Taking Grace-filled Inventory of Your 2020
As Camilo and I laid in bed that night, we began to speak out to every thing that’s happened this year. It could be painful, it could happy, anything that caused a shift in our life. Nothing we said was too small, or too obvious. There was no moment for either of us to discredit the toll life had taken on the other. Any sort of transition. Any sort of change that left a part of who we were in the before…
This was our shortlist:
Moved
Lost an important friendship
Canceled/postponed/rearranged our wedding plans
Married each other
Started a business
We both transitioned roles/salaries at work
Lost a friend to suicide
(Pandemic)
Surgery
Recovery
Change in bosses
Navigated new in-laws
Family members are sick
and it went on and on.
For the first time we honestly recalled things from January that felt lightyears away, simply because of the fullness of this year.
If there was ever a year to take inventory-it’s this one. We received new versions of almost everything. The smallest of wins were hard fought. And the happiest of day reworked. Normal is different now. And I wonder if we’ve taken inventory of the toll charged to our hearts (exercise on how to do this below). I think it’s possible, the constant sense of failure this year has convinced some you’ll never measure up again. Or at best caused others to whittle down on your hopes so that the disappointment surprises you less next time.
It’s okay to be honest about this. As my husband and I laid in bed last week, we shared a breath of mutual discouragement. Why does it feel like we just can’t get a handle on all we want? Why do the metaphorical spinning plates seem to multiplying -and falling?
Probably because we, and you have lived more lives this year than ever before. We’ve reached our capacity for tragedy. Challenged or ignored, depending who you are, our ability to process pain.
We are collectively living with a bout of car sickness. Reality merits nausea (with over 300,000 pandemic deaths in our country alone, racial unrest, plus your own personal life) but we still have somewhere to be. So we get in the car and go. We live with it like we live with a headache. Medicating where possible, but likely not slowly down to inspect.
In real life, I get car sick really bad. There’s a lot of theories out there about why this happens, but my favorite is that the creation of cars happened so quickly, our bodies (or I guess some/my bodies?) didn’t have enough time to evolve to adapt 70mph speeds.
Read that? We didn’t have enough time to adapt to the speed of what we were getting into…
Therefore, when I look out the window and buildings and people and street lights are rushing past me, my body thinks I’ve been poisoned. And boom- nausea.
That’s the car of this year. We are all strapped in, looking out the window, and it’s moving too fast. Before we can process one landmark, another is in front of us. Before we can measure growth in any area of life, we’ve tripped somewhere else.
Even when it all slows down, a deep sense of failure or misunderstanding of what was and is now can remain. Unless you stop, dig in, and identify what’s really going on.
The Exercise: “This Year I _____________.“
In Psychology the recency effect is the tendency to remember the most recently presented information best. And hear me, do not let the recency effect let you underscore the workload of this year on your heart. Do not let a tidal wave change convince you to discount the ripples you used to count at significant.
So let’s do this. Grab a warm cup of your favorite. Get the lighting right. And write out your own list. Then speak out your own list. Aloud. Speak it to God, to a loved one-both. Bear the honesty of saying, “Yea, that was a lot for me. It still is a lot for me.” Mourn the gifts in your life, because even gifts replace a before we may have also loved. And mourn the hurt you’ve had to keep moving past, but still think about in the quiet moments. Give those thoughts space to breathe.
I don’t know what 2021 holds, but I refuse to go into it without a full view on what I walked through this year. And it wouldn’t be smart to either. Not without melting under grace for what’s gone down. Or without taking a good look at the weathered walls inside. Like a good book, you and I have to read every one of our pages if we want to believe in the ending. And I sure do.
