I’ll just come out and say it: life is absolutely frustrating right now. I know it is impolite to say such things. I know we are supposed to operate in positive vibes only and move as blessed and highly favored on The Clark Sisters’ internet. But when life is really #lifing, there are no gratitude exercises, positive affirmations, or churchisms that can cloak the pain and misery we feel. For the last several months, I’ve been experiencing life in this way.
I had a 6 month long menstrual cycle. That’s not a typo. From August 2019 until February 2020, I coped with debilitating menstrual bleeding while still showing up for most of my obligations, duties, and major sources of stress (read: corporate work). This experience culminated in a hysteroscopy with dilation and curettage (D&C) and myosure that produced even more stress and anxiety (I’ll detail this experience in video). I couldn’t take the time for myself to really relax, destress, and heal. I still had to show up for work so I could pay bills, be present for family and friends so I could maintain community, and *still* try to show up as a leader for Unfit Christian and folks who trust their spiritual lives to me.
My corporate career makes provisions for most needs, but it brings me neither peace nor joy. My work life is fraught with feeling constantly overworked, undervalued, and undermined. In the workplace, I experience multiple stressors of lose/lose double binds, trade offs of personal and work cultural norms with my social identities, and multiple biases beyond gender. My assertiveness is relabeled as combative. My rightful anger is placated and managed out through performance reviews. Despite being labeled as an expert, my advancement has been stagnant for the last 3 years of my 4 year tenure. I have to navigate a culture of “relationship-based” promotions and advancement. Which means I have to play social games of code-switching my language, feigning interest in things that have no cultural relevance to me, and be super sociable but in a generic, ethnically non-threatening way. I advocate for bringing the whole self to work, but being myself has a price which often includes my peace.
Life seemed to be happening without relief, so naturally this drove a silence between God and me. A silence I chose because I felt that the answer was endurance, not belabored prayers to God with a litany of complaints. I know, I know. Oh what peace we often forfeit when we do not carry everything to God in prayer. But I did not wish to over-spiritualize my experiences. Yet by the time I’d run out of endurance, it was quickly replaced with anger towards God for not listening to me.
My personal, professional, and spiritual life is a mess. I can’t offer you platitudes of positive thinking and mindset shifts. Not because they aren’t available, but because I have enough integrity to not try to spiritually bypass the realities of life. You can’t wave, praise, or buck away very real feelings of impotence, dissatisfaction, and failure. No matter how much I’ve shown up publicly as an example of strength in hardship, these experiences just damn hurt. This is not a testimony of tribulation to triumph. Even as I write this, life is still very much happening in a location where there is profound gratitude but very little joy. I’m in a space where I’m exhausted from trading joy for survival and peace for illusions of stability.
This week, I tried to soothe myself with a familiar Ecclesiastes scripture, “the race is not given to the swift nor the strong but to the one who endures to the end.” It sounds nice and is often used to encourage us to be of good courage, trust God, and have faith that it all works together in the end. I mulled over that scripture and what it should mean to me in this season.
I broke it out to the strong component. I’ve spent my life as a Black woman being strong and, as the scripture suggests, I still haven’t always won based on that strength. It is all that I’ve been taught and that I’ve taught to others. We tell people to stay strong, be strong, God gives strength to navigate the trials and tribulations of life. We assume strength requires endurance, but that’s not true. We endure a lot of things with no strength at all: bad relationships, habitual boundary steppers, shitty jobs, and mistreatment of many varieties.
But then I asked God, “who decides the end? What good is endurance through such harmful adversity? Should we endure hardness as a good soldier or do we get to decide the end?” Hell, what do you do when you don’t even know what an ending looks like? When have you endured for much too long and too little reward?
