The Rather Not Year

Before long, I’ll be flying again.

I hate flying.  I have to take anti-anxiety medication to even board a plane: the only time, and the only purpose, for which I have ever had to use it.  I hate everything about the process of getting ready to travel, going to the airport, getting in the plane.  Hate it.

But the plane is the only way to get overseas. 

In November, it will be a year since my mother died.  And I have come to call this the Rather Not year.  It’s the year in which I’ve had to do a lot of things, pretty much everything, that I would rather not do.  It’s the year I’ve been unable to avoid doing what I would rather not do.

And now I’m looking at flying soon, and I want to do that the least of anything.

I am sure some of it is worse because my mother isn’t here.  She is the one who prayed with me before flights, prayed for me during flights, waited up to receive the triumphant message: I’m in Europe!  When she reassured me the flight would be fine, I somehow knew it would be.  And now she isn’t here.

Fortunately, the medication helps.  At some point, before boarding, I’ll choke down a little pill and it will take the physical manifestations of the terror away.  My heartbeat will slow, the pit in my stomach will leave, the sickening feeling of doom will vanish.  I will mostly feel sleepy and ambivalent about flying, which is much better than alert and terrified. 

Still, there’s no medication to help with everything else in the Rather Not year.

I would rather not have coped with my career being doused in rocket fuel immediately after Mom passed away—and the subsequent opportunities and stresses and maneuvering that came with it—but I couldn’t avoid it.  I would rather my supervisor not have suddenly made her dislike of me manifest around the same time.  I would rather not have been thrust into a thousand interpersonal situations that have tested the reservoir of my good will.  I would rather not have had some people I considered friends turn out to be the opposite.

Rather Not years stink.

And part of what stinks about them for the Christian is how it changes and alters our relationship with God.  I know it is not God’s job or God’s promise to make my life entirely pleasant and smooth and comfortable, but I still sort of wish He would.  It is a strange thing to know that I am in a close relationship with a God who can absolutely do anything if He wills it but who does not, for whatever reason, will taking some of these problems away.

That’s not to say God isn’t paying attention or intervening.  He is.

He is resolving situations, often after I’ve struggled through them for a short time, in my favor.  He is visibly changing people’s hearts—after I’ve resigned myself to enduring whatever these people had to throw at me.  My little black cat has taken to showing up to sit on my lap and offer purrs and cuddles on particularly trying days.  I am certain God is whispering to him that I could use the assist.

It’s just not always happening in my time, in my plan, or to the liking of my preferred comfort level.  Yet the plain truth is that as believers sometimes we have to just endure situations we don’t much like.

And the other plain truth is that one of our responses to enduring situations we don’t much like is rebellion.  The Israelites entire struggle in the desert emerged from their unwillingness to endure the present state—to want now, more, better, improvement, on their terms and not on God’s. Idol worship comes of wanting A Thing Which Promises Relief.

Very few of us, I think, actually want abiding love.  We want abiding comfort.

So I am trying to think of the year of Rather Not as a sort of spiritual practice. Not the sort anyone would ever ask for, necessarily, but useful, nonetheless.  A practice of seeing God’s presence even when God isn’t, as I so often ask, solving all of my immediate problems the way I would like them solved.  A practice of endurance, of discomfort—a sort of out-of-season Lent of the heart.

Jesus endured no less.  And truly, that’s the promise of Christianity.  All our stuff will be fixed and redeemed eventually, but it’s sure not happening right now.  The promise in the meantime is presence.  Affection.  Tenderness.  And the gifts of the Spirit, and the transformation by God of our experience into something worthy.

At some point, we will all move from famine to feast.  In the meantime, the only way out is through.