(Part 1) Reconciling the Good and the Grief from 2023
Ending a calendar year or a significant season is a weighty thing. It is one of those times in our lives that deserves and demands healthy thought and wise reflection.
If we can do it well, and by that, I mean if we can adopt a healthy process for our thinking, then we finish the old well and start the new in healthy way that we’ll tangibly feel.
If we end the year and season with a poor process or no processing at all, then we drag a lot of the negative heart and head stuff that should have been dealt with into our new start. That stuff affects everything we do and think and we definitely feel that.
To this end I have written a Part 1 and Part 2 blog to walk us through two processes, one on looking back wisely and one on looking forward healthily.
I’m honestly praying that these help us think well, think godly and pray wisely. If we could, in God’s help, drop some chains and refuse to put fresh ones in the next season that would be a win I think.
Take your time on these, there’s some meaty content here, I believe it will help.
Let’s dive into Part 1: Reconciling the good and the grief from 2023.
Recap - You Did a Thing
A year has passed, twelve months of living has elapsed. It’s likely that during those twelve months a few of us have also experienced the end of a season, a transition time out of one thing into another. Maybe we are teetering on the brink of such a time. Perhaps like me you transitioned out of something and into a corridor for an uncomfortably long period of time.
Whatever your story is, twelve months of living with all the intertwining of God, work, calling, relationships, locations, family and friends, money and health have all happened to you and I. It is healthy and right to do something internally and between you and God to process all this stuff.
At its most foundational level, inviting the Holy Spirit in as we go and as we experience all of these things is the most important thing we can be doing.
Processing with Him in real time and doing some forgiving, some thankfulness, some meditating will already (hopefully) have been a feature in your prayer time and conversations with God and others.
More than this though, there is real symbolic and felt value in giving time at the end of a year or season to make sure you have processed what you’ve experienced in a healthy and godly way.
If you were an explorer travelling across the ocean to a new land you would process the journey as it was unfolding. The moment you landed however and looked back at the sun setting from the shores of your new world, all those emotions and memories would rise up again as you consider the whole experience.
That is what we’re talking about here, considering the whole and then giving it space to breathe in within a safe and godly framework.
Translation - thinking in a way that brings life and not brings you down or chains you up.
My Honest Overlap
All of us have a complicated Venn diagram type overlap going on in our lives most of the time. The good experiences, the bad, the unresolved aches, the opportunities taken and the others missed, the joy and the grief of a year or season all layered on top of and intertwined with each other.
My life has changed dramatically this year and that’s an understatement. It feels like some of the best and some of the toughest things feel like have come into our orbit this last year:
*I’ve been juggling being a stay at home dad and a part time pastor.
*My wife and children and I moved from the UK to the US, gave away all our stuff and left dear and loved friends and family behind as we’ve started in a completely new place
*I’ve taken on the leadership of a church plant in North Dakota, with the all the excitement and uncertainty that brings.
*I’ve watched the church I worked for for over 10 years go through the trauma of a safeguarding investigation and see its leaders leave in a season of much pain. I’ve also seen several other churches and ministries meaningful to me in my walk with God experience the same thing this year. Pain and all.
*We’ve seen friends go through trauma and pain and felt helpless on the other side of the world to help them.
*We’ve had some of the happiest memories of our lives watching our toddlers explore the world and our family grow. We’ve also been sleep deprived and exhausted this year.
*My wife and I have been so blessed financially by others generosity and kindness.
*I have been greatly encouraged by God moving through me and I’ve also had to be humbled in areas I didn’t know I had pride and control in.
Some of it is just the best of the best. Some of it is stuff I wished had happened so differently. Much of it is just life and the way that it goes.
Have you experienced similar things as you look at the snapshot of your 2023? What did your last season look like? How many different emotions, memories and circumstances are overlapping inside you as you look back on where you’ve come from?
The Fork in the Road
We have two options for processing everything on our list.
1) Recognise and process the good and the bad, what has happened to us and the part we have played in as healthy as way as we can (while knowing that we have to be patient and that we may not get all the answers or resolutions God has to everything).
