This Isn’t the Consolation Prize

This morning I walked into my kitchen and exhaled a bit. I put the coffee on, then curled up in the armchair in the corner where I could see out the windows and I sat there in the early morning light just being quiet.

The kitchen isn’t the same one as the one I would go into every day when I last wrote, and the armchair still doesn’t feel like mine. We left Haiti back in November, knowing we hadn’t planned or expected that, and that we wouldn’t be going back, so a lot of things still feel really unfamiliar right now. Because of increased insecurity and concerns that we might not be safe in our general area for much longer, and some issues with our staff that we realized we no longer had the capacity to lean into, we knew it was time to make the decision we hadn’t planned on making until retirement. I’m grateful that we had the time to pack up the things we wanted to take with us and have some closure, but it hasn’t made the transition easier or less painful.

When we left I think we all thought that if we could just get here, to the US, things would be easier and we could take a breath. We could settle in and pick up the pieces and life would be easier. Almost five months later it doesn’t feel easier. It feels really hard. What makes it extra hard is that this wasn’t the plan.

One thing that has become very apparent to us in the past few months, is that North Americans don’t grieve well. Like most other things, we like to put grief on a to-do list as a task to be done and checked off. We like for it to have time frames. We talk about the stages of grief so we know what to expect and prepare for, then try to make sure we’re moving through the stages so we can be done grieving. When someone struggles with grief for a long time, longer than we think should be necessary, we get frustrated and wonder what’s taking them so long. We use phrases like, “It’s time to move on…”

But here’s the thing – grief doesn’t care what we think or how we want things to work. Grief is going to settle in and it’s going to take it’s sweet time. It’s going to broadside you when you least expect it in moments that often feel ridiculous. I broke down crying one day because of a carrot peeler. Why? Because I spent several seconds rooting around for my carrot peeler in the drawer, only to realize that the one I was looking for was the one I had left in Haiti, and that my new one was still so unfamiliar that I didn’t know what it looked like. At the core of it I was hit with how much we had left behind, all the little things that make a home, that we accumulate over the years, and I had to acknowledge that I didn’t feel at home in my new house. That the US wasn’t home.

There have been so many of those moments for us. There have been so many hard conversations. So many tears. So many days of wondering if it’ll get easier. So many conversations where we talk about how this wasn’t what we had planned, it wasn’t what we expected, and how much we left behind.

Chris has a new job that he started this week, and I’m so excited for him. But, it’s been a hard process. When we got here he was sure he wouldn’t be able to find something that had as much importance for him as Clean Water for Haiti. It’s SO hard to go from committing your life to something where you know you’re daily helping to save the lives of others, to a place where everyone seems to have access to whatever they need when they need it. He would repeatedly say, “I’m not going to find something that will matter as much as that.” This week he started as the Executive Director for an organization that focuses on creating relationships with the homeless community in Portland. We all need shelter, water, food, and safety to exist, but we need relationship to thrive.

This morning, in that early morning light, we were once again talking about how hard things feel right now and I told Chris that I had realized that it’s very easy, when we compare our life now to life in Haiti, for us to think that this is the consolation prize. That this will never be as important, or as meaningful, or fill in the blank, as our life in Haiti. We feel that in many ways we didn’t get to have much choice in the now and present reality we’re living in. But, that doesn’t mean it isn’t the next right thing for our family.

One of the ways that God has always cared for my heart over the years, through all of the really hard things, is that I eventually get to a place where in the midst of all the hard things where he can peel back the surface layers and show me where the hope is. In the early morning hours today I scrolled through Facebook and read a friend’s post where she talked about “good trouble”, and how good trouble people are the ones that look for what they can uproot and disturb in the process of loving people like Jesus does. A while back as I was sharing with a Haiti friend who knows us well, lamenting how hard things were, she said, “I know it’s so hard right now, but you guys were made for this. You KNOW how to do this. God made you for hard things.” You see, I know that deep down, Chris and I are “good trouble” kind of people. I actually think that most of us are, but the majority of us don’t give ourselves the opportunity to learn that. We think we’re not capable, or maybe we’re just a bit afraid. Chris and I have had the privilege of being worn away, of seeing that we’re more capable than we ever thought, and that we LIKE that. That it feels good and right to be in that space and living that life of disrupting and doing the hard things.

This morning as we talked I told him that one of the big reasons we knew it was time to go is that we saw that relationally, we had reached a wall with our staff. Our family was very lonely because most of our friends and social network had left. We were so isolated. Chris especially struggled with the isolation and lack of relationships. But here he was stepping into a new job where the primary focus was relationship. God hadn’t given us the consolation prize, he’s taken us out of something where we had built this amazing thing to the point where it COULD be handed off to local leadership, I could still do the things I’m good at to keep the funding going, but then allowing Chris to step into the next thing for him where he can do what his heart most desires – to be in relationship with people that are often forgotten and most in need of love.

I couldn’t help but wonder this morning how often we feel like we’re living with the consolation prize, and because of that we miss the things that God really wants us to see? Do we focus so much on the fact that things feel hard, and miss the fact that grieving means we emotionally invested in life? That it hurts because we dared to love or care? Do we know that no one has ever promised that life would be easy? Do we see that the hard things are what shape us and grow us and allow us to see what we’re really capable of? How deep we can dig, how tenacious we can be? That there can actually be hope in the midst of the storm?

Don’t get me wrong, it doesn’t make things less hard right now. I cried again this morning, and will probably do it again tomorrow because tears are my way of processing. But I do know it’s worth it. It’s worth it to sit in the grief and to feel and hurt. Because on the other side of that is hope and joy and gratitude. At least for me it is. I’ve realized I don’t want to be a person who doesn’t allow myself to go through the hard things, because I love coming out on the other side, looking back, and getting to fully see what was happening. I know it may take a really long time to see the full picture, but if Haiti taught me anything, it was that it was all worth it, and the other side is pretty amazing.