resurrection finds you

on happiness (and a personal announcement!)

A time comes when you wonder if unequivocal happiness is somehow behind you. You wonder if the simple feeling of waking up to a life that’s not a constant struggle might be only for the naive and the unfathomably privileged; if it might it be your lot in life to just be a sad and tired person.

It is subtly, but crucially, different from the anhedonia and exhaustion of clinical depression, even if it’s accompanied by depression.¹ It’s more of a sense that life is terribly hard, that it has been hard for a long time, and that life may always outpace by just an inch your ability to truly cope with it. That total depletion is the inescapable price of adulthood and awake-ness in your time and place.

There is a head-shaking and a fog-clearing I see so many of us still trying to do as we are each finding our own way toward an uncertain pandemic future—after such loss and isolation, with these impossible systems and politics to navigate, with so many of our hopes dashed for what disaster might call forth from society. Can we make something of these weary waters? Do we dare dream, still, of living human-shaped lives?

Laura Jean Truman

wrote last week about how weary the Palm Sunday worshippers must have been. They didn’t want a king because they were bloodthirsty and bored. They clamored to be saved, saved from oppression and dehumanization, from exploitation and occupation, and from the constant nagging question: If God loved God’s chosen people so, why did they have so little to show for it?

How much more exhausted must Mary have been, only a week later, stumbling to the tomb after a short and fitful sleep. Finally she didn’t know what to do except to go to the garden while it was still dark.

---

My last six years has comprised a litany of personal losses, failures, and frustrations. Perhaps it would be simplest to say that after three years of physical and mental health struggles, I was finally beginning to see and feel the light—when the pandemic hit.

For all this time, I wanted desperately for someone to take me by the shoulders and say: lightness is coming for you again. There is more to this life than fighting to stay whole. You will know the belonging you dream of. You will smile in that way you can almost taste, but that feels just on the other side of a windowpane.

And so let me be the one to testify, if only to my once and future self: uncomplicated joy has snuck up on me in its own time! A break has actually come in the litany of losses. I feel right-sized within the world; I feel like myself, like a much truer and bolder and more adaptable self. I don’t mean I have left all those old sorrows and selves behind, but that they are allowed to be part of me and I am allowed to keep changing and flowing and deepening, but also lightening, with the seasons.

And I have never felt quite so much like a miracle, because I am 22 weeks pregnant today. As I write this, I realize Nate and I spent half our marriage—over three years—carrying the heavy, invisible burden of infertility. And now I am carrying a fluttering, hiccupping baby instead.²

It matters, too, I think, that we are back in the hills that formed us—I here and he in the Adirondacks near the other far end of this ancient Appalachian range. It matters that it has been such a novel and gentle experience to move to a place where we are already known and loved, where we can know and love. For a long time I have lived with an ache for this landscape and these people, our family and friends. To actually be here is like finally wearing clothes that fit, like opening the window shades. I am dogwood and field pea and hymn sing; I was never going to be shrimp and grits.³

All of this—the external circumstances and the internal ability to profoundly rejoice—feels like we helped it happen and like we didn’t at all. I have some guesses about how we made choices that nudged our trajectory one way or another, but I have no evidence to prove or disprove those guesses. Equal parts intentional, patient action and desperate, blind hope have led us here, to this surprise clearing, to a springtime that is more than desperate relief; it is also a celebration, a breeze, a dance. To the renewed knowledge that as much as sorrow is an inherent part of life, so does the fabric of happiness belong in the patchwork pattern.

---

Many years of my life I’ve been deeply invested in playing out the drama of the Lent and Easter seasons in my own days. I think this is worthwhile, not just because it teaches us personal “lessons” or is aesthetically pleasing, but also simply because it connects to a global and historical people of God through stories and practices more powerful than words. But this year I had no interest, and no interest in making myself develop an interest. I didn’t ponder sin and mortality. I failed at my Lenten discipline. Instead, I bought a bag of jelly beans and waited until Easter morning to eat them.

So I was surprised—and surprised all over again on each succeeding day—to find myself in tears, in rejoicing, deeply moved and deeply carrying the stories and presence of God with me throughout an ordinary Holy Week observed at unfamiliar churches. The Palm Sunday service affected me. The Good Friday service gripped me. And the Easter service overwhelmed me with joy—each in turn, anew, without my expectation or preparation.

Because Holy Week is not about me and my efforts to ponder it. Holy Week declares the mystery of faith: Christ has died; Christ has risen; Christ will come again. Resurrection comes. Resurrection comes again and again. As inexorable as tragedy and exhaustion can be, beauty and belonging and ease will also come to find us if we let them.

I don’t mean that God promises to magically solve all our problems. I don’t mean that we will not make strange frenemies with certain lifelong sorrows. And I don’t mean at all that resurrection is diametrically opposed to death, or happiness⁴ to grief. Resurrection has woven death into a story that once seemed irredeemable. And so the depth of our capacity for happiness depends upon the depth of our capacity for grief.

I only mean that things change, and sometimes they change for the good, and usually all we can do to bring about the good is to dance with the change as best we can. To listen to the music of the longings of our hearts. To let the season of sorrow be what it is, and trust that some ground is being tilled here and something might come of our faithfulness.

And sometimes all we can do is even less than that: to survive.

On the first day of the week Mary stumbled out of her restless bed and took a walk in the dark without hope.

And when she arrived at her destination, resurrection had gotten there first.
"Mary,” He said.
Because she had not been forgotten.
Because happiness’ own time is not as we would expect.

peace, love, bread, and wine,
Lyndsey

1. Just a note that I think it’s quite valuable to name distinctions between spirituality/life itself and diagnosable mental health struggles, even if they constantly remain intertwined. Today I’m taking the risk of talking here mostly about the former to the exclusion of the latter.

2. This whole essay is really mostly about infertility and the baby. Our baby! Eeeeeeeee! What?! I am still crying and laughing and grinning all the time. If the baby seems a little like a side-note, I suppose I’ve been searching for a joyful but also gentle way to share our news while knowing so many still wait. I promise to write more about pregnancy and motherhood (although no plans to become a full-on mommy blogger [EVEN THOUGH I LOVE MOMMY BLOGGERS] as of now).

3. I’ve been pondering for months the terrible unfairness that usually when you move away from a place, you have been grieving it very quietly already for a long time before you tell anyone else that you are leaving. So for all my complaining about our time in Charleston—whose worst parts really had little to do with Charleston—let me say how thoroughly responsible our dearest Charleston friends have been for most all of the many and profound moments of peace and happiness that we also experienced there. We miss them so.

4. I’ve run out of room to mount a “defense” of happiness; I think I’m more convinced than most people I know that happiness is a central goal of human life as God has given it to us. I have lots of reasons. But absent a defense, I’ll just flag that “happiness” is indeed the word I mean to use in this essay!

---

Here is a book about dancing with change! Also, right now the audiobook is $11.99 (40% off!) at this link.