On Grief, Resurrection, & the Power of Planted Dreams

Finding wonder while standing on the threshold of change.

It was a misty, brooding Good Friday in Colorado. The kind of wet, damp cold that soaks through your best layers and lets you know snow is just about to edge out the sleet.

There I was, the two decades younger me, staring at the edge of a medium-sized hole we had just dug in my friend’s backyard.

Photo by Neslihan Gunaydin on Unsplash

I didn’t have my own yard in those days… so I had to borrow one for the occasion. Bless the kind friends who indulged me.

Beside me was a medium corrugated banker's box filled with 4 years of notes, studies, and things I had poured my life into for hours each day.

Hours of research and easily 1000 pages of Greek and Hebrew word studies. Plus reams of handwritten notes. And tiny handheld recorder tapes of me sharing my big theological insights.

(Dang, I’m grateful YouTube didn’t yet exist because that would have been a very awkward forever.)

We solemnly lowered this box of words and dreams into the recently thawed earth and silently covered it with dirt.

It was a relic of a past season I couldn’t carry with me into the next season. But I didn’t want to throw it away. It felt like I was supposed to put it somewhere, so I put it in the earth.

I didn’t even fully know why in the beginning.

As we were walking inside to grab hot cocoa, the clearest, simplest thought came to me…

You think you are burying your dream. But you are actually planting a seed.

At every transition point since then, that one line has kept watch over all my thresholds of change.

Today, I stand at yet another one. And here in this place of wildly unknown things, that metaphor still holds me.

Planting seeds…

Leaving Florida is no longer a choice for me, it is an absolute necessity. In between all the hard headlines, the proposed HHS budget cut that eliminates Head Start also quietly strips the funding from ACA medical insurance subsidies.

As a medically complex person, that means between the cost of the insurance itself, medical care and prescriptions in FL… I’m looking at needing an extra $40K/year for starters. Just to keep a standard of care that doesn’t let me see my preferred providers to begin with.

I don’t have to tell you that is untenable. (If you are congressionally calling inclined, please join me in letting our leaders know these cuts put real people in danger.)

While there is part of me that is really excited about the next adventure, the thought of uprooting my world, moving 1500 miles across country, re-establishing medical care, and all the myriads of details on a shoestring budget is daunting at best. Especially in the cultural climate of uncertainty we are in.

To be honest, it feels like standing at the edge of another grave. Leaving the last place I have actual memories with my parents in. To go to a place I have never been, where there are no shared memories (yet 😉)… my throat knots up when I think of it.

But here I stand again and remind myself… What feels like burying a dream is still planting a seed.

On grief and resurrection…

On a day when my tradition celebrates rising with new life, rolled stones, cracked eggs, and transformative rebirth, perhaps it’s an odd time to talk about grief.

But there can be no resurrection without grief.

Photo by Ginger Jordan on Unsplash

For something to be brought back to life, what it was before, it can never be again.

Even good, holy, hopeful changes involve some dimension of loss.

So if you are grieving today, uncertain about your future, feeling overwhelmed by the enormity of all the hard things happening right now… you are not alone.

You are not weak. You have permission to be right where you are. Because right where you are is sacred ground.

After losing my mom over Mother’s Day in 2020… my grief was wild and feral, a rogue wave that would come out of nowhere to flip my world upside down when I least expected it.

It felt like something elemental clawing its way out of my chest.

I watched my mom’s tired, brave earth crack open to give her wings. And I screamed at loss and God and the world because she was no longer there.

My heart ached with such visceral violence, I almost wished it would break open and set me free as well.

It was an un-tethering to so much of how I oriented myself in the world.

In familiar places, our conversations hung in the air like ghosts. Vapors and mists from another lifetime.

The world became emptier, fuller, lonelier, and not as alone as it once was. It would never be the same.

These last five years I’ve spent meeting new faces of my grief. And finding the wonder and promise hidden in their folds.

Grief in a sense opens up this liminal space that can become a gateway, an invitation to find a new way of being.

And in this space between, grief and resurrection live side-by-side. They walk together.

Two very different things can be true at the same time. Life is not a zero-sum game.

And beloved, we don’t just grieve people we lose, we grieve the loss of ideas and experiences, the loss of ourselves, the loss of the way our bodies once worked, the loss of dreams.

On this Easter Sunday, however you celebrate or welcome this moment, maybe the things that feel buried right now are just seeds waiting to become something even more beautiful than they were before.

You are loved. You are safe to be who you are here.

May we be the ones who witness the wonder of one another’s beauty and becoming.

I am so grateful you are here.

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