In Celebration

 I hold in my hands a birthday card, filled with love and warm wishes, from the mother of my dear Alex. The irony hits me with full force, and I find my eyes welling up a bit as I reflect on the fact that she can no longer shower her only son with birthday love yet here she is, choosing to give it to one of his dearest friends. I feel deeply honored because I know these things must be bittersweet. 

This moments gets me thinking about celebration. The days leading up to now have been filled with some happiness and, for the first time in years, I feel like I'm able to be fully alive and fully present to the joy being offered right here: singing and dancing at a long-anticipated concert, fielding calls and texts from sweet ones thinking of my special day, reading all the written words of love and kindness from hearts I am proud to call my people. It's been good all around. 

Yet, I wonder if celebration is strictly limited to things we consider positive. Are we only allowed to celebrate what we deem is happy, expected, or good? Author Henri Nouwen, whose book I happen to be plowing through, doesn't seem to think so. In fact, he offers up that celebration is simply "an ongoing awareness that every moment is special and asks to be lifted up and recognized as a blessing from on high." He even goes so far as to propose that this can happen in sad moments as well. That, since joy is not just for parts of life but for all of it, even great losses and crosses can be celebrated - not because they are somehow desired but because of what they produce in us and through us as a result. 

Perhaps this goes back to what I've felt for a long time: that there is a certain gratitude - a type of embracing - that accompanies suffering. That, in order for it to do its best work in our heart, it must be received as a sort of gift. It must be viewed as a minister of good, even if the situation itself isn't necessarily considered good. It has to be taken as vehicle of God's purpose in accomplishing goodness in the earth and in us since He, by His very nature, is nothing but good. This means that any sufferer has to walk into their pain with a level of surrender, knowing that this will somehow be redeemed and that even moments like these demand we hold them up and receive them as agents of blessings, however difficult. 

How you move through pain is an act of the will - you either see it as a threat or you welcome it as a gift. 

There is no in-between. 

If there's one thing I've come to realize as I've processed my own share of hardship it's that even the greatest brokenness - even the worst darkness and the harshest providences - still ask us to believe that there is new life to be found on the other side of their visitation. The resurrection of Jesus from the dead is the ultimate example: the proof that freedom and victory are products of endurance in the testing, of hoping in the waiting. And the greatest endings are always proceeded by the greatest traumas and tragedies. 

This doesn't mean that we fail to acknowledge our pain or that we brush it off with some glib platitude. Suffering won't allow us to dismiss it or deny it. But it does mean that we go into it and through it with something other that mere fatalism. Our resignation isn't because we're giving into the inevitable and concluding that this hardship is God's curse or judgement. Rather, our surrender is rooted in the infallible truth that God knows best. That God must give the permission for suffering to visit us. That the simple fact we were not given a choice in this happening means we must rest in the perfect knowledge of Him who rules the world. We must admit that this too can be a blessing from Him in disguise, even as it may hurt us beyond belief. 

I know these are hard things to trust in... hard things to agree to. But they are true things, all the same. And this is why sufferers can find reasons to hope. Challenges, losses, changes, difficulties of all kinds can befall any human at any time. They are inescapable. Yet God calls us to still give such moments their due acknowledgment as instruments of His purpose. He still asks that we "celebrate" them in the sense that we take joy in the assurance that death and destruction no longer have the final say, though their devastation remains prevalent. As followers of Him who once endured His cross, we can look at all these things and know that He is always present with us as we carry our own. 

The key to moving forward after massive things in any of our lives is finding ways to turn our isolation, our grief, our rejection, our pain into celebration - taking all the destruction and havoc it has wreaked on our personal story and discovering the hidden goodness, the disguised blessing, the necessary gift it is bringing to us in the midst. This looks different for each of us but it is a needed step. We have to learn how to accept what is placed in our hands, even when what God has given appears to be horrible. 

 No suffering is so bad that you will be able to be ripped out of God's care. Believe that!

This is what is means to remain in Jesus's love as He told us so His joy could be in us and our joy could be completed (John 15: 9, 11)... a love so strong that "neither death nor life, neither angels or demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation" can separate us from it (Romans 8:38-39).

I re-read the sentiments inside the card and realize we're all carving out a new life without Alex. We're figuring out how to smile and give thanks. His mom is finding ways to still mother others like me even as she will always mourn the absence of her son. I too am discovering avenues of loving those left behind while still carrying the loss of my best friend and brother. 

Maybe it's true that life doesn't necessarily have to be positive in order to be celebratory. Maybe "rejoice at all times" (1 Thess. 5:16) isn't just a command for when things are going well. Maybe it's as much, if not more so, a command and a promise for when things are hard because this lifting up and calling the pain blessed is simply following the pattern of Jesus when He too looked up and gave thanks as He broke (Luke 9:16). As always, maybe goodness comes in less obvious ways and it's up to us to take a closer look.