About a month ago, my little brother and I were driving through the hills of western Pennsylvania, watching the fiery colors of autumn flash by the windows. We had just left the home of one of my college roommates and were on our way to visit another roommate in Maryland. To pass the time, my brother popped the Fellowship of the Ring soundtrack into the car’s CD player. If you’ve been following this blog for a while, then you know that I’m a big Lord of the Rings fan. J.R.R. Tolkien’s stories are very close to my heart. So I was already feeling pretty darn wistful by the time the final track – “The Breaking of the Fellowship” – rolled around. As I listened to the melancholy strings and brass, I pictured Frodo and Sam leaving their companions and rowing away across the Anduin river. The time that my brother and I had spent with my friend in Pennsylvania had been wonderful, chock-full of laughter and goofiness and reminiscing. Now, like Frodo’s time with Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli, it was at an end. I had wept when I said goodbye to my college roommates after graduation. Now, after saying goodbye again, I felt a familiar ache in the pit of my stomach. In spite of my attempts to elude and forestall it, farewell had tracked me down again, creeping up behind me with all the inevitability of autumn’s chill.
I’ve been thinking about goodbyes a lot recently. This autumn has been a season of changes for me and for my family, transitions mirrored in the tumbling leaves, swaying corn stalks, and honking geese winging their way southward across the sky near our home. Early in October, my little sister and her new husband hurried off to start their honeymoon as friends and family showered them with leaves. Later that month, my grandparents rented a U-haul and moved back home to Florida to resume the ministry that God was calling them to. As October drew to a close, I found myself saying goodbyes to two beloved friends on the East Coast. Throughout November, I said more goodbyes to residents who were graduating from the group home where I work. Recently, I’ve been repeat-listening to Ben Shive’s amazing album The Ill-Tempered Klavier, a collection of songs that reflect on love, loss, the passing of time, and the changes of growing old.
I’ve always hated saying goodbye, whether it’s parting with loved ones or watching the sky darken after sunset. Yet, in spite of my frustration, goodbyes remain a fact of life. I guess I’d better learn to make my peace with them. But how to do it? I’m in the thick of this struggle and don’t have all the answers yet. However, I hope that what I’m learning along the way can be an encouragement to you if, like me, you’ve wrestled with the bittersweet burden of leaving and letting go.
Nothing for the Ache
Goodbye is an intruder who we were never meant to meet. In the opening chapters of Genesis, the first book of the Bible, we learn that the first humans were created to experience intimacy with each other and with their Maker. They were also given a shared calling to till the land and care for the creatures that God had entrusted them with. However, when Adam and Eve chose to rebel against God, they started to experience multifaceted brokenness: distance from their Creator, disunity in their relationship with each other, and exile from the garden they called home. Ultimately, humanity began to experience death, which is the ultimate goodbye. Loneliness and distrust had erupted into relationships that were once marked by harmony.
The painful goodbyes that we experience are the rubble of that ancient rebellion, the aftershock of an explosion which has reverberated through history into the present. We all long for lasting fulfillment. We yearn for relationships that will stand the test of time. But despite our best efforts and intentions, time continues its relentless forward march. Old friends move on, loved ones pass away, and trusted companions let us down. Thrills subside and highs give way to hangovers. All songs and tales must come to an end. Although our world has had thousands of years to get its act together, society continues to fall apart at the seams, ravaged by violence, oppression, deception, and greed. Scientists even predict that our expanding universe is over-stretching itself, chugging toward an inevitable heat death that will grind stars and planets to a halt. Whether or not we acknowledge these gloomy forecasts, we know the ache of loss all too well. It never seems to get easier. As the Lumineers sing, “Nobody knows how to say goodbye. It sounds so easy ’till you try.”
Despite the fact that we in America have more opportunities to distract, amuse, and comfort ourselves than ever before, the consistently high rates of drug abuse, divorce, and suicide in our nation testify to the truth that deep loneliness and heartache persist, rumbling underneath us like a fault line. Again and again, after trying and failing to make our pleasure and contentment last, we find that the things of this world don’t satisfy our longings. We feel the weighty truth expressed in the Book of Ecclesiastes: “All streams flow into the sea, yet the sea is never full. To the place where the streams come from, there they return again. All things are wearisome, more than one can say” (Ecclesiastes 1:7-8). We discover, as Ben Shive sings, that
There’s nothing for the ache,
the groaning of a heart about to break.
