Fighting Christian Hyper-positivity
It’s easy to forget that the Bible happens in real time, not reading time. As in, even though it’s only pages, maybe minutes, as we read between Jesus being born and crucified, there were actually decades in between. Mary wasn’t a virgin one second and an immaculate mother the next even though the events are separated only by a paragraph. There was real time there. Jesus was a baby, then a child, then a teenager before he was peaching His way across the land.
After Jesus was born, Mary & Joseph took him to the temple to present him, as was custom. Simeon and Anna were there and unfortunately, even though Anna was a prophetess, we don’t know what her words over Jesus were. (Come on, Bible writers.) But Simeon had been promised by the Holy Spirit that he would not die until he set eyes on the coming Messiah. So when he sees Jesus arrive at the temple, He’s so excited that I imagine Simeon Baby Simba-ing Jesus like he’s up on Pride Rock. He tells God “You may now dismiss your servant in peace, for my eyes have seen your salvation” and it says that Mary and Joseph marveled at all the things He said about their son. Not only were they hearing fantastic things about this child they brought into the world but this had to feel like confirmation that what Gabriel had revealed to them was true, that their child (who hadn’t done any miracles yet to prove himself) truly was the son of God.
Then the blessing takes a turn in Luke 2:34-35 when Simeon turns to Mary and says
A painful sword will one day pierce your inner being,
for your child will be rejected by many in Israel.
And the destiny of your child is this:
he will be laid down as a miracle sign
for the downfall and resurrection of many in Israel.
Many will oppose this sign, but it will expose to all
the innermost thoughts of their hearts before God.
I can just imagine Mary going “wait, what?” as something shifted. She was in two places at once. On one hand, there’s the elation of Simeon recognizing him as the Messiah they’ve been waiting for but also the realization that, if he knows all of those things, then his prophesy for the grim future must also be true. Pure happiness pierced by dread and despair.
I think a lot of us can relate to this as we look back on 2020. Maybe right in the middle of your happiness, things took a dark turn. Your joy turned to sorrow or your plan took a detour and you felt shaken out of the moment without notice.
As a society, we tend to fall on one of two sides when life surprises us. Either we’re optimists or pessimists, positive or negative, glass half-full or half-empty. You look for the good or you see the bad. I tend to stay on the positive side and want to look for the good in things, believing it will all work out. But 2020 showed me the error of blind positivity, of hyper-positivity as Christians are being accused of.
As Jesus followers especially, it’s easy to default to hope as an answer. We want to say “We trust God, we have faith” and use it as a way to act like everything isn’t as bad as it is. But the problem with pretending like bad things didn’t happen, with turning a blind eye to the pain to focus solely on the good, is that if we dismiss the pain, we dismiss the people it happened to. If we dismiss the darkness, the problems, the death, we actually dismiss the lives of the people who experienced very real hardships.
Friends, we can’t do this.
People died and are dying. People lost loved ones, not just to Covid but to other things. People lost their jobs. I have many friends who had to quit a career they loved to homeschool their kids because they couldn’t stretch enough to do both and it felt like the only option for their family. No, that’s not death. But it’s hard and it’s a loss and it’s worthy of grieving. There are families that feel incomplete because the way their family now functions has systematically shifted the foundation of day to day life and it feels broken. I have friends with small businesses who are going under, wondering what they are going to do financially, who are questioning if God really called them to follow a dream that now isn't working out like they wanted, planned for or invested in. There were racial injustices revealed. Many of you already saw the broken systems and didn't need 2020 to open your eyes but for others of us, this was the year where we took the blinders off and caught up. It continues to not be a pretty sight to face underlying violations in our country that I just didn't see before.
