My last Sunday at Incarnation is just about one week away.
When all is said and done, I’ll have worked here almost exactly three years (I think, technically, three years and three days). It’s a cliche, but it seems like both way shorter and way longer than three years. I suppose one reason it seems shorter is that my position here was only half-time. So, half of my time the past two years has been taken up in commitments to my other church work and university teaching. What that’s sometimes meant is that I haven’t been as present here as I would have liked. I hope I can be forgiven this on the way out.
At the same time, it’s also felt like way longer than three years. One reason for that, I’m sure, is how deeply I’ve come to know and love you. As I think of the people–of you–who I’ll be leaving behind, it seems surprising to think: “I’ve only known them three years?” There are many with whom I have come to feel like I’ve shared whole lives.
Another, perhaps less obvious (from the outside) reason it’s felt like more than three years has been in how much has happened to me in my personal life, and how much I have personally changed. I won’t go into too much detail, but I recently stumbled across an old e-mail correspondence that, when I read it, and heard my voice in it, I was sure was something I had written some years ago. Come to find out, it was February 2023. I had also written what I had written in that correspondence after a particularly difficult personal crisis. In my memory, given how much has changed, I had at best thought that the crisis was much longer ago than a year, and really, had all but forgotten the crisis had taken place at all.
That struck me. At the time, the crisis was all consuming. At the time, I was afraid the crisis would lead to the loss of the things I cared about most in this world. At the time, it was tied up in events that sometimes felt like they would never end. Yet here I am, on the other side of it, with only the thinnest recollections that it ever took place–about to start a brand new chapter, brimming with excitement, and joy, and above all, hope.
Life is often like that, isn’t it?
In November of 2021, shortly after moving into the Parish House, I bought a piece of artwork to go above my kitchen table. The piece overlays the key words from that old Churchill quote–“if you’re going through hell, keep going”–on a photo of Muhammad Ali doing a training run. Ali also famously said: “The man who views the world at 50 the same way he did at 20 has wasted the last thirty years of his life.” I look at this piece most mornings as I sip my coffee and prepare for the day.
When I hung this piece, I had a lot of people sharing the Churchill quote with me. A friend had also given me a card with the Ali quote on it. I remember thinking to myself at one point: “You keep going you jerk [NB: I didn’t say “jerk”], I’m too busy going through hell.” But over time, it became hard to do deny the reality that, oftentimes, that’s all there is to do–put one foot in front of the other, and keep moving forward….
And so I did, and here we are.
I don’t know where you are today. I imagine that some of you are going through your own personal “hells.” Or if you aren’t, you have sometime recently. Or if you haven’t, or even if you have, you will sometime (again) soon (I’m under no illusions that things will be all sunshine and rainbows for me from here on out).
But if there are any lessons for me in this transition, it’s these two things. First, keep going. The God who has made you, the God who loves, and the God who sustains you even now, will hold you close and carry you through. A day will come, perhaps sooner than you think, when whatever you’re facing today will be a distant memory. Know that. Trust that. And rest in the arms of one who will never, ever fail.
Second, on the other side of that grief, you may find–you may even hope to find–that that the crisis was a gift. You may find, in other words, that the most important and lifegiving transformation you will ever experience will come from this crisis. Now, I hasten to say–I don’t say this lightly. If these crises are for you anything like they were for me, they are searingly painful. But as C.S. Lewis once said: “God whispers to us in our pleasure…but shouts to us in our pain.” And I have found that to be true. At the end of the day, at the end of these three years, I am a 41-year-old man that sees the world very differently than I did at 38. These years have not been wasted.
And I pray, whatever you may be going through, that the same might be true for you.
Nate+
