what it means to "get through it"

Today the rain falls on Illinois, like it has days before and like it will days after. It is afternoon and I am struggling with a pounding headache, as if air is being pumped into my sinuses with no exit strategy.

But I must get through it. 

There are messages to write, meetings to engage in, conversations that need to happen - I’m expected to be fully involved, headache or no. 

I must get through it. 

Maybe you are driving, anticipating chaos at home. Maybe you’re in a conversation with your child and the summer swoon is hitting on the first day of that gloriously misdirected season. Maybe you can’t find it in you to get off the couch or stop the parade of Netflix on it’s never ending march into your living space.

We must get through it. 

Today, just a small encouragement. Life with God is filled with headaches, conversations, confrontations, and feelings of apathy. Not every day is a miracle.

Not every day is filled with joy, desperate as we are to choose it. We don’t believe as deeply from one day to the next, and we certainly exercise more cynicism towards what God is up to on these days rather than others. 

These are the days where we search our memories for times when we were “through” and not “getting through.”

We benchmark our history and find that place where we felt the most connected, healthy, and spiritually vibrant.

We look for that song, that verse, that conversation, that text that reminded us that faith is a knitting fabric stretched wide across the world and we’re all caught up in it, either by engaging or disengaging. 

We remember that we had times before that weren’t this hard, or weren’t this blah, and we grab onto them with our mental hands and with our hopes for a resurgence. 

Then it hits us: God is not the God of getting through. He is the God of GOING through. 

With Him, we never go through alone. So, our heads may ache and our blah may blah, but in it all we may know that we are not alone. 

In our melancholy or our miracle. 
In our suffering or our sublime visions.
In our hope or our hackneyed versions of coping. 

We are not alone. 

Today, may you go through - accompanied - to find more light on the other side.