Fighting for Life
Wrestling with surrender and a (second half of) life you can love
In 2017, from the middle of intense grief, I wrote a call to worship centered on the need to accept our lives as they actually are. It’s the thing with grief, so much of it is about getting your brain to catch up with reality.
Give up the fight for some other moment, some other life
A couple of years later, my friend and colleague Christopher Watkins Lamb (performing as Crispy Watkins) wrote a song from this same line, centering on a reminder to keep breathing.
I’m just gonna breathe…until I touch the sorrow beneath the rage
When the pandemic hit, one of the first things I wanted to offer people was a video that would put the two pieces together. There was so much we had to learn to accept in those days, so much we needed to surrender.
Surrender only to this life, this day, this hour
I remember saying it to myself over and over in those early days. This life, this age, this body, this heartbreak. This is what we have been given. Start here.
It was one of the first videos I made (and the closest I’ve come to impressing my son with my youtube views!). I watch it now and I think - two things….
First, what a mess the sound is on this recording! We learned SO MUCH more about editing in the next few months, I can hardly stand to watch it.
But once I get past that I wonder - does this message make any sense at all to me now? After everything we’ve seen in these years. As we approach the possibility of a second Trump presidency. Two years after everything we knew about how life and church and parenting and intimacy and safety changed over night. With my teenage children, and my aging parents, twenty five years into partnership with Carri, and more than 12 years of ordained ministry? Do I still land at surrender?
I’ve been wrestling for a while now with what we are called to accept, and what we are called to fight; where in wisdom, we embrace, and where with courage, we resist. Like the well-traveled Serenity Prayer,
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, Courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference…
I think about the last year when I was driving the commute from Denver to Fort Collins, how much I actively resented every bit of the drive, despite there being literally no way to make it be less time, or for the year to pass faster. All of my choices were already made; being mad just made it harder. Give up the fight for some other life….
And still - maybe it’s just an old story of middle age, and middle class, but I keep thinking about that Richard Rohr book, Falling Upward, which acknowledges how much care we take, and how much social investment is given, in crafting the first half of life, and how little attention or awareness we give to creating a life worth living in the second half, when often the deeper and more pressing questions of true belonging, and spirituality come calling.
I used to give Falling Upward to congregants - no shock, all of them were women - mostly, mothers, wives, caregivers - when they’d come to me with this creeping heartache that all of their life choices were behind them, and now their only task was to give up the fight for some other life. As if acceptance of what is was the only spiritual task. As if any of us could reach the point where God would ask us to sacrifice the selves we were becoming mostly because we had until that point, done everything we were supposed to do.
It’s one thing to talk to congregants theoretically about all the choices they have made; it’s a whole other thing when those choices add up to the story of your own life, all the people you love, and all the ways you’ve come to know yourself….
A few years ago, most of my family went paragliding in Hawaii. Even my mother in law flew above the boat with the biggest smile the whole time. Flying over the ocean, with a boat watching you very closely, with a life jacket - this has to be one of the safest ways to fly. But as someone who has been my whole life, afraid of heights, I enthusiastically watched everyone go up, and down, from the boat. Carri checked with me so many times, but I wasn’t even tempted.
But then recently my tiktok fed me this video of this woman base jumping, while screaming I LOVE MY LIFE
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And suddenly I wondered, what if I’m not afraid of heights? As if it was a thought that had never occurred to me before that exact moment. Or, what if I am, and it doesn’t matter? What if I can choose to love my life, even when it is terrifying in ways I never would’ve even considered before now? What if the terrifying is part of the love?
I haven’t yet signed up for base jumping (I have thought about it!), but I have been trying on these little experiments of doing things that most of my life I might’ve said, that’s not for me. A few terrifying things. Sometimes things that only I’m even aware of. A lot of times small choices that require a shift inside myself, a courage. But all as a practice of resistance, a pathway of fighting for a life that is mine.