I’ll be honest with you. This article was difficult to write. Why? Well, because in my estimation, there are three types of encouragement one can give.
There are encouragements for yesterday, and they are always filled with a need for repentance. They remind you that you were meant for more, and that your past behavior doesn’t have to define you in light of God’s radical Grace. This is not one of those articles.
There are encouragements for today. These are speeches and sermons delivered with roaring oratory, ones that lift people’s gaze off of what is and present them with the very first step to be taken should the audience long to avoid calamity and instead thrust themselves into a far better future. This is also not one of those either.
This is an encouragement for tomorrow, which, for my money, is the hardest kind to deliver and deliver well because the goal is unlike any other. There will be no call for repentance today, and I’m not launching you out of here to take a step toward paradise. My prayer for our time together is to deposit something into the deep well of your soul so that on a day when you find yourself parched and in need of water, you will draw up not a memory of me (for I may long be forgotten by you at that point) but of a word that will refresh, and God-willing, sustain you for whatever length of time you need to make it to the other side.
So, all of that being said, if you are a note-taker, God bless you. Here’s what you can write at the top of your page:
The Four Things You’ll Need to Grieve in the Next 15 Years, and Why You’ll Be Better Because of Them.
*a note. Grief is an interesting topic in itself. Do a little research into it scripturally, and you’ll find that in the Hebrew of the Old Testament, there are over twenty words defining, describing, and differentiating grief in all of its varying forms. Flip the page from Malachi to Matthew, and something beautiful happens. The lexicon shrinks. We now only find a couple of words with which to express the feeling or notion of grief. Words matter a great deal when life and death are at stake. So what can we make of this change in the language?
The less frequency in the NT of words denoting “grief” is significant. Christ came "to comfort all that mourn—to give a garland for ashes, the oil of joy for mourning, the garment of praise for the spirit of heaviness." Christians, however, cannot but feel sorrow and be moved by grief, and it is to be noted that in both the OT and NT, God Himself is said to be susceptible to grief.
W. L. Walker
We can debate that last sentence later, but for the sake of our time together, let’s lean into the notion that grief is simply a longing to love that which we can no longer express.
The most obvious being:
You will grieve people, but God can use their departure to show you his beauty in a whole new light.
There are two ways this plays out, one less obvious than the other.
Relationships are super interesting if you think about them fundamentally for a second. People are in your life for a period of time, and then all of a sudden, they aren’t. The depth of your relationship with them obviously differs from person to person; some will be nothing more than someone whose name you remember as you pass by them in some hallway, and others will make a home in your heart.
Regarding the first group, can I just say this? It is far better to be fully known by 15 people than it is to be adored from a distance by 5000. Now, how you cultivate those 15 relationships is in itself an entire discussion, and one we should absolutely have sooner rather than later, but for now, I’ll just put this out there: you have about 15 seats in your soul; men and women who have an honored position to speak to the innermost part of you in love with correction, wisdom, or affirmation. By and large, you decide who those people are, and they aren’t appointed for life. You will sometimes need to let someone go if they can no longer be trusted, and that will be a grieving process. But again, we grieve because of a love for someone or something we can no longer extend. Grief is healthy, and so is carefully curating the advisors of your soul.
Let me tell you something else that is very true: every time I have had to make this choice, God has been faithful to fill what I saw as a gap and to remind me of his ability to provide for my every emotional need. Too often, we have invited people to our table because of what we can take from them to try to satisfy an urge or longing that we should have gone to the Father to fulfill all along. This is not a relationship; this is a heist.
As for the other reason that we will have to grieve the people in our lives, I will just tell you that there are what we call “thin places,” moments in time where you can sense that the distance between heaven and earth is just not as far as we imagine. Weddings are like this, and the births of my children were like this, but nothing has ever put on display the brevity of life on earth and the comfort of heaven like a funeral. Death will never come on time for the people who remain; you will always want more time with the people you adore. My advice is simple: call your parents every day, call your grandparents once a week, don’t hold back your affection for the people who matter most to you, and don’t take small moments for granted. When the time to grieve comes, know that there is a father in heaven and a church on earth ready to hold you while you weep. In fact, it will probably be those same fifteen people whose shoulders you will run to when the time comes.
But it won’t just be the external force of death that drives you to them; it will also be your own internal anguish because:
You will need to grieve imperfection, but a stunning humility awaits you if you do.
