Love was here the whole time
Rewriting the last three years
Dear readers — Thank you for a wonderful 2022 together! It’s an honor to arrive in your inbox on Thursdays. Here’s to new adventures and noticings together in 2023!
Do you remember life in December of 2019? This time three years ago. We hear rumblings of a virus in other parts of the world but it feels like a headline that can be ignored. Life continues on.
Yesterday I went through my photos and videos from the past three years of our lives as I prepare a highlight reel for my daughter’s upcoming 11th birthday. I arrive at the December 2019 photos and feel the growing sense of dread.
The pandemic is coming and we are clueless. We’re hosting birthday parties, gathering at church, and flying to Florida as if life isn’t about to take it all away.
Fast forward three years later and I still feel stuck more days than I’d like to admit. I have a laundry list of reasons why it’s a valid response to the last three years. Even as I give my attention to healing like it’s my full-time job, there’s still a sense of, “When will this season be over? When will life feel normal again?”
The most interesting happens as I scroll through images from 2020, 2021, and 2022. I notice a big difference between what I felt during those years and what I see in those images.
My body knows the grief, anger, loss, and confusion.
Those pictures look like determination, resiliency, and love.
Instead of only feeling stuck in the trauma response of challenging seasons, I see what is also true. “Look at us! Look what we keep doing, even in the midst of everything falling apart. I am so proud of us!”
I don’t see denial in those pictures. I see determination to keep living.
I don’t see hopelessness in our faces. I see a resiliency to keep showing up.
I don’t see anger in our photo memories. I see so much love.
I am shocked.
My body remembers the hard stuff and she’s slow to heal. I keep thinking her narrative is the only one. It’s not.
Love was here the whole time.
Supporting us and giving us grace. I missed it a lot. Everything hurt so much. She loved us through people, open doors, difficult healing, stripping away the stories keeping us stuck in our old selves, and daily graces we often missed.
Love loved us even when we weren’t paying attention.
I keep thinking that I am in charge of love. That somehow love sits around waiting for my direction and my plan. I keep forgetting that love is bigger than me. That she has her own power and desire and energy that I have zero say in. It’s super annoying.
Love has the audacity to move and heal and act without my input.
It’s wild to look back on the hardest season of my life and see that love was really there the whole time. Every time I thought I was holding the whole thing, love was there holding me. Every time I arrived at the end of myself, love was there holding the door open to where I needed to go next.
What does one do with love that we can’t control?
We let go.
We stop believing we are the only show in town. We open ourselves up to an energy that loves to dance through our lives and surprise us. We get comfortable with feeling wildly uncomfortable when love wants to remake our life. We learn that it’s okay to surrender and go with the flow of this love. Even when it delivers us into a life that feels foreign.
We simply choose to trust love. Over and over and over and over and over and over and over.
She knows what she’s doing.
What do we do with a love that wants to rewrite the story of our past?
We don’t ever want to bypass the absolute pain and difficulty of certain parts of our stories. We need to sit on therapist’s couch and engage whatever healing modalities feel good.
And.
Is it possible that love was powerfully present in past chapters of our stories and we simply missed it?
Some may ask — well then, if love is so powerful, why didn’t that stop that terrible thing from happening?
In my opinion, love is so powerful that she never forces her self onto anyone. Terrible things happen in our world. People die. Relationships dissolve. Bodies get sick. Hate festers. But love is still here. Weeping and lamenting with us. Soothing and comforting us. Giving us our imaginations back when we wonder what else is still possible. Healing and repairing. Love’s been here the whole time. Waiting for us to notice and trust her again.
As we turn the calendar to 2023, let’s take a look back at the last three years and wonder together. In the midst of a challenging season as a global community, where has love been dancing in the background the entire time? Let’s feel that beautiful truth deep in our bones as we turn our attention to a new season of life.
The best news? Love will be here the whole time.
As someone who has had a front row seat to your journey, it warms my heart for you to say that "love" was there all along. There was such depth and clarity in this piece. We all lived the pandemic differently. Some folks will struggle to see the hope and resiliency that you speak of. Articles will be written for years about what we did and didn't learn. But I want to believe and live in a way that agrees with the reality that "love" is with us all the time.