Meet Me in the Middle of the Year 2021

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June is smack-dab in the middle of the year, and I can’t help but wonder if this is the synonym of our lives. We’re both here and there, and yet not fully either. Society is fractured and we march for unity but does it actually connect neighbor to neighbor in our real-life communities? We’ve lived through one long year and how could one year stretch longer than twelve months, but somehow it has and here we are, still in the middle.

I do not seek to speak politically, but I do want to put a finger on this feeling stirring inside—that until we see the person in front of us as intrinsically valuable and worth getting to know, all our efforts to bridge the divide amount to little.

I’ve written before how Ann Voskamp said that “We will never reflect the image of Christ to the world unless we first see the image of God in everyone,” and it’s stuck with me ever since. We can’t get to the other side without going through the middle, and this road walks us straight into the heart of God so we can see how each of us carries a resemblance to our Creator.

As we slowly drop masks, slowly build bridges where walls existed, slowly pick up the pieces of our lives and decide what’s worth keeping, this tension remains: we’re not where we were but not yet where we will be, and perhaps we have more to learn before we will be there.

Kaitlyn Bouchillon says in Even If Not, “The war has been won but the battle is still waging all around and as we walk in the dark, there are lessons to be learned,” and she is right. Because thank goodness we know the end of the story, but these lessons in the in between are hard-learned sometimes.

The middle is what we make of it. It’s also what makes us.

It can be the refining fire that makes us more purely reflect Him, the dark waiting for the light, the hope stirring within when faith is all we have to cling to—or it can be pocked with emptiness. The darkness can seep in. Hopelessness can push us down and beat us up and cause us to forget that the light is still coming and we are only waiting.

What I’m learning in the middle

One lesson I’m learning here in the middle can be said in just one word: nevertheless. It’s a mouthful-of-a-word, but it’s my word of the year, and I want to remember why I chose it. Because here in the middle it can be hard to see the end, see how we will come through to the other side, even when the other side doesn’t look exactly how we picture it or land in as soon a chapter as we would have written it.

Nevertheless says “even when not, still I choose gratitude.” Even when life doesn’t go the way I want it, God, You are still so very good, and I choose to acknowledge it.

If you’ve been here for a while, you might remember from my word of the year post that nevertheless is found in Psalm 89:52 in The Passion Translation. It’s a little verse that follows a lengthy complaint of all the things that have gone wrong for King David. As if in the same breath as he asks his searing questions, David says this in verse 52:

Nevertheless, blessed be our God forever and ever. Amen. Faithful is our King!

Nevertheless is a very here-in-the-middle word. It’s choosing to trust the One who knows the end of the story while we are yet in the middle chapters. It’s choosing trust, choosing devotion, in the middle of our stories—when we get the rejection or the diagnosis, or the injury is slow to heal, or the waiting feels longer than we can bear, or all we touch seems to fall to pieces. It’s choosing to praise even when we feel raw and bruised and broken.

I didn’t know when I said nevertheless was my word for the year that mask-wearing would stretch for so many more months. I didn’t know ones I love would be near lost and that even then He would be so very much with us.

I didn’t know that the one time I fell while doing a high kick injured a ligament in my ankle, and ligaments are very, very slow to heal—that it would keep me from saying many yeses I wish I could say with no hesitation—that it would daily remind me that even when I don’t know how long the chapter I’m living will go on, He is always faithful, always good, and always here.

I didn’t know all the questions we would ask in six months. I didn’t know how long we would meet via zoom with our missional community. I didn’t know how far into the school year the kids would be able to go in-person, or how my girls would decide in one day and three weeks, respectively, that they’d rather finish the year out virtually anyways. I didn’t know we would go a full month without kitchen counters and sink while we had our kitchen remodeled.

But what we don’t yet know is what makes up so many of these middle pages in our stories. And no matter what happens, and what doesn’t happen, and what happens slower than we expect—nevertheless, God is faithful, and for you and me and all of us.

And saying it aloud, letting others see our stories as they are being written, it opens the door for them to also say nevertheless in the middle of their own stories.

Sharing our stories is missional

It’s the realness of the middle that we can best relate to in each other’s stories.

To quote Kaitlyn Bouchillon again, “You become a safe place when you share your story, both the broken and the beautiful, with another.” I flip the page and stop yet again to note another line because Kaitlyn’s words encapsulate so perfectly what missional living is all about:

We have been given the task of telling everyone what God is up to in our lives. He has given us a story to live and it may have twists and turns, roads we would rather not walk and ampersands we would prefer to hurry though to the other side, but He calls us to speak from those places and glorify Him on every page, daring to say that He is beautiful and true, loving and kind, no matter what story the next page may tell.

Tell your story. Tell the middle of it. While you are in the middle. This is how we let what God is currently doing inside us ripple out beyond us.

Press into God. Choose the near-Him place. And welcome others to really get know you. This is how we genuinely love both God and those around us.

Because how can we not declare that God is good? How can we not say nevertheless when we know He never leaves us?

We live now in the tension of the here and the not-yet come. We are this side of heaven but also that side of the cross, and Jesus is right here in the middle with us.

He’s here as we navigate the deep wounds that have rocked our nation and the repercussions of a pandemic that rocked the world.

And if we will let Him, He will teach us how to better love our neighbors—those we look like and those we don’t, those we think like and those we don’t, those who mask and those who don’t, those who rally and those who reconcile quietly.

Let’s pray.

Jesus, You write our stories through to the end, and may we see Your hand in our today—see You with us, see You faithful, see You good? You meet us in the middle of our what if’s and even if’s and neverthelesses. We may carry scars and battle wounds and still so many questions—but You are not done writing, and You can use the stories we share to bring hope, healing, and reconciliation. With Your help, we will share the stories you give us to tell while still living here in the middle of them. In Your precious and holy name, Jesus, we pray. Amen.

Change your actual life in less than 5 minutes per day!

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