'Into your hands I commit my spirit' by Andrea Bailey Willits [Retrieve Lament 2021]
While I’ve never met today’s guest in person, I’m so grateful for her spiritual companionship and look forward to being in the same space together someday. Andrea demonstrates a holy dissatisfaction with shallow conclusions about the message of the Gospel and a desire for a Jesus-shaped resilience. With skill and honesty, she invites us to do the same in today’s lament. She also orients us to the meaning of Holy - or Silent - Saturday. No matter our current experience of grief and suffering, we all share this truth in common: we live in the middle of the story. We live between Christ’s first and second coming and we long for the fulfillment of all that’s not yet resolved.
Would you read Andrea’s lament story with me, and ask God for an open heart to hear any words Christ might be speaking to you in the middle of the story?
Willits family in front of the chapel their church plant met for the 2019 Easter service.
“It was now about the sixth hour, and there was darkness over the whole land until the ninth hour, while the sun’s light failed. And the curtain of the temple was torn in two.
Then Jesus, calling out with a loud voice, said, ‘Father, into your hands I commit my spirit!’ And having said this he breathed his last.
Now when the centurion saw what had taken place, he praised God, saying, ‘Certainly this man was innocent!’ And all the crowds that had assembled for this spectacle, when they saw what had taken place, returned home beating their breasts. And all his acquaintances and the women who had followed him from Galilee stood at a distance watching these things.”
Lament as Returning to the Story
by Andrea Bailey Willits
Last year, right after COVID hit, I turned 40. It is a monumental birthday for most people. Mid-life crises have become a cliche, but they happen for a reason. I couldn’t resist turning a full circle to survey the landscape of my life. To do so, I pulled out my invisible checklist.
The list included the following:
A house of our own
Savings
Retirement
Nice-ish cars that don’t break down all the time
Vacations that last more than two days
Not living paycheck to paycheck
I held my invisible pen poised about my invisible list, unable to make a single tick. I had exactly none of the things I was “supposed” to have, according to the prevailing cultural narrative. Plus, I had added my own narrative. I’d promised myself that at 40, it would be “my turn.” Finally, all three of my children were in school—my youngest had just started kindergarten. I would quit my part-time job, finally, finish my novel and become a full-time writer, penning stories for children and young adults.
Instead, the year I turned 40, the church plant my husband Erik had launched three years before closed its doors. Christmas Eve was our last service. We sang carols by candle-light as our dear friends led worship, and we said goodbye to the little community we had invested everything in. Nothing terrible happened; it simply never grew. Slowly the money ran out. It was an agonizing process watching this dream die, and we found ourselves at a loss for what to do next. We stared at each other and asked, “What now?”
It felt like an even bigger hit because prior to church planting, we’d sold our house and moved across the country to attend seminary. We’d raised money to pay for seminary but it had taken every last penny we had. We started the church immediately after finishing seminary, before even catching our breath. Now, unsure of what all that sacrifice had been for, we were tired. My anxiety was sky-high. So I accepted a full-time job in Franklin, Tennessee, we rented a place to live without ever seeing it, pulled our kids from their beloved elementary school, and moved from Texas to Tennessee in January.
Even though I could trace the thread of his provision for us, I began to scream and rail at God for how my life was turning out. I looked in the mirror and saw how stress had aged me. I asked God how he could have led me to this place and forced me yet again into this position of desperate reliance. I sank into despair at our lack of security, home, savings, and retirement—the so-called fruit of “responsible” living. Even more, I was grieved by my own entitlement and privilege in thinking I deserved these things. Seduced by glittery but shallow promises, I began to wrestle with envy. It felt impossible to rejoice with my friends who had the things I lacked. I watched my friends buying bigger homes, taking Disney cruises, and stockpiling their retirement accounts and I cried, “What is wrong with me? Where did I mess up?”
The Wrong Story
In the midst of my lament, I heard a story of a man climbing a ladder. He climbed higher and higher and higher, and he was exhausted from climbing, but he forced himself to climb higher still. When he got to the top, he realized to his dismay that the ladder had been leaning against the wrong building the entire time.
When I heard that story, something clicked. As tears splashed onto the pages of my journal, I wrote, “I’ve scaled the wrong building.” I was clutching on to the world’s frail and fickle ladder of success, instead of seeking first the unshakable Kingdom of God. I lamented that. I lamented that I was so easily seduced by the world’s story of the only life worth living. I lamented that here on this planet, we humans allow our hearts to be captured by shiny cars and Botoxed foreheads.