2) Choose an extreme option to deal with or manage our unresolved and painful issues (and enjoy what will feel like immediate solutions but will ultimately make things worse and harder down the line).
These are our two choices at the fork in the road.
It’s one or the other.
Vision-fixing
Here’s one extreme way we try and manage (and sidestep) the negative things we’ve experienced: Vision-fixing.
Proverbs 29:18 says “Without vision the people perish”. I believe this to be true and I’ve experienced it. A problem I have seen however is that it is possible to use ‘vision’ as a fix to take you out of the reality of your un-delt with issues.
Rather than address painful situations or people that need our attention we choose the more exciting and progressive option to start something new. We roll out a new vision for our life. A new beginning. A fresh page. Pulling out some prophetic words from our past or journaling something with God and then bam! We’ve got ourselves a new vision for a new season.
I don’t think this what God was intending with that Proverb.
When we vision-fix what we’re really doing is papering over, distracting ourselves and leaping away from the things in our lives that actually need our attention. We’re immersing ourselves (and others with us) in the excitement of a new passion or project and we don’t realise it’s at the expense of someone else who needs us to slow down and address an unresolved problem..
It feels great if you’re the one doing it, leaping into all that pioneering, big thinking, dreaming glory and allowing surfing its cresting wave into something that feels new and beautiful and light years from all our problems.
It feels gutting if you are watching someone else doing it and you needed their presence or their communication for resolution and closure from a pain.
When someone (you, me or them) are too busy riding that wave of new vision after a season of trial it will not be noticed that way back in the water’s wake there is someone or some people coughing, spluttering, trying to keep their heads above the water. These people are still dealing with the issue that you, me or them has moved on from. These people are usually desperate for help and need to be seen.
Vision-fixing puts our eyes ahead and keeps us so preoccupied we don’t see these people.
Head Burying
This one shouldn’t require too much explanation. I’ve done it, you’ve done it, that person you think always does it has done it too.
This is simply not dealing with our issues.
Fear causes it. Intimidation about the work required to make things right does it. Stubbornness or reluctance to face reality can cause it. Being too focussed on ourselves leads to it too.
The servant in the parable of the talents in Matthew 25 stuck his head in the ground and failed to steward well the thing he had been given by his master. That’s the kind of territory we’re in.
Sometimes life is busy and more demanding than we feel we can keep up with. Sometimes we’re not being a jerk or lazy or fearful, we just feel we are maxed out and running on fumes already. We know we need to sort that issue and speak to that person but we’re just trying to keep our head above the water.
Sometimes however our head is in the ground because we don’t want to face up to the fact that we had a part to play when things went wrong. We don’t want to be called out and we don’t want to look in that mirror and see the culprit for some of the mess.
The short term ‘win’ is very short term here. Sticking our heads in the ground only lasts so long as a strategy. When we are trying to hide from all the things an entire year or end of signifiant season presents, sooner or later it gets too much and the door bursts and it all comes spilling through.
Like with vision-fixing, this one doesn’t bless the people around us. It causes them to walk on egg shells and compensate for our lack of action or words where they were needed. We’re not loving our spouses, friends and colleagues well when we hide from our lives - even if it feels better to just move on, we’re not moving anywhere.
Self Medicating
And the unholy trinity of ways we try and deal with my issues is complete.
Self medicating.
What to say about this one?
When we are in our right minds we know that that the sugar, the drink, the alcohol, the pornography, the overworking, the working out, the eating, the unhealthy fasting and the convincing ourselves that we are the right one are not good for us.
We know that.
Yet when our back is against the wall and our mind is swamped we are start crying out for comfort. We find ourselves choosing to sidestep The Comforter and get to the self medicating false comfort instead.
Much has been said and written about this, especially about the pain and damage it causes to families, marriages and communities. I’ve written several chapters about this in my book “The Road to the Father’s House’, so I won’t go too deep here.
