“When life is sweet, say thank you and celebrate. When life is bitter, say thank you and grow.” -Shauna Niequist
I read this quote the other day, and it stuck with me.
I won’t bore you with all the details of these past few months. I won’t rehash Perú and the sneaky lies that crept in about me and my leadership or the way the sun felt strong on my skin sitting outside the church, numbly. I don’t have to tell you about Bolivia, the way the rain fell from the sky and we looked for cover and the wall I leaned up against. The highest altitude and the harsh words of criticism left me breathless and crying. Or about Chile and the hopelessness I felt about my friendships and the couple times I sat on the side of the road crying at various hours of the day and night and the sweet “angels” as I like to call them, who asked me if I was okay. I don’t have to tell you about all of these, but I gained some understanding of this season as I sat on the subway for the 100th time this month. I crave these moments of clarity and understanding. My emotions have been everywhere and I’ve been mad at myself for not being able to control them.
“The middle-described as the fog, the exhaustion, the loneliness, the daily battle against despair and the nagging fear that tomorrow will be just like today, but you’ll be wearier and less able to defend yourself against it. The middle is the place where you can’t find the words to say how you feel, when you try to connect but you feel like thick glass is separating you from the rest of the world. I’m not sure if there is anything that can make time pass more quickly when you’re in this place, and I don’t know if anything good comes from trying to explain how you feel, when you are so confused yourself.”
Even the sweetest of things were weighed down by fear and anxiety and exhaustion. I remember one night at the hostel, we laughed and ate spaghetti and bought sodas for everyone and in the morning when I burned the eggs I was making for a teammate, I almost burst into tears, overwhelmed by something that completely did not matter. With teammates one day, I got my feelings awfully hurt, not because anyone was cruel, but because those days I was so tender and raw that practically everything hurt. Music or conversations would make me weepy, and I’m not talking about music like Adele’s new song that makes everyone feel all the feels. I’m just talking about normal, everyday stuff.
I start crying on the park bench and I don’t know why. All I can muster to say to myself is, “I just want to be happy!” through my tears and runny nose. It seems like such an honest human thing to say. When we’re tired, tried, and angry, isn’t that what we all want?
During this time, I prayed for it to be over, not to grow from this. I prayed for things to just be fixed, not for healing or a process of redemption. I wasn’t interested in learning something about patience or endurance.
As a team, I think we need to keep in mind that life and God and pain will instruct us when necessary, and that all the hard things under the sun could use an extra round of listening, another dose of understanding, and double portion of grace. As community, we have to be committed to helping each other through hard moments, rather than pouring salt in wounds and touching on tender spots, our immaturity and pride disguised as altruistic desire to see the other grow. Life will teach us things, and there are times for friendship to teach us things, but there are also times for friendship to be a sweet, safe landing spot when life is instructing us rather brutally.
Through all of this, I learned that one of my fears is that people would think that I can’t handle as much as the next person. I learned that I wish I could define myself to be the strong one, the capable one, the one who doesn’t make a fuss of things. But sometimes I am not that person. Sometimes, I am tender, and sensitive and feel hallowed out.
I don’t really want to need grace. I can see now that I have never really been comfortable with the idea. I don’t really trust that people will show me grace. I don’t show myself grace very well, and when I’m doing poorly I don’t show it to anyone else well either.
And then the month changed and I was now living, working, doing life with another team/new people. People who started this journey with me in January. And Argentina is just indescribably beautiful. We live on some crazy number of acres on a farm that is full of olive trees and flowers budding everywhere you look. It’s springtime here; newness is sprouting from the ground. I take daily walks by the creek and I have two 4-legged faithful running companions. I sit in the sun, with my coffee and find a comfy place to read. When we need food, I hop on a bike with my friends and drive down to the corner store where the workers already know us after the time we made homemade pizzas for like 20 people and we ran to the store 4 times for more cheese or something. For a few days, there were 15 of us World Racers living on this beautiful hostel/farm. Fifteen. Fifteen of my people. We all took turns preparing food for one another, and ate around a long wooden table, family style, passing food down and around until everyone had enough. We came together as community, to feed one another’s bodies, and spirits, and to serve one another in the simple act of providing nourishment. When I’m being careless, I chalk it all up to this one change. But it hasn’t been just that. It was a hundred things that got broken along the way, and then a hundred moments to put them back together again. It was prayer, friendship, work, writing, patience, discipline and some nights spent sipping wine. It was gifts I didn’t deserve and hard choices I made, ones that made me proud of myself. I began to pray with more hope and possibility and slowly, some of the stuck things became unstuck. Everyday, life became sweeter again, and the little things didn’t make me cry nearly as much.
I leaned to practice believing in springtime. New life will spring from this same old ground.
Now that I have let a few things go, I’m finding all sort of things blooming into life again. The things I used to laugh about that stopped being funny for a while, are now, thank the heavens, funny again.
Our hearts are more elastic than we think, and the work of forgiveness and transformation and growth can do things that I couldn’t imagine from where I stood.
When you stay with something instead of walking away, it builds something new inside of you, something solid and weighty, something durable. But you have to wait for it and earn it the hard way.
I believe our past is what brings us to our future. These things are shaping me and (hopefully) bringing me to something good, and life-giving and meaningful. We have to walk through challenging times and choose to believe we’ll find something important each time.
I see moments of heartbreak that led to honesty about myself I wouldn’t have been able to get to any other way. As I walk through this season, I’m trying to remember to search for light. Knowing the more I look for it, the more I will find it.
The harder I look, the more thankful I am for what I learned, what I became, what God gave me and what God took away during that season.
Today starts November. Officially my last month on the race. I am in disbelief that this crazy adventure ends soon and that before I know it I will be eating sweet potato pie with my family. Thank you for all the support and prayers!
Love, Sonny