You are not perfect, and I don’t imagine that, outwardly, anyone reading this would say that they are. We are all inherently aware of our own misgivings and weaknesses. Still, we have been conditioned to move through life in a way that minimizes their effects and maximizes the outward appearance of our strengths. And so, over time, each of us will move, inch by inch, to a place where we fall into one, if not many, of a few traps:
We will begin to believe that we are wise beyond our years and that other people’s problems or vices are relatively easy to solve if they just listen to us.
We will trade a desire to learn from our leaders for skepticism towards their decision-making, again based on the belief that we would have the answers if we were in charge.
We will leave no place in our hearts and minds for wonder or astonishment at the accomplishments of others because our pride whispers to us that we could have, or would have, done the same thing if given the chance.
There are countless other pits for us to fall into along the road of perfection, but the ultimate outcome stays fairly consistent in my experience. A miscalculation of your own strength ultimately leads to bitterness. The thing about bitterness is that it grows fast, like a weed within you, and the work to untangle its grip from your heart will only grow messier the longer you let it.
Here is the truth: A day is coming when you will be humbled. Humility, as it turns out, is largely an earned commodity. I can’t tell you how or when it will happen, but I can tell you that it will not be fun. A friend will confront you. A boss will be disappointed. You will hurt someone, and you may even lose a measure of respect or trust.
Here is what will happen on that day. Your community will surround you, your family and friends will love you, and you will feel shockingly human. You will feel this way because, simply put, you are. In the Church, we can be guilty of treating our humanity like a villain or an obstacle, something to be besmirched or, better yet, abandoned. But the creator intentionally crafted you. We are corrupted by sin, yes, but we are not ruined.
The quickest path towards becoming a person worth looking to or a leader worth following is realizing earlier rather than later that you are not perfect. Let that illusion die, grieve its passing, understand your limitations, and then let God work on refining you through His timing and His ways.
*This is a talk for another day, but you are going to have to grieve the imperfection of the institutions you grew up admiring and idolizing. To be clear, I’m only referring to the ones comprised of imperfect people like us, which is to say that I’m talking about all of them. I think this is a generational difference between millennials and whatever you are, and if you want to talk about it later, let’s go to lunch, but just write this down, if you will: Be slower to judge than you want to be, because when your time comes, you’ll want that same kindness extended to you.
Speaking of you again:
God’s refinement takes time, so please don’t rush it. Character is crafted like a river bed, with hundreds of choices slowly carving a new path against the stone of your old self.
There is an ocean of difference between using your humanity as a crutch to absolve yourself from any responsibility you may bear for misbehavior and realizing that the fire of humility beautifully welds holiness and humanity together.
Humility and refinement are both holy means to an end, but please don’t let the enemy twist what that end is. The point is not for you to “let God work” so that He can turn around and give you something as if you knelt before him, expecting a crown to be placed upon your head. No, the end goal of humility and refinement is to be more like Jesus. If the metalworker decides to make a necklace out of the Gold once he has put it through the furnace, fantastic, but even if he doesn’t, the gold itself is no less valuable.
Work hard not to confuse the two, because if you do, it will only be harder to:
You will grieve dreams, but only briefly, as God reveals to you that life is an ever-changing adventure.
I want to be gentle with this, maybe even more so than I have on the last two points, because while death is inevitable and imperfection is unavoidable, the laying down of one's dreams can be one of the most painful parts of life, but there is beauty on the other side. What do I mean by that?
Let’s start here.
One of the reasons I’m so passionate about Passion Equip is because, over the last fifteen years, I’ve seen and been impacted by how a buzzword or turn of phrase that is ever-so-slightly off-course can impact an entire generation. For me, it took almost a decade to untie the knot in my heart and soul where my assignment and my calling had gotten horribly intertwined.
Your calling in life is to make much of Jesus, to reflect His Glory back upon Him, and rightfully so, submit yourself to His will in order to build up the Church. You will, in pursuing that calling, have assignments. But those two things are not the same, as similar as they may sometimes be. To say it a different way, if your mind is fixed on your calling, then you will fulfill it despite the circumstances of your assignment. If your mind is fixed on your assignment, God may still use you, but your race may feel like you're dragging a broken leg behind you the whole time.
If someone was being pulled out to sea by a strong riptide, what difference would it make if the person who jumped in the water to help was a doctor at Johns Hopkins or the lunch person at a primary school, so long as they knew how to swim?