The summary is that this one keeps prodigals sons and daughters from returning home because of shame. It keeps the older siblings from drawing on the heart of God because of pride. There are no winners with self medication, even if it feels like a relief and an escape in the moment.
Fortunately there is hope for everyone who struggles with this one. Jesus came to help those who are sick not the well (Luke 5:31). That means people caught in addiction or unable to say no to themselves when things get hard get the love and help of Jesus Christ. If they want it.
So let’s move on to the better way of dealing with things instead - Wisdom Reflection.
The Other Road in the Fork - Wisdom Reflection
I coined the phrase Vision-fixing (at least I think I did as all google searches for it brought up opticians websites) so I’m going to coin another now.
Wisdom Reflection.
This is my personal chosen road for how I am going to process the good and the grief from this last year and season.
Here is is in a nutshell:
*Recognising
*Grieving
*Gratitude and Glorifying
*Making Right and Making Peace
*Living my life
Let’s expand it out a bit into a process and some values. Hopefully you will see where this is going pretty quickly:
- I need to reflect on and recognise what I’ve experienced this last season.
- I need wisdom to do that in a healthy way.
- Wisdom will lead me as Proverbs 9 says it will.
- Wisdom will direct me where to grieve my losses and process my hurt and wounds. It will help recognise pain that needs Christ’s attention rather than hiding from it.
- Wisdom will lead me through gates of thanksgiving and courts of praise for the all good God did. I hang on to the testimonies and they change me rather than losing them to faded memory.
- Wisdom will identify what things are ‘problems to solve' and which things are ‘tensions to manage’ (see Andy Stanley book on decisions for expansion of this language).
- I then need to seek the Holy Spirit’s help to empower me to do some of the key things I don’t want to do, like forgive people and let things go. He will also help me to remember the good that God has done and the testimonies I forgotten I had.
- I then wrap it up with asking the Holy Spirit to give me the insight and ability to see what wise choices I can make from this point. He’s able to help us start afresh and move on. There is no fresh start without His leadership
This is less of a step by step order and more a process for initiating some core values like reflection, wisdom, grief, praise, forgiveness and repentance.
It’s all about making peace and resting in grace. All these layers working around each other and within each other. It’s not about a single session of journaling or prayer to knock all this out. These are parameters and values to help our brain stick process in a Christ-like way.
My Closure, My Good and My Grief
I’ve had to give some grief to God from this year. I’m still doing it. I don’t even know if it’s all gone yet, but I’m glad that I’ve started talking to Him about it.
I’ve realised just how many things times I’d forgotten how God came through for me. It’s helping me build building gratitude as more a part of my life right now, and that makes me much nicer to be around. I wasn’t expecting that as a consequence of doing this reflection.
I’ve had to make things right with some people and this year. I held some people at a distance as my head in the ground and left them behind with my vision-fixing. I’ve had to make my peace with some situations that I can’t control and some of the people within them. I’ve had to message some people and be the first to come to the table.
“As far as it depends on you, live at peace with all men” Romans 12: 18 says. This means do what you can to be at peace with others and yourself. It won’t happen all by itself, but with intentionality and the empowerment of the Holy Spirit, something very freeing can be our reward.
So What Am I Suggesting You Do?
Wisdom Reflection is what it says on the tin.
It’s a guide to shaping our thoughts, as we go.
It’s the process of doing the important inner life reconciling with wisdom.
The next blog “(Part 2) Your 2024 North Star” is all about taking a healthy, intentional and visional step in the next year.
But for here and now, take some time to do some Wisdom Reflection. Celebrate the good. Be honest about the crap. Remember your wins and don’t go into the next year or season without allowing yourself to grieve you losses. Repent for the times you were at fault. Make it right.
Wherever you get to, if you have chosen to invite Jesus into the process then even if some things remain unresolved or unanswered for the time being, you are still in a better place than if you choose to run to one of those extremes to try and distance yourself from it all.
He holds wounded and healing hearts in His hands very well. Neither judging or condemning, He loves a heart that wants to heal and is willing to do the work.
Those are the people He entrusts a Kingdom with.