Every season of the year, I create a new Facebook photo album to document the shenanigans I will (most likely) get into over the course of that season/semester. I end up titling each album with something that represents what (I expect) is going to happen over the course of that album. For example, I titled my Fall 2013 album "The Beginning of the End" due to the fact that it was the first semester of my last year of undergrad. Of course, sometimes I end up having to change the name of the album part of the way through so that it more accurately reflects what I'm experiencing (like Fall 2014 started out as "Mastering the Divine" but quickly changed to "How the Heck Do You Spell Athanasius" after writing his name down in my notes fifty thousand times and spell check never knowing if the spelling is right or not).
All this is to say that I've changed my photo album for this summer. It started out as "JK there's no summer break in grad school" (due to the fact that I am currently taking a six-week intensive Hebrew course), but I've renamed it "A Time to Celebrate and a Time to Lament", because as I sit here at the halfway point of the summer and look back on the past two months, I notice that the threads of celebration and lament have been sewn throughout my summer (and probably my whole life, but I don't have a single Facebook photo album for my whole life).
I celebrated the fact that I got to go on a two-week choral tour of the Balkans, increasing the number of countries I've been in to 15.
Yet I lament at the fact that the Balkan region was torn up by bloody war, the evidence still visible 20 years later.
I celebrated going to Annual Conference, being elected to the General/Jurisdictional Conference delegation as the first lay alternate delegate to General Conference (and probably the youngest delegation going to General/Jurisdictional Conference in the denomination), and being a part of the Conference endorsing and sending (by a fairly sizable margin) seven petitions to General Conference that would change the rules of the United Methodist Church to allow for LGBTQ persons to be married in United Methodist churches and be ordained as ministers in the United Methodist Church, as well as allow United Methodist clergy to perform LGBTQ marriages without having to risk losing their credentials.
Yet I lament that the conference failed to pass a resolution that would have us advocate and pressure Albany to raise New York State's minimum wage to a living wage of $15/hour, relying on tired, fear-based rhetoric such as "it would hurt small businesses" or "it will result in people losing their jobs" rather than living into Christ's resurrection hope that calls all of us to work for a just society.
I celebrate that our national conscious has finally realized that flying the Confederate battle flag does not honor Southern Pride, but rather is a racist symbol that at least should not be flying over public land and buildings.
Yet I lament that it took a racially based act of terrorism against a historic black church and the loss of nine innocent lives to come to that seemingly common sense notion; that black churches are being burnt; and that in spite of how far we've come since the time of slavery (both in years and accomplishments), the evil of racism is still alive and well in our country and around the world.
I celebrate a historic ruling from the Supreme Court that allows for two people who love each other very much and want to publicly profess their love before family, friends, and God will be allowed to do so even if they happen to be of the same sex and/or gender.
Yet I lament that my LGBTQ Family members can still be legally discriminated against because of their sexual orientation or gender identity in the majority of states in the USA; that many of my LGBTQ Family embers still face stigmatization, leading to higher rates of suicide, mental illness, poverty, unemployment, and homelessness (among other things) than my straight Family members.
Of course, all of our entire lives cycle through seasons of celebration and lament. But for one reason or another, this tension has really stuck out to me this summer. It has seemingly been one thing after another. As I reflected, I struggled with figuring out which emotion to feel. Do I celebrate the victories, or do I lament at the failures?
But then I realized that celebrating and lamenting are not the primary goals. Rather, the primary goal is to work to build God's kingdom, governed not by fear, but rather by love, here on earth. No matter what the victory we celebrate or the failure we lament is, we still have work to do, and it cannot stop because of a good thing happened or a bad thing happened. Our celebrations and our laments cannot be the end of the story.
