With love to all my friends finding themselves in a season of transition: here's a post from two years ago.
photo: Michael Bruner
Transition sucks.
I have been thinking about this for several days now, and I'm not sure there is much more to say about transition than this: it sucks.
I know people have written big long books about it. And they're probably good books. Of course information is a helpful thing--knowing what to expect, if there are different stages, if there are certain things you can do to manage it.
But essentially, transition is a grief process. There's a lot of loss on the way to the new normal. Loss, by definition, is going to be painful. And you just can't completely control that. Anybody who says otherwise is selling something. Probably their book.
It's OK to be sad. Even really, really sad.
It's OK to be weak. Even really, really weak.
I know sadness and weakness are horrible feelings. I hate them myself. But when God says, "My power shows up best in weak people"--well, I think there's something to that.
I remember having that experience, living overseas, when I was so DONE that I couldn't even get out of bed. I was in a profoundly difficult transition between the way life used to be, and the way life would need to be afterward. I just lay there in my grief and pain, and somehow knew that God was there, loving me.
I had no framework for the idea that I could be completely useless and completely loved. But it happened anyway. I had that experience that Ephesians 3 talks about--experiencing the love of God, even though it is so great I can't understand it.
And then...well, it still took a while for me to change the way I lived. I think I have a tendency to be a human bop-bag. Knock me down with the truth, and I will bounce right back up to be stupid with lies again. I can look back over a 10-year period of my life and see that same pattern over and over and over again.
It finally, finally got through to me a year or so later. I was at this retreat at a church in Austin, bawling my eyes out in front of this pastor and saying, "When will it ever be enough?" And this man looked at me and said, "It is enough already." Words straight from God to me.
I think I had been in a process--probably my whole adult life--leading up to that moment to finally be ready to hear that I don't have to do one thing more. God loves me. And I can just be who I am, where I am, and He loves me.
Even if I have been in this place before. Even if I should be able to look ahead and know that it's going to be worth it in the end. Even if I feel like I should have this figured out so it won't bother me so much. Even if other people think I should be managing it better, more gracefully, more spiritually.
Today, in my pain and in my confusion and in the constant transition that is my life, Jesus loves me, this I know. I am weak, but He is strong.
Transition sucks.
And God is good. All the time.