Well folks, that’s she all wrote. The year with the worst Rotten Tomatoes score of all time has come to an end. 2020, you were fun for like 3 months right at the beginning, then evolved into some terrible fever dream we wished we could wake up from. Honestly, I’m sitting here, writing this blog on December 31st and I have absolutely no idea how on God’s green Earth I got here. But alas! I made it, and so did you, the splendid and beautiful human who is reading this! That alone is worth celebrating. Truthfully, it feels weird making light of a year which involved so much sadness and pain on so many levels. 2020 has given me some of the clearest glimpses of brokenness I have seen to date. A pandemic which has taken too many people from us too soon, racial injustice highlighting hatred and dissonance in our country which runs far deeper than we care to admit, isolation, depression, and a world on its knees begging for its creator to come and make things right. It’s enough to make anyone disheartened to the nth degree.
If I had to pick, I’d probably vote this year up as this hardest year of my life. That alone is kinda annoying because it’s like giving the class bully the satisfaction of knowing he’s gotten to you. But truly, this year has been the epitome of a roller coaster. I got to experience some of the most fun I could have imagined with my old college roommates (Goobie Gang) the first portion of the year, and even more with my current roomies (Fellows babes). But, despite being the bookends joy, my old friend Sorrow was intimately woven into most all of my experiences for the year. He and I go way back, someone I have gotten to experience a lot of time and life with. This summer, he and I were together more often than I can remember, and at the time, I saw him as a nuisance who I wanted nothing to do with. I mean c’mon, he was making me sad and I didn’t want to be sad. I wanted everything to be sunshine and rainbows and light and warm! I think I had been walking through life doing my best to maximize happiness and joy, and avoid / diminish sadness and pain when it arose. I kinda just thought that’s how things worked. Life was about optimization, and fostering space where I get the maximum return on my emotional investments. Happiness was doing it correctly, and sadness was a sign of doing it incorrectly.
Well, 22 years of this pattern did me dirty. I was at odds with too many pieces of myself to count. In a year like 2020, where themes of sadness and despair are nearly unavoidable in some regard, I was the epitome of ill equipped to handle what was coming. I saw Sorrow as an enemy to the state, a man trying his best to ruin the joy of life, a signal of what’s wrong with me. He was an intruder who I desperately tried evicting from my psyche. When Sorrow began feeling pain so deeply it felt to infiltrate every fiber of my being, I hurled insults at him. Statements like “Why are you here? You idiot! You are doing such a profoundly bad job. You’re so unwanted. Stop being sad and just grow up. Can’t you do anything right?” were commonplace. I beat down and broke Sorrow. He was scared, and why wouldn’t he be. I had convinced myself Sorrow was a sign of my weakness and incapability, a monument to my failures.
“If I had done a better job being with the Lord, I never would have gotten to this place. If only I had sought help sooner, I wouldn’t be here right now. It’s my own fault. You made your bed Tommy, now you deserve every ounce of pain you are experiencing.”
I accepted my identity as a man who had fallen so short of the standards laid out before me that it felt only logical that God felt the same way about me. I had subconsciously adopted a view of God in which he felt that I was his troubled child. That he was watching my patterns with disappointment and a deep sigh of exhaustion. “Look at Tommy, messing it up again”. Well, your boy limped through most of 2020 getting the absolute crap kicked out of him by none other than himself. I took every opportunity to throw a mean haymaker at myself whenever I fell short of any little standard I had. Grace was replaced with condemnation. And I dragged my butt through. It took a long time, lots of hard conversations, being confronted with the grace and love of my friends around me (shout out the boys), consistency (shout out Jeb and Austin among others), and God himself (shout out the Trinity) to help heal these wounds.
At the beginning of December, I penned a letter to my old friend Sorrow. I apologized to him for the first time in my life. I thanked him for teaching me how to feel deeply and empathize with the pain of others. I told him I am thankful for all he has done for me and I love having him around. There was nothing inherently wrong with him being around, and there was nothing inherently wrong with me. For the first time in a long time, I felt the deep and piercing warmth of forgiveness, grace, and restoration in myself. For the first time in a long time, I could look into Jesus’s face and not for a second doubt how deeply pleased he was with me.
2020, you did not make it easy. Yet, God took all the crap you threw my way and touched my heart with love. So for that, I thank you. Cheers to 2021! Time to play 2021 by Vampire Weekend on repeat.