The more I turned it over, the less this scripture resonated. This could’ve been the end except this scripture isn’t a scripture at all. It’s a churchy mashup of feel-good emotionalism. Here’s the actual two verses used to make this particular churchism:
“Again I saw that under the sun the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, nor bread to the wise, nor riches to the intelligent, nor favor to the skillful; but time and chance happen to them all.” (Ecclesiastes 9:11 NRSV)
“But the one who endures to the end will be saved.” (Matthew 24:13 NRSV)
It’s important to understand that Ecclesiastes 9:11 doesn’t end that way in order to silence that highly critical inner voice. That verse says you can do EVERYTHING right according to the goal you want to obtain and STILL, time and chance happens to us all.That verse tells us that there’s room for failure even when you stay the course. It tells us that you can make yourself miserable trying to follow the assumed steps towards your goal and still fail spectacularly if time and chance aren’t aligned for you. Verse 12 explains that this happens because we have no way of knowing our time. You cannot anticipate these times of disaster just like a fish in a net or bird in a snare. It just happens.
But we are so used to life responding to us. Inputs. Output. Input of strength, endurance, patience, and hard work should all output a win. Yet, the very “scripture” we turn to for encouragement literally doesn’t guarantee or support that. I don’t know how people conditioned to war cries of “it’s my time” and “it’s my season” can grapple with when time and chance affect the crop of your harvest.
How do you accept that not even complete devotion to God and faith doesn’t usurp time and chance? How do you believe in a concept as big and powerful as God, but accept that you’re still subject to time and chance? It’s almost easier to accept that you failed at one of the inputs than to be told your big dreams and goals were thwarted by something as minor as time and chance. I don’t think we’ve been equipped to reconcile this. If being a child of God doesn’t garner favor that manipulates time and chance, what good is that God?
Yet, decoupling these two scriptures has affirmed my comfort and faith in a God that answers prayers. I’ve spent so much time internally cycling through how all of my inputs have failed to yield the outputs I desired. This frees me from the prison of self-doubt and forces me to change the way I speak about my role in the circumstances of my own life. Though eternally tardy, Ms. Lauryn Hill makes a timely point: “how you gon win when you ain’t right within?” That is to say, how is the output ever going to be right if we spend every moment doubting and degrading the very source (ourselves) of the inputs of our lives?
Sometimes in the midst of what feels like perpetual stagnation, it is enough to know that you aren’t a fuck up. No matter how fast, strong, wise, intelligent, or skilled you are, time and chance happens to all of us and there’s nothing you can do to avoid that. To honor and accept this is an invitation to redirect our prayers when life just flat out sucks — even after we’ve done all we can to make it better. To that end, I offer an amended Serenity Prayer:
God, grant me with grace the serenity to accept the influence of time and chance that I cannot change, the courage to confront the negative self-talk that I have about my role in my own life that I can change, and the wisdom to know the difference between the influence of my actions, time, and chance.
Bay. Bee. Thank you!
This is amazing. And you brought up subjects I deal with EVERYDAY, but never applied them in this way to my spiritual life.
I’m a health coach and I’m constantly explaining to people the differences between strength and endurance when it comes to exercise. I’m also constantly explaining how input doesn’t always equal output when it comes to weight loss. Encouraging people to stay the course when they aren’t seeing desired results in spite doing “everything right”
I’ve never seen it the way you just explained it. You just blessed my soul. I’m going through a period of stagnation in my life….trying to make sense of it. This helps! And thank you for highlighting the REAL scripture. We messing ourselves up with this soundbite Christianity
Thanks to my wonderful co-worker and friend for hearing the voice of the Lord to pass this on to me. Thank you Jesus because you are still in the blessing business
This is an amazing, insightful and profound article that resonates with me to my CORE. “Life is happening in a location where there is profound gratitude but very little joy” is the EXACT definition of my life over the past few years and being able to read that is frightening. Wrestling mentally, spiritually and emotionally with God (and my inner critic) often leaves me exhausted like Jacob. Your reconciliation of our feelings with who God is, is pretty impressive. I applaud you and I thank you for this.