Resurrection

Every year Caleb and I pray for God to give us a word that will in a way oversee His plan in our family for that year. We each pray individually and then we talk about it and every year we get the same word, or a synonym of each other’s word. Every year we’ve been surprised not only with the word but the way in which the word plays out in our life. While we may think that it will look a certain way, it always ends up looking completely and crazily a different way.

2017 we got the word Resurrection, I wasn’t comfortable with it but my husband knew that was the word and since I heard it too we wrote it on our chalk wall and saw it develop through the year.

The thing about resurrection friends is that it requires death. It isn’t until we are 6 feet under that we even qualify for a resurrection. And that makes resurrection both a wonderful word and an awful word.

So since whatever isn’t dead can’t be resurrected, before the word could even be active in our lives a lot had to fully die. Things that we thought were already dead apparently were on life support, things that we thought were alive and well needed to be killed. And though we knew death wasn’t final, it didn’t make it any easier to dig the hole and bury things in our lives.

Resurrection starts with a gentle breath ה. It wasn’t like we leapt out of the grave and ripped our burial clothes, it was more that we inhaled and exhaled, for the first time, slowly, and awkwardly. With wonder we saw it all and it looked the same and completely different.

The thing with resurrected things is that they are never the same as what they were before death. Though they are back to life and maybe even looking the same, they are different. Some of what we knew as definite truth has changed, and some of what we doubted is now as real as our most deeply held convictions.

Both for our personal life and the world as a whole, 2017 felt like an awful/wonderful year. Because life is like that, wonderful and difficult, exhausting and energizing, difficult and easy. At the same time we were dying and finally coming alive. At the same time we were broken with pain and being healed in joy. Most journeys worth embarking on include both the sadness of the culmination and the exhilaration of having been on the journey all together.

We learned a valuable lesson this year; the God who resurrects is first the God who kills, because He knows that only in dying we truly learn how to live. And as hard a truth as that is, it is also beautiful and terribly mysterious and one of the most empowering experiences we have gone through with God.

So cheers to death and cheers to resurrection. Cheers to pain and cheers to joy. Cheers to wonderful and awful. Cheers to living… truly, wholly living.