WEEKLY PURSUIT with Ryan

Helping you pursue God, people, and purpose - one step at a time.

ryanspencerlutz.com

Hey friend,

Last week, we packed up and headed to Disney World. Sara, our two boys, my mom, and me, all in for the "Most Magical Place on Earth" in the middle of August.

It was AWESOME!

But it also was August...

In Florida heat...

With toddlers running on limited sleep.

If you know, you know.

But somewhere between the meltdowns and the popcorn, something else showed up that I wasn't expecting.

Grief.

Real, unexpected grief for my dad. It's been a strange season since he passed in May, and this trip cracked something open I didn't see coming.

I found myself missing him in ways I hadn't in a while. Wishing he could've ridden the rides with us. Wishing he'd seen the boys light up at the parade. Wishing he was standing next to me in line, trying to make us laugh with his terrible dance moves and poorly timed jokes.

We talked about him more than I had in months. Memories I hadn't thought in years came back to the surface. And I caught myself thinking about him in ways I'd actually been avoiding, memories I'd been protecting myself from because they still hurt too much to sit with.

And here's the strange part.

In the middle of all that grief, I also had some of the best moments I've had in a long time.

Dance parties in the hotel room. (Judah has moves like his Papa did... pray for him.)
Rides.
Characters.
Ice cream (chocolate with sprinkles for Ky obviously).
Memories we'll be talking about for a while.

Grief and joy, showing up in the same day. Sometimes the same hour.

I keep coming back to a line from a Joe L. Barnes song: grief is love without a home.

That might be about as good a definition as I've heard.

Grief isn't the opposite of love. It's evidence of it. It's love that doesn't know where to go anymore, so it just... stays. And it shows up in the most unexpected places. Standing in line for a ride. Watching your kid dance like his Papa used to.

Here's what I'm learning: joy and grief were never meant to cancel each other out.

And gratitude is what starts holding grief and joy together.

Because the depth of our grief usually says something about the depth of what we had. We don't grieve what didn't matter to us. The size of the ache is the shadow of the size of what we loved.

So when I feel the weight of missing my dad, I'm trying to let that same weight remind me of the gift. Decades of him showing up. Coaching me. Teaching me how to be a husband, how to be a dad, how to embarrass my family with my sense of humor. (Some things must be genetic.)

Grief.
Joy.
Gratitude.
All three, sitting at the same table this past week.

Maybe that's true for you too.

Maybe there's someone you've lost that grief still visits when you least expect it. Maybe you've felt guilty for laughing while you're still grieving, like joy is somehow a betrayal of the person you miss.

It's not.

Joy doesn't erase grief. Grief doesn't have to swallow joy. They can share the same room. Some days they even show up at the same time, and it's messy, and it's confusing, and it's holy all at once.

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Weekly Resources

Grief, Joy, & Gratitude Joe L. Barnes Please listen to this song. Available on YouTube

Sent Churches Equip SENT | Week 3 In Week 3 of our SENT series, we look at the church in Antioch and Paul’s teaching in Ephesians to discover what it means to be an equipped follower of Jesus. Equipped people are taught, prepared, and ready to stand firm when they are sent into the world. Available on Youtube

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So here's my challenge for you this week:

If you're grieving something or someone, don't feel like you have to choose between the ache and the gratitude.

Let them both be true.

Say their name out loud.
Tell a story about them.
Let yourself smile in the middle of missing them.

Because that ache you feel?
It's not a sign something's wrong with you.

It's a sign you loved well.

Praying,
Ryan