Commit yourself wholly to the idea that wherever God’s wind blows, there you will go. Hold your assignments with open hands so that God can give or take freely because, ultimately, He can position you more preciously and more perfectly than you ever could yourself.
Now, to be clear. God is not against your dreams; He gave you your imagination and ambition. And because He did, and because you are young, you have A LOT of dreams. And because you are young, you believe in the front and back of your mind that you will, in time, accomplish all of them. But because God cares for you, HE will refine those dreams over time, and that process will mean that some dreams will burn away, AND that’s okay.
Just to lay it out there, there was a decade of my life where, by far, the most painful part of my every single day was that I was confident that God’s calling on my life was to be a worship leader. I had read the scriptures and sought the lord, and the community had affirmed me. The opportunities were presenting themselves, and yet something else was happening: I was getting worse and worse at singing, which is kind of important. I’ll spare you every single detail, but the pain of those days was so confusing, which is, I think, one of the worst adjectives ever. And so, in my confusion, I felt a still small whisper—keep writing. Just keep writing. But God, when will I sing? Just keep writing. But why did that person lead in that room I wanted to? Just keep writing. But when will it be my turn to be in the band? Just keep writing.
And so I did, and as I did, something extraordinary started happening: my voice improved. Its tone richened, and the tenor with which I spoke clarified. Not my singing voice, which is frankly still a day-to-day thing, but the voice of my writing. God had a plan, and He was gracious enough not to abandon it because I had my gaze fixed on something else for a decade. What might he be leading you towards? What might He be leading you away from? Only you can answer that, but take heart in this: His will is perfect, and fifteen years down the road, I’m so grateful that he helped me let some dreams die because if he hadn’t, I might still be trying to run a marathon with a broken leg.
Why make your life harder than it has to be, after all…
You will need to grieve the faith of your father.
In this world, you will have trouble, but take heart: I have overcome the world.
John 16:33
This life, following and submitting to Jesus, was never meant to be easy. I don’t know where the idea that it would be came from or how it grew to be so persuasive. I imagine it stems from a Westernized concept of comfort and faith, but how we got here isn’t as important to me as what we do next. The world is in need of Jesus indeed; it is groaning for Him. If we had another hour in here together, we could spend our time imagining all of how it will only grow more and more challenging to have faith in God, to believe in the good of His Church, and to do Kingdom work in a world that has grown to celebrate its own rebellion against the King. To say it bluntly, you may have been living in the comfort of your parents’ faith, and that will not be sufficient for you. It was given to them for them. Your measure of faith has been given to you, and you will need to let go and grieve the ease with which belief and obedience came to you in Sunday school.
The institutions of this world, even the little “c” churches… are built by, led by, and governed mainly by imperfect people. The things we believed were steadfast and pure, that were for our benefit, will fail us as a result of those same people, and if we place our faith and hope in them, our foundation is not only misplaced but unsustainable. The kind of disillusionment that can follow when they fail is unlike any other. Why? Because we wed authority with AUTHORITY in our minds and souls. Thomas Hobbes wrote about it in The Leviathan, stating that the human response to the world's uncertainty is to cede our autonomy to a higher power for comfort. We hand over responsibility because the world is too scary, and when the thing we trusted to keep us safe fails, we are thrust into the wilderness, convinced we are alone.
But we aren’t alone, and the one with us already told us two things: that we would face trouble, and that he already overcame it. Do not be snookered into living in such fear of the world that you give the loyalty God alone deserves to strongmen and strongwomen who promise you a return on your investment when they only seek to reap the profits themselves. Be on alert for opportunities to live like Jesus, to extend His goodness and grace, to care for the widow and the orphan, and you will find that the collection of saints you belong to on the Earth represents the King of Heaven more and more, and disappoints you less and less. Seek first the kingdom, and everything you need in order to be light in a dark place will be given.
This is an encouragement for tomorrow. I hope it has helped today. My dream would be that when you face these seasons in the years to come, you will remember that you are not alone, nor are you forgotten. People have gone before you, and they are coming after you. So, learn your own lessons along the way and then pass them on to a few people who are eager to learn, willing to listen, and hungry for truth.
Walker, W. L. (1915). Grief Grave. In J. Orr, J. L. Nuelsen, E. Y. Mullins, & M. O. Evans (Eds.), The International Standard Bible Encyclopaedia (Vol. 1–5, pp. 1305–1306). Chicago: The Howard-Severance Company.