You’ll notice when you lie in bed awake,
feeling like you’re falling.
Beyond the Last Goodbye
While we cannot escape goodbyes, the anger and sorrow that we feel when they come upon us are signposts pointing towards hope. Despite their intransigence, loss and death are impostors that have wounded God’s good creation, and for all impostors there comes a reckoning. Goodbye will not have the last word.
The same Bible that begins with a heartbreaking goodbye ends with a joyous reunion. In the Book of Revelation, we read about the promise of a new heavens and a new earth, where God will once again dwell with his people. Ironically, this coming renewal of all things was made possible by a farewell: Jesus Christ’s self-sacrificial death for sinners. When Jesus’ followers watched as their friend’s emaciated body was stowed in a tomb, they said goodbye to their hopes for a promised Messiah, the long-awaited prophet-king who would rescue them from sin and oppression. But when, on Easter Sunday, Jesus appeared to them again, as flesh-and-blood alive as he had ever been, they realized with bewildered joy that something had changed. Reality had been shaken by a seismic shift. Death itself had been mortally wounded. Resurrection – new life – was the destiny of God’s people. If Christ could rise from the dead, then all that had been broken by the Fall could be restored – in society, in the human heart, and in the very soil itself.
The hope kindled by Jesus’ resurrection reminds God’s people that even the passing of time will be redeemed. The apostle Paul tells us that “this light, momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal” (2 Corinthians 4:17-18). Like everything else in this world, our suffering will pass away. Beyond the last goodbye, just over the horizon, Jesus is preparing a lasting home for his people – a kingdom where truth and justice will soar like banners over a rampart. As someone wise once said, “Our future is as bright as the promises of God.”
Freed to Let Go
In light of this hope, how should we live in this land where goodbyes remain a fact of life? For starters, our relationship with our Creator and Savior has got to come first. This is a tough one for me. Jesus said this to his disciples: “He who loves father and mother more than me is not worthy of me. And he who loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. And he who does not take up his cross and follow me is not worthy of me” (Matthew 10:37-38). If I’m honest with myself, I’ve got to admit that I invest a lot more time and energy in my relationships with other people than in my relationship with the One who made me. I care far more about what others think of me than about what God thinks of me. I try desperately to please people, and when inevitably I let them down or don’t measure up to my own expectations, I beat myself up on the inside. When relationships change or dissolve, I feel bitter and irritable, questioning why God’s plan for my life doesn’t match my ideals and why the people around me don’t either. I yearn for lasting community, for a place where I’m known and loved as I am. But to be honest, most of the time I just feel lonely.
Whether by their own faults or by the unexpected changes of time, the people we love will let us down. Truth is, they were never meant to satisfy our deepest longings or alleviate the ache. They weren’t designed to carry the weight of our expectations, and expecting them to do so does them a deep disservice. Pastor Tim Keller once gave a lecture at my college’s chapel, and I remember him saying that if we build our identity on our relationships with others, then we end up placing a crushing burden on them and on ourselves. Too many marriages rupture because of selfishness – unrealistic and unreasonable expectations of what the other partner should be doing to make us happy. Singer-songwriter Jon Foreman of the band Switchfoot recognized this danger and discussed it in relation to his song “Enough to Let Me Go”:
In our barcode media, love is often portrayed as consumption. As consumers in a commercial-driven culture we can begin to view other souls as objects, or potential cures for our deepest fears and insecurities. “Perhaps if I found the right lover I would no longer feel this deep existential despair.” But of course no human soul could be the Constant Other, the face that will never go away. Only the infinite can fill that role. But the silence can be deafening. It’s a fearful thing to be alone… “I can’t live without you” – “I would die if you ever left me” – These are not the songs of love. These are the songs of consumption.
We were created to desire a relationship with our Creator, and no human relationship can satisfy that desire. If we expect people to fulfill our needs in an ultimate sense, then we’re setting ourselves up for crushing disappointment. Alternatively, if our self-worth is rooted in the love of God, which doesn’t change, then our love for others becomes the overflow of that faithful, self-sacrificial love. Resting in the unconditional love of God, we are freed to see people as they are – as broken, complicated souls capable of great evil and great goodness. We are freed to love people as they are and not as we want them to be, which is exactly how God loves us. Rather than stifling people, we are freed to give them space to grow and learn, freed to let them try and stumble and get up again on their individual journeys. Like a mother who watches her child leave home, we are freed to let them go, knowing that we can’t hold them forever and trusting that they are carried in the hands of God. Liberated from the burden of expectations, we can ask of others the question that Jon Foreman asks in his song: “Do you love me enough to let me go?”
