I knelt on the floor with a woman dear to me and cried. I didn’t know why but I had a darkness over me and the tears wouldn’t stop falling. I tried to recite a psalm I had memorized but the words just wouldn’t come. They were words that had ministered to my heart so much that I wanted to etch them there. Only tears came. Sensing my struggle, she reached for the leather book so I could read from paper what I couldn’t retrieve from memory. You have searched me oh God and you know me. You know that even as I don’t consciously know the tragedy that has come, you know me, and so you continue to prepare me for what will come very soon. You know when I sit and when I rise, you perceive my thoughts from afar. You discern my going out and my lying down; you are familiar with all of my ways.
You knew that as I sat in the car with my friend (who now has been touched too closely with tragedy herself) when we rose that evening on New Year’s Eve to celebrate our roommate’s engagement- that there was another family across the country, who lied down not in beds but in grief, collapsed by their daughter’s sudden absence from this world.
You are familiar with all of my ways. You hem me in, behind and before, you have laid your hand upon me. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, too lofty for me to attain.
As my tears hit the page of Psalm 139 you laid your hand upon me in my present sadness and the sadness to come. You surrounded me with friends and family who shared the tears so I wouldn’t plunge too far into the depths of depression. As I rose from those wet pages, your spirit rose with me, to meet the truth.
Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I flee from your presence? If I go up to the heavens you are there; If I make my bed in the depths you are there.
When her mom called us, she spoke to my mom first and I trembled in fear on the couch of all the possibilities. My favorite oversized knit sweater, not enough to comfort me in the new reality that followed. Her mom told me, Lauren’s been murdered and I fell on the couch screaming “no” in anguish because the harsh reality of death had come too personal, too real. I yelled “no” in a rebellion of the truth. “no, no, no” I screamed, “how could this be?” with an acute awareness which I will never forget.
I made my bed in the depths of despair that night, you were there.
I walked that year more acquainted with death and grief than I wanted to be. Your spirit manifested in pink — pink nail polish, a pink scarf she gave me, pink sunsets, pink grave flowers, pink font.
You laid your hand upon me during every return back to campus where her absence left a hole in our classroom. Your hand was upon me when we read her blog as her eulogy. Her prophetic, powerful, and pink words rising up into the air to settle on hearts in our grief.
Your hand was upon me during every test, every rotation, those six weeks in Africa, pushing me forward.
Her breath and blood, brutally taken from her by a man with a knife. He succeeded in taking her body but not her soul- he could never do that. As her body lay lifeless, her soul rose upward, her life-where her true beauty came from, rose up in light to meet you- one who was pierced too.
If I rise on the wings of the dawn if I settle on the far side of the sea, even there your hand will guide me, your right hand will hold me fast.
He can meet us in any place, the high and low of our emotions, or the far and wide of our geography only because he met death himself. Only because he surrendered to that unjust cruelty of a criminal’s death can his hand meet us anywhere that we land.
If I say surely the darkness will hide me, the light becomes night around me, even the darkness will not be dark to you, the night will shine like the day, for darkness is as light to you.
When the dark days still come and I think they will hide me- from you and from the people I love- when it’s my birthday and I am supposed to be light and happy like the sun outside, but all I feel is dark and hidden and far away. Far away from my own vision of who I’m supposed to be, far away from the memories of her friendship, far away from your joy. It’s these days, when I’m supposed to be eating birthday cake but don’t feel like eating at all- these are the days that my soul needs your words the most, needs to feast on your presence.
As I let myself feel the hurt, cry the tears, plunge the depths of my emotions- pink flowers show up at my doorstep. Your spirit meets me in this color again, the color of her persona. And I realize birthdays may not always be “happy” because it’s a broken world, we’ve been too acquainted with death, too close to disaster, too fraught with inadequacies, to celebrate another year of this.
But I read your words in that psalm again, stain the pages again with my tears, and am reminded that “happy” is not what life is about.
The pink flowers remind me of how, in this life, birth, and death, joy and grief- they dance together. You may want joy alone on your birthday, but grief meets you too. And God meets you in it.
He bathes your darkness with his light and in fact, he doesn’t see darkness at all. He holds the dark holes of sin, sadness, and longing and instead of staying away- he fills it. His impenetrable light penetrates your darkness and fills every crack and crevice of your dark canyons.
Just as on your very first birthday, you came out of the dark womb where you were knit together, you came out and were bathed in the bright light of life, so now he births you into this new year. His light in your darkness, His joy in your sadness, his fullness in your unmet expectations, his adequacy in your inadequacy.
Though you may not be happy this birthday, you are not hidden. Instead, you are bathed with light. You are known and you merely have to sit here, sit in it– the light and knowledge of being known.
God, the Father knows you, sits with you in your hurt, and transforms your hurt into holy. He is knitting in you a desire for the eternal above the here and now, where you will be birthed forever into light and love. Through Christ, you have a place at that party, where tears are wiped away and death and mourning will be no more. That’s the true birthday our souls are longing for.
