Order Disorder Reorder Part 2: Disorderናሙና

New Song

After a very painful divorce, well meaning people would always ask for updates on how I was doing. I was grateful that they cared about me, but after awhile I grew weary of telling that part of my story, as though digging it up again and again kept me tied to it.

I remember the day when it became clear to me that I needed to start telling a new story: the story of what came after that painful chapter, of slowly rising up out of those ashes as a new creation—kinder, wiser, humbled, and broken but stronger.

Telling the story of the transformational work God was doing in me became a part of the transformation itself. Articulating it made it more real, gave it traction, and helped it come to pass.

I suppose that’s not surprising when I consider this is how it’s been since the very beginning when God created the world by speaking it into existence. Likewise, we who are made in his image have the power to speak our own worlds into being.

Not only that, but we were also created as both visionary and ballistic creatures—which means that the direction our life takes depends on where our sights are aimed. It’s important to look forward to brighter and hopeful horizons, to lift our “eyes to the hills…” (Psalm 121:1). Songs of ascent can help align our language with our vision and properly aim us.

On the day my friends Ellie, Jordan, and I wrote “New Song,” their publisher poked her head into the writing room to check in on us. I noticed a tattoo of a bird on her arm and asked her about it.

She told us that after grieving her own divorce, she needed to look forward to a new future with hope. She’d heard how the sound of singing birds was the symbol of hope for sailors who’d been lost at sea because it meant that land was near. After a long season of feeling lost at sea, she got the tattoo in anticipation of new shores on her horizon—a symbol of the birdsong in her heart.

After she left the room, I said, "Guys! This is what our song should be about!" And so that’s where “New Song” begins.

There is a brand of spirituality that superstitiously urges against speaking anything negative for fear of bringing it about. On the other side of that spectrum we find the “name it and claim it” positive confession crowd who imagines that the way to manifest positive results is by only speaking faith. At their extremes, both ideologies are half-baked and offer their own flavors of anxiety and blindness.

But they are only half-baked, and what they get at least partially right is that it’s good to pay attention to the words we speak and the stories we tell. Are they aiming us up and out into new and better stories? Or are we participating in our own despair by wallowing in the continued telling of it? There can be a perverse kind of pleasure in unhappiness. A pity party is still a party, even if only a sad one.

There’s a time for singing the song of our grief. It’s a good and necessary song that will help us heal and even bring healing to others by giving them permission to release their own grief that’s been locked inside of them. I believe grief is the mechanism God has given us for bleeding out the toxicity of our pain before it poisons us.

But when we’ve given our grief it’s full due, there will come a time to sing a new song: a song of resurrection and overcoming, deliverance and new life. And when this song is sung in its right time, it becomes the wings that lift us beyond our grief into what comes next.

At the beginning of this devotional series, we read the first part of 2 Cor 2:14 which says, “But thanks be to God, who always leads us in triumph in Christ…” The second part goes on to say, “…and manifests through us the sweet aroma of the knowledge of Him in every place.” (NASB)

As we pass through the fire of our own suffering, authentically working through our disappointment, anger, and grief, “speak(ing) what we feel, not what we ought to say” as Shakespeare wrote, we have a literal chance in hell of coming out the other side more whole, more alive, and more like Christ himself. In fact, I am persuaded that this is how we are made more like Christ: by voluntarily taking up the cross of our own suffering and following him through order, disorder, and out the other side into reorder. 

As we do this, with the great hope that Love will have the final word over our lives, we may yet become the sweet aroma of Christ to the world around us—able to minister to the suffering of others, offering help and hope, singing the new song that becomes a light at the end of the tunnel for those still in the dark.