Here There Be Dragons
Living in the light of resurrection hope, we can savor each good thing that we experience in this world as a foretaste of the glory to come. Knowing that the destiny of this fractured world is not merely destruction, but re-creation, we can delight in sunrises and sunsets, whales and wolves, music and movies, constellations and cornfields. The good things that God has made will not be lost. Resurrection isn’t a helicopter air-lifting us out of this crumbling kingdom. It’s a seed planted in the heart of the earth, an antidote coursing through the soil and groundwater until all is green again.
Art is a wonderful gift to creatures bound by time. By challenging us to pause and notice, to look for beauty in the seemingly ordinary, art draws our gaze past the gifts themselves to the Giver and Artist who fashioned them for our delight. This world isn’t just a backdrop for human activity. This world was made to be wondered at, to be adventured in. Here there be dragons. If we keep our eyes open, we’ll never run out of reasons to sing praises. “Earth’s crammed with heaven, ” wrote poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning, “and every common bush afire with God.” Rich Mullins recognized something similar when he sang:
There’s more that dances on these prairies than the wind
and more that pulses in the ocean than the tide.
There’s a love that is fiercer than the love between friends,
more gentle than a mother’s when a baby’s at her side.
There’s a loyalty that’s deeper than mere sentiments
and a music higher than the songs that I can sing.
The stuff of earth competes for the allegiance
I owe only to the giver of all good things.
We’re finite beings with only so much time to give. We won’t get to do all the things that we’d like to do, or have the impact on the world that we might hope to have. There are only 24 hours in a day, and darn it, some of those hours require sleep (freshman year of college notwithstanding). Each day is a gift to be treasured, a song of intense beauty made all the more precious by its finitude. As Ben Shive sings, “Every day is the day to say goodbye.” Yet if no good thing is lost, then the acts of love that we undertake in the present will have eternal consequences, both for us and for those we serve. Seemingly small and insignificant acts of kindness may have stronger repercussions than we could ever have imagined. When we love people by telling them about Jesus, we’re both warning them about the reckoning that is coming and inviting them to join in the victory dance – the eternal celebration made possible by Christ’s death and resurrection. None of this love will go to waste. In Christ, we’re able to live like each day like its our last, while knowing in our bones that it isn’t. As Andy Gullahorn sings in his song “The Other Side,”
When that day comes, don’t look back.
Love will be the bags you pack
for the other side.
On and On and On
If we keep our eyes and hearts open, God has a way of ambushing us with hope, stoking the fires of our souls with small moments of magic that remind us of his promises and enable us to keep going. As my brother and I drove through the Pennsylvania autumn with “The Breaking of the Fellowship” thrumming in our speakers, the road leveled off and the hills before us gave way to an expanse of brilliant blue sky, framed like a photograph between walls of rock. Listening to the sawing of strings and the muffled thunder of drums, gazing up into that endless sky, I was reminded of a quote by C.S. Lewis that I had read a long time ago: “There are far, far better things ahead than any we leave behind.” While saying farewell to my friend in Pennsylvania had been painful, I was excited by the ways I’d seen God working in his life. The goodbyes that my college roommates and I had said to each other after graduation had made possible new beginnings for all of us – new work, new relationships, new adventures bringing new struggles and new joys. Like a shoot from a buried seed, new life had sprouted from loss.
There are moments when I wish I could turn back the clock, freeze the frame, and forestall the future. I struggle to believe that what’s ahead is better than what’s behind. Lord, help my unbelief. However, there are other moments when God pulls the curtain back a little bit, just enough to let me see some horizon. When that happens, I’m reminded that just as autumn’s chill is inevitable, springtime is inevitable too. I’m reminded that the Kingdom is coming, that through Christ it has already begun, and that no force of Hell can stop it. I’m reminded that, as Ben Shive sings, “Love is the reason the past is gone and the world turns on.” Hallelujah. Come, Lord Jesus.
I can think of no better way to end these ramblings than with yet another Ben Shive lyric:
Do you remember, when the morning fills the sky,
how all our darkest dreams surrender to the coming of the light?
And when I brush aside this curtain, I’ll find you shining like the dawn.
Beyond the ending of this world, we’ll go on and on and on.
Words for Wayfarers 