Finding God in the Messy Middle

I love it when God shows up in a surprising way.

This past weekend I led a retreat called Finding God in a New Season. For three days we reflected on the changing seasons of our lives through silence, prayer, talks, and conversation. But it was during the very last discussion that God showed up in a way I could never have planned.

I had prepared several questions and assumed we would move through them one by one. Instead, when I offered the first question, Joan stood up and said, “I have something I want to share.” What she shared had nothing to do with my question, yet it immediately drew everyone in.

One afternoon while gardening, Joan felt an irresistible prompting to drive an hour and a half to visit her aunt in the hospital. There had been no call, no warning. She simply went. When she arrived, her aunt greeted her with joy: “Joanie!” Those were the last words Joan ever heard from her. As she finished the story, Joan began to cry.

Her vulnerability opened a door. Others began sharing their own encounters of unexpected grace. None were answers to my carefully prepared question, yet each felt unmistakably prompted by the Holy Spirit.

Then a woman sitting behind Joan spoke through tears. She shared the sadness she carries because she has been unable to have children, and how she pours her longing for motherhood into her two nieces. “When I heard how her aunt loved her,” she said, “I realized I love my nieces in that same way. And that is the gift God has given me.”

Her grief encountered Joan’s story, and something in her seemed to begin healing.

What emerged that morning were not neat reflections about entering a new season, but honest stories of grief, loss, disappointment, and uncertainty. Many were still in what William Bridges calls the messy middle, the space between what has ended and what has not yet begun. The middle is messy because something from the old season must be released.

One man asked, “What do I need to let go of?” as he spoke of the crushing grief of losing his spouse.

“Perhaps,” I suggested, “the idea that the hole in your heart will one day disappear.”

Letting go of what we think should happen allows us to enter more honestly into what is happening and discover that the Lord is already there.

My final conference was titled Being Sent. By Sunday morning, I realized a better title might have been Being Accompanied. We rarely leave a retreat with everything resolved. But we often leave with a deeper awareness of our wounds, our longings, and, most of all, the Lord’s abiding presence.

And perhaps that is enough.

We may not know where we are going while in the messy middle between seasons, but we can trust that we are not walking it alone.