New Years resolution: Make room for sorrow

Few people make it through New Year’s without a list of New Year’s resolutions. Many of us will sit down and pen out, or mentally note, all the things that we are going to be differently this year. Whether we will pronounce vague sentiments like “I resolve to be more kind or loving” or whether we pin point our worst habits and swear to kick them, many of us will resolve to start to New Year off right.

Over the holidays I spent some time searching Twitter to see what other people were resolving to do. Here is just a small sampling of what I found:

@thisisrobthomas: my new years resolution this year is to not make any resolutions.

@cooperc23: New Years Resolutions 1.Win Lotto 2.Move to Cape Town 3.Season tickets to #Newlands 4.Study wine making =)

@Shmarrr: Resolutions never are kept after being made. Its the dumbest and most overplayed New Years Tradition

@SoCalPete: To cease all purchases made in china

@CROWNNUMBER1: I don't need any new years resolutions! I trust in God and I'm gonna let my actions speak!

@jeffstinco: What are your new years resolutions? Mine is simple: be grateful for all the amazing people and all the great things I have in my life.

@M__Falcon New years #resolutions in the making: 1. Stop drinking 2. Stop smoking 3. Less random sex

A post I found spoke about a husband finally fessing up to his wife about his pornography addiction. One stated they were finally telling their significant other they had settled and were ending their relationships. Another stated they were giving up cutting once and for all and resolving this year to only contemplate suicide once instead of ten times. I laughed at some, sneered at others and a few touched my heart.

I have had, what I affectionately call, the year that just was. So many circumstances, situations and relationships were taken from my hands, slipped out of my control and were beyond my reach. I watched some of my best friends lose spouses, some of my friends lose houses and careers and ministries and even a few lose their faith. I saw members of my family face serious surgeries, and others face serious crisis. I personally went through months of grief over the loss of a loved one and working through a major career change.

It was the year that just was, it is what it is, and was what it was.

What shocked me the most, but shouldn’t have shocked me at all, is that God was honestly so close in those times of loss, powerlessness, grief, worry and doubt. I have seen the hand of God move more in the last six months than I have in the last six years, not just in my life, but in the lives of others.

The pages of this blogosphere couldn’t even capture it all, nor could I even capture it all in words and to be honest I don’t even know if I would want to. It has been a very meaningful moment in time watching what the enemy intended for evil, God turning around and using for good.

My new year’s resolution this year is to somehow, someway, stay in touch with the pain, loss and powerlessness of this year. And of course, somehow find joy in the brokenness and sorrow of life. That may sound morbid or theologically incorrect on some level, but somehow I don’t want to lose sight of real life, real loss and real love.

I state every year I want to be near the broken, and every year I run into everything that is happy and fun. This year brokenness found me and the ones I love the most, and I am going to embrace that brokenness and make room for it.

In my experience spiritual maturity and reaching new depths in our faith aren’t found in the mountain top experiences, they are found in the valleys of doubt and despair. In the West we often say it is our money and privilege that muddies how we see Jesus and how we work out our faith. I’m starting to think it has very little to do with money and more to do with what we do with our brokenness and how we work so hard to avoid it. The irony of course being, the more money we have, the more things we can find to mask and medicate our pain and brokenness.

Instead of embracing our pain, we take great measures to elevate it. Some people travel the world, leave the people that love them or drown their sorrows in any substance they can find and still their pain follows like a shadow on a sunny day. We think that finding joy in sorrow to be an oxymoron, something that is inconceivable.

We seek out pleasure instead of patience; we look for fast remedies instead of reconciliation. We beg for the storm to pass, never stopping to think maybe we should learn to dance in the rain.

We love to quote verses from the bible referencing that we are to rejoice with those who rejoice and mourn with those who mourn, but then we turn to fill our lives with happy rejoicing people, never making room for those in mourning.

We find clever catch phrases to help us feel better about our own brokenness, and seek to surround ourselves with people that love us, adore us, and at times, sometimes feed into our own narcissistic tendencies.

It almost goes without saying, that the church of the West doesn’t help the problem of pain. The church of the shiny happy people is often what we would rather be a part of, instead of the messed up, broken, church of reality.

Our appetite for social media, Facebook and other online persona machines, doesn’t always help our fascination with running away from pain. We can be as broken as ever, but a quick post to twitter saying “Everything is wonderful, life is great” can not only convince the minds of others all is well, but it can trick our minds to thinking the same.

Pain isn’t a predictor that the rest of life is going to be miserable, on the contrary.

The irony of being close to brokenness is that you are also close to joy. And that joy, when it comes, isn’t fabricated or trumped up. It isn’t predicated on finding a temporary high. It is based on the knowledge that God is with you, through good times and bad, and that is more than a cliché, but a lived out truth. You can sense his presence, feel His hand of healing repairing the holes in your heart, and feel His call not to give up, but to press on. Your joy doesn’t come from circumstance, you don’t have to find the next exciting thing to elevate your baseline happiness, you can find happiness in the mundane.

Tertullian, a early Christian writer said “Your joy is where your hope is” and James states "Consider it all joy, my brethren, when you encounter various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith produces endurance. And let endurance have its perfect result, so that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing".

Maybe this year, we all can find some joy in our suffering, sense God’s hand with us during trials, and find the beauty in our times of sorrow. Joy always comes in the morning, and this year my gratitude driven praise and New Years resoultion is coming from a different place.

A place that can testify that God is good.

All the time.

God is good.