Today would have been my grandmother’s 87th birthday. Gramma Carol was a constant presence in my life. She was at every birthday dinner, every recital, every major milestone. She was a part of everything in between as well. She went on vacations with us. She was our only babysitter. I spent the night at her house and played hours upon hours of uno and rummy, and drank hot tea with milk and sugar, and had toast and cookies… She was a constant. She was a playmate. She was a confidant. She was funny and creative and silly. She wanted to be a part of all of it. She believed in my potential and she encouraged me to live into it as fully as I was able. She was so many things in my life, but maybe most importantly she loved me purely and entirely for who I was and who I am and who I am becoming.
Over the last couple of months we have been focusing our worship time on Sunday mornings around the Psalms, selecting a different Psalm every week to immerse ourselves in and unpack its meaning and significance to our chaotic, broken, beautiful lives. It has been a powerful experience, as I have engaged with the raw emotions that are captured in the words of the Psalms- words of anger, despair, confusion… words of praise, confidence, and certainty… and everything in between. As I have immersed myself in their content, I have also found myself captivated by the motivation behind the words— what is this relationship the author has with God that spurs these sorts of outpours of emotion, that allows them, that even encourages them, that is at peace with them?
That relationship seems quite in contrast to most relationships we have in this world— relationships that require we perform a certain way to be acceptable, relationships that bring with them expectation of production or contribution that make us worthy of our place at the table, relationships that make it quite clear that only certain emotions are appropriate and if we find ourselves feelings things outside of that pre-designated appropriate list we better do our best to change or burry or pretend. We find these relationships with friends, or in our families, and quite honestly within our churches— yet this is not how God demonstrated authentic relationships to look like.
Gramma Carol understood that, or even if she didn’t understand it she lived it in my life. She never shushed my questions, or told me the clothes I wore or the friends I had were unacceptable. She never told me to suck it up or be strong or toughen up. She stood with me in the storms, she cried with me in the pain, she sat with me chaos and then she danced with me and laughed with me and cracked jokes with me. She maintained a stance of peace, even when I felt like life was all jumbled– she was at ease with the unease of life.
I want to be like Gramma Carol… I want to be more like the glimpse God we see in the Psalms. I want to be a mother who can make be present through the tantrums without shaming my child or wondering who is judging my parenting. I want to be a wife that stays when the future is uncertain and the emotions are running high. I want to be the friend that sits and cries when days just seem too long, or life seems to be too hard. I want to be a human that appreciates the diversity of God’s creation, the depth of our emotions, the complexity of life while finding beauty and meaning wrapped up in it all. I want to get comfortable with the discomforts of life, I want to be a source of peace in the midst of the chaos.
As we have explored the Psalms, I have found myself return over and agin to the work of Eugene Peterson, a lover of the Psalms. Peterson was a pastor and an author who shaped my ministry and my life. He died at the age of 85 last October. At his funeral, his son shared that his father told him daily, “God loves you. God’s on your side. God’s coming after you. God is relentless.” I pray that we each have in our lives someone who embodies that great love— love that is constantly cheering for us, love that will follow us wherever we go, love that never gives up. I hope we each know that love in relationships with other. I hope we know that love in our relationship with God and feel the security in that love that we can come at God with our anger, our despair, our hopes, our dreams, our sadness and our uncertainty and know that God will stay with us, that God will not turn away from us, that God cheers for us, and that God’s love is our’s forever without conditions or requirements. God loves you. God is on your side. God is coming after you. God is relentless.
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