by Katie Nichol
Read the text from Jered Weber-Johnson’s sermon here.
Superbowl Sunday, I walked into church weary. I was feeling like an imposition, a fraud, exhausted, devastated, overwhelmed, angry, and lonely. I’d just moved out of the sober house after living there 14 months. Two days ago, I’d worked my catering gig’s biggest event of the year; yesterday, I’d started a new job (bringing my total number of jobs up to four). Weariness had me dreading the rest of the day.
I’d skipped a funeral yesterday in lieu of the new job. Work was a good excuse, but I was relieved to escape social niceties with people from a life I’d left abruptly behind, for grieving publicly a person I didn’t particularly care for (even though I wished I did) while I was actively grieving the death of a friend whose obituary had just been published.
That Superbowl Sunday, the sermon asked me to remember times when the abundance of God surprised me. I found I could remember lots of them. How I work four jobs but each one is neat, and four jobs means I don’t have one, all-consuming job. How I missed date night because of work, but also how I have weekly date nights with my bestie and next week is Valentine’s Day. How I get to live with the dog I once had to give up and thought I’d never see again. How my new housemate had texted me to say she loved having me in her house. How she and her father had painted the guest room, my room, pink prior to my arrival. How help continues to show up unexpected and unlooked for.
After the sermon, the morning’s weariness was not quite dissipating, but the desire to “fake it until I make it” had begun to seep in.
*
The friend I was grieving, Colleen, embodied—dare I say brought to life—the program of Alcoholics Anonymous. Everything appeared to seem incredible to her. She was voracious. She had a presence, and her presence was truly a gift.
Many of us in recovery discover new or previously untreated health issues coming up. More than once, I’ve jokingly responded to “Oh, the joys of getting older!” with “Oh, the joys of getting sober!” It’s like starting a small home repair and before you know it, your house is gutted, stripped down to the studs. Colleen was dealing with a bad tooth. She died of sepsis. She was seven months sober.
The last time I saw Colleen, she was giving a presentation on the second step—“being restored to sanity”—and she was talking about babies. I’d been internally fighting that step lately, specifically the word “restored.” There is no original me I want to be restored to, I thought, that’s the me that got me here in the first place. But there Colleen was, loopy with pain, talking about babies, saying because isn’t that fundamentally what each of us want? To be acknowledged in the only way we know how, to have our basic needs met, to be kept alive, and loved?
When I told another friend about Colleen’s passing, they asked if she died how she would have wanted to go. Who am I to say? But she did die sober.
As the days passed and my grief threaded through life in moments of joy and public sobbing, I thought about how Colleen died: full of passion, energy, connection, and possibility. Does it stink she couldn’t do some of the things she wanted to? Absolutely. Do we miss her? Daily. But, wow, to leave this life at such a peak of wonder, when the impossible not only felt but actually became fully, unadulteratedly possible—now, that’s a way to go. I have to imagine that is how Colleen would have wanted to go. Her spirit continues to live on in each of us who knew her.
*
My therapist once suggested, “Perhaps what God was offering you was Here is your past, whatcha gonna do? And, Here is your now. What are you going to do with it?”
When I think about my now—even a miserable under-the-weather now— I feel giddy. My “now” is a dog snoring on the couch, my housemate’s leftover lukewarm coffee, a puzzle begging to be tinkered with on the dining room table, an awkward rocking chair next to a fake fireplace which atop sits a dozen orange roses. Oh, those roses! My housemate brought home a bin of flower seconds and I spent hours deconstructing the bouquets, new arrangements scattered in mason jars throughout the house, a blue and white ceramic bowl on the hutch filled with colorful floating blooms that I named a prayer bowl.
Afterwards I saw a post on social media from my housemate: “I was seeking a conversation with god – paused to take in the beauty of flowers and realized…that was the conversation and I almost missed it.”
*
After the early service on Superbowl Sunday, I went down to work my shift in the nursery, my weariness lifting. A child came up to me and asked me for help, articulating a need for the first time since I’ve known them. We played together. After church I continued to play. My boyfriend and I went bowling.
I went to my new job, where a grown man asked me to help him remove his outer jacket, heavy over layers, a body weary from living outside in Minnesota winter. Everything that bogged me down the day before now felt like an opportunity for discovery, for greater understanding and connection.
I can remember that weariness is temporary. That my feelings of loneliness are often self-imposed. And that if no grief is solitary, nor is any amazement solitary. And that amazement continues, is built memories upon memories until those moments of joy are not some vaulted four-leafed clover, but simply the now. Here and now.