Vocation

“Weeping may linger for the night,
    but joy comes with the morning.”

Psalm 30, verse 5

One of the hymns that that was sung in this morning’s service was hymn 383 from the United Methodist hymnal, “This is a Day of New Beginnings.” As the congregation began singing the melody, I recalled two things. One was the verse from psalm 30 quoted above, which was also read over the course of the semester. The other was a memory from the last time I sang this hymn last semester. I remember starting to sing the first verse, and I choked when I read the verse’s lyrics.

I read those lyrics at a time when I was undergoing a time of deep, chronic pain. I was still trying to figure out how to move forward with it. In high school, I once had a conversation with my English teacher about how to deal with this kind of pain. He told me, “This too shall pass.” This message was phrased differently by the Trevor Project, an organization that was responding to a series of teenage suicides in the Midwest several years ago. Its message was, “It gets better.”

These two phrases have very different meanings if you look at them closely. One simply states that things will change, while the other says that things will improve. I also heard these two phrases in starkly different contexts. Despite the difference in meaning, these two statements do have one thing in common: they emphasize the role of time and change in moving on.

Truthfully, I’ve always found the first statement to be more helpful. The idea that everything will change eventually and nothing lasts seems paradoxically more comforting to me than the idea that life gets better. Frankly, I don’t think the latter is always helpful. There are periods of grief in mourning in our lives that must be acknowledged before they we can pass on from them. To simply say that it will get better seems to trivialize the anguish and sorrow of those moments. And sometimes, the wounds left behind on one’s heart from these moments never fully heal. They leave behind scars that remain and perhaps will fade in time, but the scars can still be painful when we brush against them.

I think one of the most difficult parts in moving on from pain is acknowledging the pain itself. It can sometimes be easier to look to the future, to hope for a time when the pain will be less heavy and burdensome. But for someone who is in the middle of deep, heartfelt grief, telling them to look to the future doesn’t always help them deal with the present moment as much. Grief and sorrow are very difficult emotions to overcome, and unlike the verse from Psalm 30, they rarely go away overnight. This is why there is some deep wisdom in what my English teacher told me many years ago. Sorrow and grief will always exist, but in time they, too, will change and become less burdensome. In time, we may be able to look back on them with newfound joy that somehow makes them have less on a hold in our lives. And although these emotions may never completely disappear, we at least can recognize that they too, will inevitably pass. I may not be able to say how and when, but I do believe that it will happen. And that, as infuriating and incomplete as it may be, is enough to help me move slowly forward.