Saying Goodbye

I really needed Easter this year. In chaplaincy, every day feels a little like Good Friday. Everyday, I am meeting people at the verge of a goodbye, at the edge of a battle that feels hopeless, or repeating a discouraging pattern that never seems to change. Sometimes I can see the terror on their faces so clearly that I can feel it, and other times I can see a peaceful surrender. Both faces are hard to see. Sometimes it gets too heavy.

This week the heaviness was complicated by my own fresh sense of Grief – the church that formed me as an adult spent their last Sunday on the hill where I fell in love, where I became, where our life happened for so many years. And yet, I am grateful. I am grateful for the memories on that hill. I am grateful that the hill will continue to be a gift to the community as the site of a brand new high school. I am grateful that I can carry the good, the bad, the ugly, and the beautiful today and every day because that hill will always be in my heart. It’s permanently imprinted in my mind, and the people I was so gifted to interact with there are forever woven into my story.

This goodbye seems like the peaceful surrender…like the graceful letting go of one chapter to begin a new one. That doesn’t make it easy, and it doesn’t take away the grief. It is still hard – but there is a little glimpse of hope in it. There is an Easter moment – one where we remember that no feeling is final and that life will keep moving us forward – forever transformed and new, but sacred.

And do you know what’s funny? So many of the painful moments that come with this goodbye are, in some sense, ways in which I became too permeable to this community. It’s in the places where I didn’t create a strong sense of boundaries. In fact, it wasn’t until this year that I learned what boundaries in ministry looked like for me. I am learning that it is possible to be present for people without driving through the flood…that I don’t have to drive through the flood to be worthy. Others may ask or expect me to drive through it, but I am the one with my foot to the pedal and my hands on the wheel. I am coming to a place where I can accept these moments of too much permeability and pain as necessary parts of my own formation and the building blocks of the strong foundation growing beneath me.

Wishing peace and love and Easter hope to all of those who are grieving on the Hill this week. Blessings on your new chapters – I hope you thrive.