• Death and Dying,  Grief,  My Story

    Older and Wiser Words

    April 7, 2020

    It’s taken me awhile to feel ready to write about COVID-19. I still don’t feel ready. Our society—our world, really—has come face to face with our mortality. Most of us have been thinking about the reality that no matter who is considered at risk all of us are vulnerable to this illness and could die. All of us.

    You’d think that would be exciting for me, as someone who firmly believes this realization is vital to who we are as humans. 

    It is exciting, in some ways. I see so much potential for good conversations among families and friends, I’m hopeful and praying that we would see patterns of renewed and mended relationships, healthier patterns of rest, better relationships between parents and children, and hopefully a greater humility before God and gratefulness for the common graces he’s given us. There is so much of our humanity to be reclaimed in moments like these.

    But on the other hand, this is scary! Who of us doesn’t have family or friends in the “at risk” category? Who of us doesn’t shudder as the unemployment numbers rise? Who of us doesn’t weep for the children and others trapped at home with their abusers? 

    These are serious matters, and I don’t feel equipped to speak into such large-scale suffering. To write as if I have answers would minimize real suffering that’s taking place. There are others, older and wiser, who can speak into this situation. All I can do is listen and weep and pray.

    My words can’t possibly provide enough strength or comfort or grit to get anyone through a crisis of this scale. I am only slowly growing older and wiser, after all, and I don’t write about mortality because I’m good at grief. In fact, I write about it, I think, because I’m not good at it. I’ve tasted just enough suffering to hate it, to avoid it. Recognizing that there is something better for us than fear, though, I write to remind myself and whoever reads that this is, in fact, true. But right now, even though I know that Christ is near us in our suffering, and that we, in his sovereignty, were no safer a month ago than we are now, the weight of suffering feels heavy enough that I’m left mostly without words. 

    There is one word, though, that I’ve been pondering. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the term “microaggression.” Or, not about that word specifically, but about a correlated idea for which I’ve coined the term “micro-grief.” There’s surely a real word for it—I just don’t know it. So, in lieu of that real word, let me just explain that I’m “microgrieving,” and it’s not easy.

    I think a lot of us are feeling this. The fear of getting sick—of this unknown thing that could kill me and anyone I love is one thing. But perhaps even more weighty than that fear are the tiny griefs along the way. Celebrating my two oldest children’s birthdays without friends or family. My daughter missing her preschool teacher and friends. My son missing the childcare workers at the community center. Not getting to introduce my newborn to friends, or have my parents get to know him in his early weeks. Lamenting missing church for the month before lockdown because of sickness and childbirth. Even the loss two-hour grocery delivery, and instead having to wait several days so that Instacart can keep up with new demands. There’s grief in the action of disinfecting groceries, the handwashing after opening Amazon packages, the calendar reminders for cancelled events. And there’s grief in the good things, too—virtual game-nights, eating donuts while watching a sermon, and extra time for reading or hobbies. 

    All day every day I feel the small weight of these micro-griefs. And every now and then, I realize that they have become one giant, worldwide Grief, and it floors me.

    My husband and I caught up with our small group over Zoom the other night. Our time together was happy, with no imminent threats to anyone’s well-being. But after the call, Michael and I both felt exhausted. After hearing of all the little ways COVID-19 has disrupted normal patterns, those “micro-griefs” felt like a giant weight.

    I don’t mind bearing the weights of our friends and family—it’s a privilege. But, as others have pointed out, we need to acknowledge that all of this is real and heavy. Even if no one I know and love gets sick or dies, even if a vaccine is miraculously found tomorrow and not one more person dies from COVID-19 (Lord, let it be so!), these last weeks of suffering will have taken a massive toll.

    So, while creation groans like I’ve never heard it, I myself have no words. Although, happily, the days passing within the four walls of our home are mostly marked by joy, these little micro-griefs pile up and the weight is wearing. So I’m returning to the old and wise words of scripture to form my prayers. If you’re not turning to them already, now is the time. We’re only mortal, after all.

    Matthew 11:28–30

    Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.

    Psalm 71:17–20

    O God, from my youth you have taught me,
    and I still proclaim your wondrous deeds. 

    So even to old age and gray hairs,
    O God, do not forsake me,
    until I proclaim your might to another generation,
    your power to all those to come. 

    Your righteousness, O God,
    reaches the high heavens. 

    You who have done great things, 
    O God, who is like you? 

    You who have made me see many troubles and calamities 
    will revive me again;
    from the depths of the earth 
    you will bring me up again.

    Isaiah 40:28–31

    Have you not known? Have you not heard? 
    The LORD is the everlasting God, 
    the Creator of the ends of the earth.  He does not faint or grow weary;  his understanding is unsearchable. 