But some days, my heart still gives in to the false story’s magnetic pull. It’s painful to turn my heart in a new direction, and it stubbornly persists in going back to its idols. Selfishly, I don’t want to align myself with the kingdom of a suffering God, whose greatest victory took place on a cross. Sometimes it’s easier to enmesh the American narrative with the scripture to proudly declare American exceptionalism. We fight. We conquer. We take what we want. We pull ourselves up by our bootstraps. Only the fittest survive. And if you don’t fit into that story, there is something wrong with you. This mentality is in the water, along with the “godliness” of capitalism and every person’s “right” to pursue the American dream.
No, I think there is something wrong with that story. This story says my life is a failure. But then so are thousands, if not millions, of people for whom the American dream—self-made riches, security, and status—is not, and never will be, a reality. I lament along with my brothers and sisters who find themselves on the outside of the story in more ways than I will ever understand. I lament that as a society, we have elevated individualistic, consumeristic lives that are in direct contradiction to what Jesus modeled in his life on earth. "Foxes have dens and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has no place to lay his head" Luke 9:58. The American Dream is too small. It is a meritocracy. It thrives on inequality. It asks us to lift ourselves up at others’ expense.
The grand story of God is the only story that has a right middle, beginning, and end. It is the only story that can encompass and make meaning of every human life, every kind of human joy and sorrow. It is the only story strong enough to hold us. One day I will be made new and the whole world will be made new, and there will be no sun because we will live in the brilliance of God’s presence. No longer will we be caught up in a story that requires constant striving but never satisfies.
Often, the middles and even the endings of our personal stories are tragic. They don’t make any sense, in and of themselves. On Holy Saturday, it looked like Jesus was dead for good. That’s why our personal stories need to be situated in a larger story, the one in which we are always safe because God’s purposes ARE prevailing. The Anglican liturgy has helped me re-saturate my imagination in that story. For me, lament has been cleansing. It required grappling with my idols and laying down lies—and welcoming a life that looks, to many people, like a failure. I place my own little story in the story of the community’s suffering, and I think our suffering Savior is there too.
The Blessing of Limitations
What would God say about my life? Would he be ashamed of me for not executing a 10-year plan? For being 40 and right back at the beginning? I have a strong, unmistakable feeling that in his dusty, upside-down, cross-shaped story, God would not frown or tsk like a disappointed parent. He would remind me that he is the true Storyteller, and I belong in his story.
Thankfully, these days my family is making ends meet. Being the breadwinner takes its toll—I feel guilty for not being there for school pickups and drop-offs, and when I get home, I’m tired and cranky sometimes. We are still trying to dig our way out of debt. A year later, my husband is doing side jobs while he looks for a full-time ministry position. We are in our 40s and still feel like we are 20, just starting out.
Maybe that’s OK. Daily, my limitations draw me into the downward mobility that Jesus embodied, and through the heartache, I am learning to live in His story.
Andrea Bailey Willits is a storyteller at heart. She is wife to an Anglican priest and mom to three children ages 11, 8 and 6. Andrea is the communications director for the Diocese of Churches for the Sake of Others and The Telos Collective.
Read and Pray
The Seventh Word: Father, into your hands I commend my spirit. (Pater, in manus tuas commendo spiritum meum.)
“I called to the Lord, out of my distress,
and he answered me;
out of the belly of Sheol I cried,
and thou didst hear my voice.
For thou didst cast me into the deep,
into the heart of the seas,
and the flood was round about me;
all thy waves and thy billows passed over me.
Then I said, ‘I am cast out from thy presence;
how shall I again look upon thy holy temple?’
The waters closed in over me,
the deep was round about me;
weeds were wrapped about my head
at the roots of the mountains.
I went down to the land
whose bars closed upon me for ever;
yet thou didst bring up my life from the Pit,
O Lord my God.
When my soul fainted within me,
I remembered the Lord;
and my prayer came to thee,
into thy holy temple.
Those who pay regard to vain idols
forsake their true loyalty.
But I with the voice of thanksgiving
will sacrifice to thee;
what I have vowed I will pay.
Deliverance belongs to the Lord!”
--Jonah 2:1-9
There was darkness over the whole land…while the sun’s light failed; and the curtain of the temple was torn in two. Then Jesus, crying with a loud voice, said, “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.” [Luke 23:44b-46a]
Good and strong Jesus, even as you once entrusted your spirit into the hands of the Father, so we give our lives to you. With Andrea, we commit into your hands every unrealized dream, every unanswered question, and every scrap of what the world perceives as failure. We ask you to bury as far as the east is from the west every idol and bit of self-reliance that never satisfies and in its place resurrect us to live right now on earth the same story that Jesus lives in heaven. Thank you that you don’t despise our humanness and we ask in our frailty that your Spirit would minister, counsel, and comfort us in the middle of God’s saving story.
We adore you, O Christ, and we praise you because by your holy cross you have redeemed the world. Amen.