Standing in the Gap

My husband and I celebrated our twentieth wedding anniversary in Greece at the beginning of September. We came home with so much gratitude. We’d shared two weeks away in incredible places, relishing long meals, and wandering through the most magical villages. Time to be together without the usual schedules and responsibilities pulling at us was a precious gift and I’m still carrying so much gratitude.

And then we came home.

The news this week has felt especially difficult to absorb. Here in Tennessee, a deeply troubling state execution was botched, while news coming out of Cornell University has also been too much.

And outside my window in Nashville, fall has finally arrived. The mornings have been beautiful with cool air, changing leaves, and sunrises that make me stop whatever I’m doing for a minute and look.

What are we supposed to do with all of that? What do we do with the beauty when there is so much suffering? What do we do with gratitude when other people are in despair? What do we do when the world is broken and ordinary life keeps offering us small, beautiful things anyway?

I’m trying to stand in the gap. I’ve spent a lot of time looking for the thing that will make everything make sense: finding the right answer, perspective, or the thing I can do that will somehow resolve the tension.

But I’m becoming less interested in that. Maybe because I’m learning that some things just can’t be resolved. We can be grateful and heartbroken. We can enjoy a beautiful morning and still care about what is happening in the world. We can laugh with the people we love while carrying grief for people we’ve never met. We can experience something wonderful without pretending that everything is wonderful.

Maybe wisdom isn’t about choosing which reality is the “real” one; maybe it’s learning how to remain present to both.

I’ve been thinking about the impact this has on my work.

Right now, I’m spending time with people who are doing meaningful work in complicated places. I’ve recently launched Flousih with the Kentucky Annual Conference, a group coaching experience for people in the first years of ministry. I’m continuing my work with the Virginia Annual Conference and their Clinical Pastoral Education program. These are people who are showing up, asking questions, paying attention, and trying to care well for the people entrusted to them while also figuring out how to care for themselves.

None of this fixes what’s broken in the world. But it matters. I’ve sometimes thought that if I could just find the right words, create the right experience, ask the right question, maybe I could help make things better. I still believe this work matters, but I developing a different understanding of what “better” means.

Sometimes better looks like helping one person recognize that they aren’t alone. Or like giving someone enough space to hear their own thoughts. Sometimes it looks like helping a leader notice something they’ve been too busy to see or sitting with a difficult question without rushing toward an answer. Sometimes it looks like doing the next faithful thing even when the bigger picture is beyond what we can see.

We don’t need to know how to fix everything. But we do need to notice what is ours to do. We need to care about what is happening without allowing the enormity of it to convince us that our small acts don’t matter. We need to stay connected to other people. We need to keep making room for beauty. We need to let ourselves be grateful without apologizing for it.

And we need to let ourselves grieve without believing that grief means we’ve lost our hope. Maybe this is part of what it means to be human: to stand in the gap between gratitude and grief, between beauty and brokenness, between what we wish were true and what actually is, and between the work we can do and the things we cannot change.

Standing in that gap is so hard. There is no tidy answer, resolution, or way to make all the pieces fit.

But maybe we don’t have to make them fit. Maybe we can simply remain present. We can look at the sunrise, pay attention to the news, love the people in front of us, do the work that is ours to do, notice when someone needs a little more care, laugh when something is funny, cry when something hurts, and give thanks when gratitude comes.

This morning, I watched the sun come up over Tennessee. For a few minutes, I let myself just sit there with a cup of coffee.

The world was still broken. The morning was still beautiful.

Both were true.