    He gives power to the faint, 
    and to him who has no might he increases strength. 

    Even youths shall faint and be weary, 
    and young men shall fall exhausted; 
    but they who wait for the LORD shall renew their strength; 
    they shall mount up with wings like eagles; 
    they shall run and not be weary; 
    they shall walk and not faint.

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  • My Story,  Publications

    News and Updates

    February 25, 2020

    Hello Friends,

    As you know by now, Unhurried Chase is a hobby of mine. Unfortunately, I haven’t had much time to dedicate to writing lately (keep reading and you’ll see why), but I do have a few updates to share with you!

    First, we welcomed the fifth Carlson (well, sixth, if you count the dog) last week! He’s little and cute, and we all love him.

    Secondly, a book review I wrote for The Gospel Coalition was published yesterday. If you didn’t know that Tim Keller was releasing a short book called On Death, watch for it in just a few days (or pre-order it!) and check it out. I reviewed it here (and a hearty Welcome! to those of you visiting as a result!). The book is well done, and I think you’ll enjoy it. One of my favorite things about it is that it’s short enough to read in one sitting (around 120 pages with large text and wide margins), and is something worth sharing with friends and family regardless if they are Christians or not.

    On Death, Tim Keller

    Finally, and this is not news for most of you, but if you’re just stopping by from TGC (or anywhere else)—I’d love for you to either follow the blog, or watch for updates by following me on Twitter (@UnhurriedChase).

    Okay. So there are my updates! Now back to snuggles and catnaps.

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  • Grief,  My Story,  Stories and Songs

    Their Span is But Toil and Trouble

    November 5, 2019

    “For all our days pass away under your wrath; we bring our years to an end like a sigh. 
    The years of our life are seventy, or even by reason of strength eighty;
    Yet their span is but toil and trouble;
    They are soon gone, and we fly away.
    Who considers the power of your anger, and your wrath according to the fear of you?

    So teach us to number our days
    That we may gain a heart of wisdom. 
    Return, O Lord! How long?
    Have pity on your servants!

    Satisfy us in the morning with your steadfast love,
    That we may rejoice and be glad all our days.
    Make us glad for as many days as you have afflicted us,
    And for as many years as we have seen evil.”
    Psalm 90:9–15

    O, Lord. Who am I, but dust and ashes?

    Sometimes the fragility of life just seems overwhelming. Our false hopes come to light, our co-worker’s stillbirth didn’t mean that our pregnancy would be healthy. Our good news is overshadowed by someone else’s bad news. That’s what happened to me today, and I am feeling my fallen, dusty nature. 

    After two weeks of uncertainty and anxiety, yesterday I came home from the doctor feeling relieved and hopeful. Today, I found out that someone in a parallel phase of life received devastating news and had her life turned upside-down.

    Sometimes, life feels like an affliction, either ours or someone else’s. Our lives are destined for death, either before or after “seventy, or even by reason of strength eighty” years of suffering and toil. Sin must be really terrible to deserve this sort of curse.

    Of course, all of the other parts of the gospel story are still true. This curse is the one that Jesus bore. This curse is the one that he conquered on the cross and in the tomb. This curse is the one that will be forever made right when he returns. 

    And yet right here, right now, all I can do, and maybe you too, is cry and say with the psalmist: 

    “Return, O Lord! How long? Have pity on your servants. 
    Satisfy us in the morning with your steadfast love,
    That we may rejoice and be glad all our days.
    Make us glad for as many days as you have afflicted us,
    And for as many years as we have seen evil.”

    Amen. Let it be so.

    I know this is an incredibly vague post. It’s vague for privacy, both mine and the other person mentioned here. I’m fine, really. Grief is good, and so is lament. It’s good to sit here for awhile.

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  • Miscellany,  My Story

    Oh! And this happened.

    June 14, 2019

    I graduated!

    Well, I actually finished my MA in Catholic Studies in December, and I didn’t actually walk in commencement. But I did show up for the reception to take pictures with my friends in our caps and gowns.

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  • Miscellany,  My Story

    An Early Summer Update

    June 11, 2019

    I’m still here.

    It’s been awhile, and I’m eager to write. 

    Since I last wrote, we’ve taken our first family road trip to Denver. Both of the kids did well, and we will do it again. Days after we returned, we took a semi-unexpected trip to Washington (the state) for my grandmother’s funeral. I’ve also been attending a summer Bible study, and taught Ruth 1 for the group last week. It was a blessing to spend time in Scripture preparing, and to feel like I was using my gifts in a new way. 