All of us faced something last year. All of us. Maybe it was publicly, maybe it was personally, maybe it was privately and no one else knows what you went through, but you know what it was and it mattered. Please hear my therapist in my own ear telling you: Do not say “because I didn’t lose someone, because I wasn’t personally effected by injustice, because Covid didn’t take a life that’s precious to me” that it didn’t matter. Don't believe the lie that tells you to minimize what you went through. It mattered and it’s not any less worthy of grieving because it wasn’t as big as, as painful as or as earth shattering as someone else’s.
Maybe our only option here is to lean in and acknowledge the hurt. Don’t feel like you have to look for the positive or the good in it. As tempting as that can be, it’s a defense mechanism of avoidance. Acknowledge what happened, to you and to other people. Those you know and those in the world. It’s a both/and tension to hold the good and the hard and not skip ahead to the happy parts.
Tension literally means to stretch or strain. It’s such a good image of what it looks like to try and live with two polarizing things. Life isn’t lukewarm where things are okay, manageable, not too bad. Maybe there are seasons where it is. But there are also seasons where it’s both good and it’s bad, hard and easy, and we are stretched between the two extremes. It’s hard to do and it takes practice, especially when we feel like we’re on the verge of snapping.
It’s so important that we are real about what’s happening, especially as Christians, so our hope feels real, too. If we minimize the hard, we minimize the hope. We inadvertently take a powerful truth and sugar coat it, water it down, make it fake. No one is attracted to a plastic Jesus. But if His hope is only offered for lukewarm problems and issues that aren’t really too bad, what kind of solution are we offering? Not the true one that goes beyond our human capacities. Not the real power of our Jesus who wouldn’t turn a blind eye to the hardship, to the pain and things people are going through.
We are past the point of positivity, of optimism that just looks for the good in a situation. I’ll be the first to admit, I didn’t think we’d be in this pandemic for this long, that Covid wouldn't have been cured and long gone by this point. I didn’t think we’d be in this for an entire year without an actual end in sight. Because I didn’t see it coming, it was easy run around and look for the positive and encourage people at the beginning. “It’ll get better! It’s okay! Focus on the good things!” We are past the point of relying on optimism. People see through it now. They’ve been in it, they’ve been through it and they are looking for something more.
In Hebrew, “El Roi”is the God who sees me. This is the hope we need to give people. Not plastic Jesus. Not a spiritual band-aid. Not a God who is waiting for us to get over it but a God who is in it with us. While I have a feeling that a lot of 2021 will look just like 2020, we don't have to treat it as a rebound year, either. Just as we shouldn’t turn a blind eye to the hard, we don't have to pretend like the good wasn’t there either. (At the risk of sounding like I’m contradicting myself, remember: I said this was a tension. It means we don’t get to pick a side, either one.)
The temptation is there to act like we’re running away from a bad break-up, looking to 2021 to replace it with something better - or something different - as we wait for the right year to come along. It’ll be real easy to run into 2021 saying “This year doesn’t matter, I just want to have fun, I don’t even care what happens, I’m just glad 2020 is behind us.” but I’m gonna challenge you to fight that mentality. 2020 wasn’t a waste and 2021 doesn’t have to be either. 2020 was not broken. It was not worthless. It was not a mistake. And 2021 doesn’t have to carry the low expectation of “As long as it’s better than the last one.” You did things that mattered. As cheesy as it sounds, there was purpose in your pain. Maybe you learned something about yourself that you’ll get to put into practice this year. You might not ever know why you went through what you went through. I no longer believe that everything happens for a reason and I certainly don't believe the reasons will always be revealed to us. But if you can look back and recognize patterns, if you’re more emotionally healthy, if you’re more mentally healthy, if you’ve spent more time with your family, if anything good has come from 2020, then you are seeing how God was in it with you. He is capable of doing more with an entire year than just letting it be a rebound. Let’s not go into it already expecting nothing from it.
We can hold the pain and the sorrow. We can appreciate the good while acknowledging the very real pain that accompanied it. We can live in tension, growing as we stretch between unsettled uncertainty and the peace that comes from trusting a God who sees us.
