole life hoping for a son, and when he finally got one, God asked Abraham to give him up. The rich young ruler loved money and possessions, and Jesus told him to give everything he had to the poor. 

I care about leaving an impact, and God asks me to embrace my insignificance. I care about knowing answers to the Big Questions and God calls me to places of uncertainty. I am obsessed with the female mystique, and at twenty-four, having never even been on a proper date, I have a sneaking suspicion God is trying to tell me something.

He always asks for the one thing we want to hold onto most, because it’s never about the thing; it’s about our hearts. Am I willing to lose what I desire most because He is what I desire most? When I give it up, sometimes He gives it back, and sometimes He doesn’t. I don’t get to make that call, and it doesn’t really matter either way, because either way I have Him.

If I lose the whole world and everything I ever wanted, but gain Christ, I will have found something far better than anything I could have imagined. I know that intellectually, but I don’t always believe it, and I certainly don’t feel it. This, I suppose, is where faith comes in. Believing His way is better, even when my way feels better and His way hurts.

We use these moral terms – “I feel good,” “I had a bad day” – to describe things relating to our comfort and preferences, not morality. When “bad” things happen to me, I question God’s goodness, but is it really a bad thing, or does it just hurt? The Lord gives and the Lord takes away. I would prefer more blessings and less pain, but it’s all grace if it draws me to Him. 

So I wonder, looking back, if maybe it was a good year, after all. 

J.

Oct. 29, 2019