Grief and Gratitude and the Space Between

Reflecting on 2023

2023 was a year of grief and gratitude.¹

I spent this year living in the space between the hard and the beautiful as I traversed the labyrinth of healing and journeyed with others in their pain. Led by the Spirit, held by the Father, and companioned by Jesus my older brother, I have walked into the places of my own deep pain and darkness. They have not been places I wanted to go, but at the gentle nudging of my wise and compassionate counselor, I have tip-toed in, with much fear and trepidation that my body and nervous system could attest to. It has required tremendous courage to face things I thought I had long outgrown but had instead been banished to the deep recesses of my heart, still taking up residence in my body. The work has been hard, heavy at times, and I am thankful that my counselor has been intentional to slow me down and not push me into those hard places, trusting the Spirit to do the work of healing when I was ready.

Throughout the year, I have wanted to rush the process. So often, I have wanted so much to barge into those rooms, kick down the doors, and rush in to clear out whatever ills I thought were hiding there. My “let’s get this over and done with” mentality has had to be curbed repeatedly with reminders to slow down. And so, I am (still) learning to embrace the slow work of God, accepting that God is not in a rush and that in order to catch up with him, I have to slow down; that fast is slow but slow is enduring.

Grief and gratitude. 2023 was the year I learnt how “conflicting” emotions can coexist in one body. Weeping can exist alongside joy, anger can be roommates with hope, grief and gratitude can companion each other on this journey called life. I used to have an unconscious value system for emotions, locating them on an imaginary number line with positive or negative values as if emotions had inherent moral value (hint: they don’t).² Now, all my emotions have a seat at the table, even the ones that make me uncomfortable. Each of them has a story to tell about where I’ve come from, where I am, and to where I am headed³, only if I am willing to pay attention and be curious and compassionate about what they are trying to tell me. When I learnt to bless the difficult parts of my story and the emotions that accompanied them, I was able to start reclaiming the lost parts of myself.

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Grief and gratitude. When I was a young worship leader in the early 2000s, one of my favorite songs to lead was Hillsong’s “This is How We Overcome.” I would belt out: “You have turned my mourning into dancing…” while exuberantly spinning in a mad twirl, way more public emotional expression than was expected for a typical, sensible, reserved Singaporean. In my young mind, I understood it to be an exchange, that happiness came after God took away the sadness, that I could somehow help God by dancing my way into forgetting the sorrow in order to make way for joy.

In Psalm 126, the psalmist describes the joy of the people of God after they are restored to the land from exile: “Those who sow with tears will reap with songs of joy. Those who go out weeping, carrying seed to sow, will return with songs of joy, carrying sheaves with them.” Imagine this with me: the weeping ones, sowing their seed while their tears are falling freely into the soil. The earth takes up those tears and so nourishes the seed, the seed absorbing the salt and moisture while it lays in the darkness of the earth, waiting for the time of sprouting, of growth, and finally, of harvest. The fruit of the harvest, having incorporated those tears, takes on some of their character, but they have been transformed in the process of cellular growth and the fruit takes on a complexity and depth of flavor. The exchange is not one of erasure but of commingling. Transformative. Redemptive.

My friend, Rachel Pierce, sings a beautiful rendition of Psalm 126 here:

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Grief and gratitude. At the beginning of this journey, I would have described the space between as one of ‘tension’—the dynamic of equal but opposite forces pulling at each end. For tension to work, each of these forces have to be of equal magnitude acting in exactly opposite directions; there is a precarious balance that needs to be maintained, an iota off and the tension shifts. Having come through 2023, the word I now use is ‘integration.’ Grief and gratitude as partners in a dance, coexisting, commingling, each one taking turns to lead, sometimes moving forward, sometimes moving backwards, sometimes moving where you can no longer see the space between them.

There is no formula for this dance like there is for forces in tension, you have to pay attention to the inner rhythm and improvisation of this dance—the ebbs and flows of the rhythm of grace. It has required a surrendering to the dance, and letting go of fighting to maintain the balance. Integration is the pathway to wholeness, an inner and outer congruence which Parker Palmer describes as integrity. It has meant living with more honesty, more vulnerability, less numbed out. More self-compassion, more comfortable in my own skin, a more expansive way of living. Less bound, more creativity. Less self-flagellation, more ease.

What does 2024 hold? I don’t yet know. But I know the same daily new mercies and everyday-ordinary grace are available on this meandering journey. Transformation occurs in the space between. And joy can be found in the unexpected turns around the corner.

1. I saw Sam Won’s post where he used the phrase “grief and gratitude,” referring to it as liminal space and it resonated deeply with me.

2. Becky Castle Miller is one of my favorite follows, with her pithy insights about healthier ways of thinking about and engaging our emotions.

3. A riff on Frederick Buechner. In Whistling in the Dark, he writes: “But of this you can be sure. Whenever you find tears in your eyes, especially unexpected tears, it is well to pay the closest attention. They are not only telling you something about the secret of who you are, but more often than not God is speaking to you through them of the mystery of where you have come from and is summoning you to where, if your soul is to be saved, you should go to next.”