You Can Do Hard Things

Exploring the intersection of sacred and secular.

The past year has been brutal. From the loss of my father to professional reinvention, the joys and perils of parenting, and all of it going on while it feels like the world is on fire and everything is fire, just brutal.

This past year has been beautiful. From the comfort of family and friends, the joys and perils of parenting, and seeing a new maturity of empathy in those around me, just beautiful. 

See, that’s the thing. Life doesn’t come in waves of good and bad, it sweeps in like the wind-stirred dust covering everything with all of it. All. the. time.  

Over the last two months, I’ve been having conversations with folks about what faith and community mean to them. Hearing these stories and processing what they mean as a professional churchy type, a stunning trend comes to the fore. These stories are some of what I expect, beautifully brutal and brutally beautiful, yet also reveal what feels like a rising trend I haven’t heard for what feels like an awful long time. In the face of fear and anger, hurt and worry, a new hope is rising. A resiliency of spirit is forming. A maturing determination is growing. 

And so on. 

This inspires a feeling of emerging joy in me because I’ve been waiting for the winds to shift in this direction for so long, and because it’s not something shared on facebook or insta from whatever influencer happens to be riding the algorithmic tides today. It’s something rising among us, story by story. It’s the ebullient hope at the beginning of Pride month as some of us plan to offer bottles of water and fans to folks who may come out as detractors. It’s the grit of people who receive training to bear witness to and challenge ICE’s latest brand of inhumanity. It inspires something resembling hope, because it’s not the knee-jerk reactionary screaming into the void I’ve heard so frequently among justice-minded (especially white) peers, but a quiet tidal shift toward values rather than resistance. 

Some of the 2.65 people reading may wonder what this has to do with stories about faith and community.

Our culture has a dangerous habit of considering “faith” and “community” as milquetoast adjectives enabling an armchair activism that makes us complacent, complicit in the face of injustice. As a verb, community is the connections and relationships people form together for support, engagement, and shared values. As a verb, faith is assuming an intentional posture of openness, making room for mutual trust and action arising from positive values. A group of people communitying and faithing are a powerful force. Our lovingkindness has the capacity to overwhelm folks who want nothing less than to drive everyone into a more neutral shade of closeted beige; and that will really piss them off. 

Come to me all you who are weary, and I will give you rest,¹ is a declaration against the forces that would grind trans and queer people into the dust. It’s the image of Psalm 46, calling us to lay our eyes upon the desolations God is bringing to the earth — ending war, breaking spears, destroying shields with fire. God’s desolation uncreates the very implements of war that bring suffering to the vulnerable, causes nations to totter and fall, and melts the very earth beneath political institutions and industries that undergird them, enriching the wealthy who cheer it all on.

Behold! The quiet resolve of sacrificial love overcomes the clanging cymbals of power.  

A new friend told me that they lost their father when they were still a young adult. They continued that they’ve learned in the years since how to use their pain, grief, and recovery to walk with others experiencing profound loss and grief. Empathy can grow from our deepest losses. Another friend shared that they worry about their children and their children’s friends who receive threats from adults angry at them for wanting to be themselves, and they want to make space for people who break all the molds. Thirst for justice arises from persecution for being different. I seek out people convinced they’ll never find their place. Together, we can create a home we’ve all longed for but have yet to find. 

These positive values arise from hearts already faithing and communitying. It’s the wind that disperses the dust of values rooted in anger at nonconformity; the guilt of knowing it’s wrong to be ugly to folks who are different; by a fear of being exposed, so devout that they overprotest how not weird they are for wanting everyone to be the same as they are. 

Hate isn’t ugly, ugly’s at least interesting. Hate’s just drab, basic, and boring.

Love sees color, nourishing within us the deepest selves we think we can only hope to become. In faithing and communitying together, you can do hard things.

I’d love to hear your stories of faith, hope, and transformation. I’d love to hear your stories of hurt, loss, and grief. Email me if you’d like to tell me your stories, the first round’s on me.

Eric Wolf is a local Lutheran pastor, and he’d love to buy you a coffee, tea, or beverage of your choice to tell him about your faith, your ideas about meaning, or whatever “sacred stuff” means to you. Reach him at eric@havenma.org!

  

1. Matthew 11:28 ↩︎