    I was able to share some of my story in the lesson, and since it has been the most substantive thing I’ve written lately (or thought about, to be honest), I’ll be sharing it in pieces here on Unhurried Chase. 

    I’ve also been spending time with my husband, finishing the basement of our new house. We’re at the stage where everything crucial is “finished,” and we’re mostly just left with a mess and a lot of annoying things to finish, like breaking down boxes, filling nail holes, staining bookshelves, and touching up paint.

    It’s been lovely to have warm weather—the raspberries are bursting through their fences with green leaves and little nubs of growing berries. My garden is… surviving, mostly. I tried to grow wildflowers in the front, and something sure is growing! Unfortunately I have no idea if they’re weeds or flowers. And the stinging nettles survived the weed killer.

    My daughter is developing a passion for toad farming in her kiddie pool. Her record for toads caught in a day is three. Her best name so far, was Petunia Timber(something) Toadyroad, or Mrs. Toadyroad. We now enforce a strict no-kissing rule after I saw her bid a toad a passionate farewell a few days ago.

    My son is regularly wearing out the seat of his pants (he doesn’t crawl, he scoots), and winding up with grass in his diaper. He is all boy, and has a special joyful sound he save just for balls—even if they’re actually just light fixtures or the big red concrete balls outside of Target.

    So, while I’ve missed blogging, life has been full of things that make me so grateful for the place God has me right now. 

    I hope to be back soon!

    Jamie

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  • Death and Dying,  Grief,  My Story

    Days to Remember

    March 25, 2019

    This is it, you guys. This week marks the anniversaries of car accidents, suicide, and my first miscarriage. 

    I sang with the congregation in church yesterday, and tears welled up and overflowed as we sang of death and resurrection. Most of my losses this week are from over a decade ago, but this week still marks most of the darkest days of my life—the loss of four teenage peers and one tiny baby. This week is worth crying over.

    I used to mark it well, taking some time off to sit and contemplate the losses I’ve experienced. To remember the people who have died, and intentionally grieve their loss, pray for their families, and let sorrow lead me to prayers of “Maranatha! Come, Lord Jesus!”

    The last few years have been, simply, busy, and I’ve let that be an excuse to let this practice fall by the wayside. But it’s worthwhile, I think, to take the time to mark loss, and my lack of planning is unfortunate. One reason I want to continue this practice (maybe I’ll have to shift the date to next week this year) is that I don’t want to miss out. I think there’s real gain in grieving.

    2 Corinthians 4:7–16 has been influential in my thinking in this regard. There, Paul speaks of the treasure we have—”the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.” Our bodies, in the metaphor, are jars of clay. As these bodies, these jars, suffer and become cracked, the light of Christ shines out with greater and greater brightness, being “renewed day by day.”

    So I remember, consciously, the times when I have felt the most cracked, the most worn. I remember the cracking so that I remember, too, the strengthening of the light within me and the comfort of the Holy Spirit.

    And I also remember for the sake of what Paul speaks of in 2 Corinthians 1:3–7, a passage I stumbled upon in my reading the morning after I learned of my cousin’s suicide: “For as we share abundantly in the sufferings of Christ we share abundantly in comfort too. If we are afflicted, it is for your comfort and salvation; and if we are comforted, it is for your comfort…Our hope for you is unshaken, for we know that as you share in our sufferings, you will also share in our comfort.” I remember for the sake of my empathy. If I remember my own suffering, and my own comfort, I can more easily enter into the suffering of those around me for the sake of their comfort. Taking time to grieve renews my compassion for those whose grief is fresher than mine, and allows the comfort I have received to flow over into the lives of others.

    So, what does this time look like for me?

    Usually it involves some time spent in quiet remembering—literally just thinking back on those days, and reliving them. I put together the timeline of events, remembering the conversations of the day, and stepping back into the emotions of the day. 

    I like to take some time to journal and pray, too. I try to remember the people who were most affected by loss in those days, and pray for them. Grief for sons and daughters never goes away. The loss of children can have an enormous impact on marriages, jobs, and all of life. Trauma in adolescence is powerful for good or ill. I never want to assume that 12 or more years later friends and family are “over it.” So this is my day to remember to pray for the people that I know who have been impacted the most.

    Usually this takes just an hour, maybe two. It feels like a short time to remember such life-altering events, and mourn lives of sons and daughters, people made in the image of God.

    Life is precious, and death is catastrophic. Two hours of grief a year doesn’t seem like enough. 

    For those of you who have lost friends and family, I’d love to hear from you. Do you take days of remembrance for losses you’ve experienced? How do you enter intentionally into grief as the years progress and the open wound of loss becomes scar tissue?

