A few years back, I wrote a series of posts about my May memories related to my call to ministry, including our move from Indiana to Tennessee, my ordination at Grandview Christian Church, and my call to serve at Christ Community Church. #MayMinistryMemory. Those memories are a blessing, to be sure, and they remind me that God is still working in me and through me, even during times of discouragement.
I’m also reminded regularly on Facebook of some delightful memories in July. Often a vacation month, I’ve seen photos this month from trips to the Wisconsin Dells in 2022, Yellowstone and the Tetons in 2021, Peru in 2018, and Colorado in 2010. Our cross-country moves happened in mid-summer as well – we spent the summer of 2012 celebrating a bucket list of fun in Indiana before we moved to Tennessee, and the move to Omaha in 2018 included a #WestwardHo trip visiting friends and family through Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, and Oklahoma. We love to travel, and seeing these photo memories pop up brings a lot of joy.
That’s what social media thrives on. We tend to post the most enjoyable moments of our lives – the celebrations, the trips, the friends, the reunions, the restaurants. It’s great to enjoy the trips again through photos saved in a digital format. We don’t always share the less enjoyable moments. But they fill our memories and, even when unposted, show up at inopportune moments, or even manifest themselves in physical ways.
As we’ve learned, The Body Keeps the Score.
July is a hard month for me. It begins a series of memories from an excruciating era for our family between July 2019-August 2020.
– the midnight phone call about Isla’s diagnosis
– the first of many trips to Children’s Hospital in Milwaukee
– the death of my dad in November
– wondering if every holiday would be Isla’s last
– the short-lived June celebration of Isla’s improvement in a Chicago drug trial
– and the news “there was nothing else the doctors can do”
– the week both my mom and Isla entered hospice care
– Living in Milwaukee and clinging to the last two weeks of Isla’s life
– Isla’s death, and her celebration of life service in August
– the death of my mom in September
July begins this march toward Christmas for me in which every month has another reminder of those losses, a reminder of someone who is missing from the family photos this year.
The trip to the orchard. The birthday party. Thanksgiving dinners. Christmas gifts.
In July of 2021 (the first anniversary of these memories after Isla died), I noticed often I was physically tense and struggling to breathe. Not full-blown panic attacks, but almost-daily memories that surfaced in the form of bodily symptoms. As if those memories were struggling to get out and my body was fighting to keep them in check. Remembering those last two weeks. Even when my mind didn’t want to go there, my body remembered how the waiting felt like walking on eggshells – waiting for the news, holding myself together, fixing what I could, and realizing what I couldn’t.
The physical symptoms have lessened over the years, but the memories are still there. The blessing, of course, is that we took many pictures, especially of the good times. But we’ve tried to be honest about the hard times as well. Both Autumn and I wrote quite a bit about our family’s difficult season.
And I guess if you’ve taken the time to read this far, my encouragement to you is this:
Pay attention to the people around you. Be sensitive to the fact that on any given day, someone around you is struggling. On the outside, it may seem like everything is fine. But on the inside, they may be struggling with unanswered questions, unfulfilled expectations, or unspoken anger.
We need to be able to enter into one another’s pain. We need to allow the reality of our memories – both good and bad – to be brought to the surface. When we share lament with others, we draw more fully into the presence of God and one another. Even in our pain, we can see what God has done, and trust what God will do. Even when life is hard, we keep following God anyway.
I shared a prayer of lament with our church this past weekend and it starts around the 27 minute mark here.
Following God Anyway 