grumble hallelujah

We are in a financial mess. Creditors call us daily. I don’t even open the medical bills anymore. Our mortgage is late again, and I don't know how we're going to pay it. And I can’t believe I’m writing this for anyone to see. But if I’ve learned anything from reading Caryn Dahlstrand Rivadeneira’s book Grumble Hallelujah: Learning to Love Your Life Even When It Lets You Down, it’s that my honesty just might help someone else feel less alone.

Now knowing firsthand how it feels to be released from the terrible prison of embarrassed isolation (which involved, I’m not embarrassed to say, a lot of tears), I’m willing to accept the ridicule and pity for telling you this awful news about our life. But somehow I doubt it’s coming. Because I bet you have awful news about your life, too.

Your situation may not look like mine, but it’s probably equally distressing and painful, or maybe even worse. It might be something that keeps you up at night or causes you to cry yourself to sleep. Or maybe you’re just working really, really hard to ignore it. As Caryn’s book so poignantly points out, none of us get the lives we thought we were supposed to have.

While reading, it occurred to me that every person I know has something in their past, present or (sorry to say) future that they never asked for, something that leads (or will lead) them to say, “This isn’t the life I signed up for.” An unhappy marriage, a spouse with depression or addiction, infertility or miscarriage, the death of a child or a husband, divorce, a disabled or mentally ill child, a career in the tank, bankruptcy, broken relationships, abuse, cancer. I don’t know one single person who has a perfect life. Do you?

And, yet, how hard we work to make it appear otherwise.

Most people who know me would probably say that I’m a pretty happy person. I find the positive in most any situation. I care for people. I love my family dearly. I follow Jesus. But what most people don’t know is that I live with this big pile of ick.

I try to keep all the yucky stuff—the debt, the bills, the worry, the fear—stuffed in a can, but it keeps sloshing over, seeping into the beautiful parts of my life. And it makes me angry and scared and really embarrassed.

I once told a close friend who knows the ugly truth about my life that one of my greatest fears is dying and knowing that people I love will discover the depth of our financial mess. How sad is that? But something in me wants to hide at all costs. Somehow we’ll come out of this and regain the life I’ve always wanted, I think. No one needs to know.

And yet, as I sat blurry-eyed, reading Caryn’s book, I realized this approach benefits no one, especially the one trying to hold the lid on the can.

In the pages of her book, Caryn shares the bitter truth—this brokenness is your life. But, thankfully, that’s just Chapter One. The other fourteen chapters are helping me learn what to do with my struggle and see how my life was meant to be lived, and loved. I am discovering that I need to grieve the fact that this was not the way my life was supposed to be, to release my expectations about how my life should look, to spit out my envy and anger at the ease with which others seem to live, to stop worrying that my shameful-feeling secret is going to influence others’ opinion of me, to die to this “should be” life I’ve imagined and, instead, to allow God’s light to shine through my imperfections and struggle.

If I could, I would give this book to all of my friends and family members who need to grieve over the fact that their lives aren’t turning out as planned. Loved ones who are experiencing distressing circumstances or painful losses. People who need to know they are not alone and that God wants their hallelujahs, even if they’re grumbled. Because when we’re courageous enough to cry out and give thanks even in our lowest times, God’s in the business of turning our lives into something beautiful. And that is reason enough to find our voice and stop pretending.