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  • My Story,  Stories and Songs

    An Introduction

    March 16, 2019

    In the last months of grad school, I got the same question grad students everywhere answer countless times: “What is your thesis about?” 

    Now, what is the least-shocking way to tell people that you’re interested in human death and decay?

    I couldn’t just tell them that I was studying dust in scripture—seriously, is there anything less interesting-sounding than dust? So I would explain it in the context of a larger philosophical/theological question, and the fact that it’s neglected by nearly everyone who will, in fact, return to dust.

    It wasn’t always a comfortable moment to share stories of grief and loss, but the truth is that there’s more to my interest than merely academic curiosity. In fact, I’ve been contemplating death from a young age. 

    I won’t go into too much detail here—partly because some of these stories don’t feel like mine to share, and partly because I’ll probably say more about them some other time. But I want to give you a picture of my experiences so that you can understand a little of why I am the way that I am. 

    It started in high-school. 

    High School

    My family moved to Minnesota in June of 2002—the summer before my freshman year of high-school. I started at a new school that fall, and to be honest, that first semester (okay, the whole year) was pretty rough. It was a small school. The kind of school where you “know” people without even necessarily talking to them—you have most of your classes together, so even if you never have a one-on-one conversation you still have an idea who they are and what they’re like.

    In the spring semester, one of my classmates became ill and missed a lot of school. I remember hearing updates occasionally, and then learning finally that he had cancer. We continued to hear updates, positive and negative, throughout the school year. Sometime mid-summer, he passed away. My grief was different from my classmates. I had only known him for a few months—most of them had known him their whole lives. Even so, close proximity, with or without a relationship, to the death of a peer at 15 is not something to discount.

    The following spring I was a sophomore, a little more secure in my new school, though still in the “new kid” category—something you never quite lose when everyone else has grown up together. In the early morning, before my sister and I went to school, my parents received a phone call. I didn’t hear it, but my sister came downstairs, knocked on my door, and told me that our cousin had committed suicide. He was just a few years older, and we weren’t close. But there’s still something profoundly shaping about losing family, another peer, in an unexpected and violent way. My sister and I went to school anyway, not knowing what else to do with ourselves, and knowing we’d be missing school to travel back home to Montana for the funeral.

    Within days of the one-year anniversary of my cousin’s death, compounding my grief, a school-mate in the grade below me, was killed in a car accident. My junior year was nearly over, and I had yet to have a year of high-school not marked by loss. 

    My senior year rolled around and I think we were as hope-filled as any senior class. You never think catastrophe is coming. But then one day three of our class-mates never made it to school. They were planning to meet before driving to attend, if I remember correctly, the state basketball tournament. After a stress- and rumor-filled morning, our principal confirmed to us that there had been a car accident and two of our classmates, weeks from graduation, had died in an accident just a few miles from school.

    And then we were adults…

    Fast-forward through happy college years—where I began to let go of the expectation that the last week of March would bring unexpected news of loss. And since 2006, it hasn’t, thankfully. 

    This week has been filled with joy for the last nearly-four years—it’s the week of my daughter’s birthday.

    But even her birthday is a reminder. Before my daughter was born, we lost her older sibling in a miscarriage. An unexpected loss in a season that we had reason to expect to be filled with joy—for us and many of our friends.

    My son’s birthday is in March too, a little earlier. He just turned one this week, actually. But even so, I see the age gap between him and my daughter and remember that there is indeed enough space in there to have been filled with the birth of a second child lost through miscarriage.

    Heavy Weights

    Do I make more sense now? The last fifteen years of my life have brought significant sorrows nearly every year. I haven’t even included the stories of my aunt and uncle, and various others from slightly more distant circles whose loss I’ve grieved. Each new grief adds a little weight to the others, an extra dose of empathy for the closest mourners. 

    And do you see why this matters? None of us are above this sort of experience. We don’t think about it often, but we, and everyone we love, are one speeding car, one bad decision, one illness away from a close encounter with grief, death, and decay. No one is exempt—age, health, and habits are no guarantee.

    Are we prepared? Do we have the tools in our belt to deal with loss? Can we answer with confidence that even in our weakest, saddest moments that God is still love, and that he is still kind? I

    I’m not encouraging fear or paranoia. But my own experiences have taught me that we should be ready to undertake the task of grieving and dying well. And it is a task—there is nothing easy about it. But, like muscles grow able to bear heavy weights with practiced motion, I think we can prepare our souls to bear greater weight as well. Great weights never get lighter; great griefs will always be heavy. But we can practice so that just as weight-lifters perfect their form, we know how to bear them when they come.

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