Humanity: The gift that keeps us tethered to Christ

Our humanity sometimes feels like a burden, but it is, in fact, a gift. Here's why. (Also available as a 12 min video if you prefer to watch instead of read.)

Jul 28, 2023

The following video (and transcript if you prefer to read) is the introductory session from the Tethered Summit, which I initially ran during the pandemic, but I think you’ll find the content to be evergreen and as fresh and relevant as ever.

Tethered—exploring themes of grief and loss, faith and doubt, wholeness and hope—was some of my favorite work I’ve ever done and I have more than forty wonderful interviews with other authors, therapists, pastors, and care workers to share with you in the days to come. Some will be available here on my regular (free) Substack, and others will only be available to those who have upgraded to a paid subscription.

I hope you’re validated and encouraged by this short 12 minute session about the gift of being human. I’ve included a scripture for meditation and a few reflection prompts at the end (after the transcript), so please feel free to engage with those in your own private journal or in the comment section. I’d appreciate hearing how these sessions impact you.

With hope,
Adriel

P.S. If you already purchased an All Access Pass when the summit was hosted on Mighty Networks, please let me know and I’ll give you complimentary access here, too.

Video summary with timestamps:

Welcome to Tethered, an exploration of grief, loss, doubt, faith, wholeness and hope. 0:01
Tethered is not about solving or resolving or fixing. 1:16
Our humanity is a gift, not a burden. 2:58
Grief is not a project; it’s a process to walk through. 4:25
Welcome your whole self—pain and all. 6:23
God wants to meet us in a place of hope. 8:07
An invitation: would you surrender to possibility? 10:22

NOTE: If you’d like to dig deeper, scroll down for scripture and journal prompts after the transcript in a section called “For your reflection.”

Video transcript—Humanity: The gift that keeps us tethered to Christ

(Transcript lightly edited for readability.)

Well, hello and welcome. My name is Adriel Booker and I am your host of Tethered. Now of course, the Tethered Summit is an online gathering, but event organizers are based here in Sydney, Australia where my family and I live. It's deeply important to us that we acknowledge the land on which we live. This is the land of the Gadigal people of the Eora nation, and we want to honor elders past, present, and emerging as we collectively find our place within God's great story from here on our shores and all the way to the ends of the earth. May we understand our personal stories within the context of the communal stories we live within.

As we enter into the Tethered sessions, various speakers will be sharing a lot of stories and looking at the intersection of grief and loss, doubt and faith, and wholeness and hope. Through that, I really hope you’ll find yourself within the stories shared. God has given us a great gift in story; he has given us the ability to not only connect with our own selves, but connect with him and connect with others in community.

Right upfront I want to guarantee that your time engaging with Tethered is not going to “solve” your grief. It won’t resolve your pain. And it certainly will not provide you with a four step plan to get your life on track or to ‘fix’ you or to bandage your faith. That is not what we are about. Tethered is about opening up a space where we gather lots of women and men of diverse backgrounds and diverse experiences—but all who love God—to be able to share their stories and share how life, loss, grief, or doubt has shaped them, as well as how they found themselves able to remain tethered to hope in the midst of it.

We're going to be telling some hard stories. There might be a few tears and we'll be laughing at times. Through our time together I really hope you’ll give yourself permission to ask some hard questions. You don't need my permission—of course you don't—but sometimes it’s helpful for someone to articulate that to us and say you have permission to ask the hard questions and have the hard conversations. My hope is that as you listen and interact with these sessions, you would engage with your whole self. I invite you to bring your doubts, bring your pain, bring your fears, your shame, your confusion, your hope or despair, your beliefs and desires. Please bring all of it and do your best to suspend any fear of being truly known by the Lord.

Friends, I'm a firm believer that our humanity is a beautiful thing, but when I’ve had times of struggle in my life, or have been in deep grief or experienced profound pain, I have sometimes felt like my humanity is a burden because I just can't seem to pull it together the way I want to, or see the world or God the way I want to. But what God has begun to teach me and form within me through these years as I've matured through grief and have been formed through my own pain and suffering, has helped me to realize that my humanity is actually a gift. It's a gift because it's the very thing that keeps me tethered to Christ. It's because of my humanity that I'm able to recognize my great need for him.

But this has not been an easy process for me. (And I’m still learning.) It has required me to disarm my knee jerk reaction to pain which, by default, is to pull up my bootstraps and say, "I will get over this" while I white knuckle my way through. This is my personality and my cultural upbringing. (Sound familiar?) I'm now Australian, but I was born American and I will always hold the American DNA baked into me during my early years. It contains a certain grit that Americans have to overcome adversity and find a success story. And look, there's nothing wrong with finding a success story—and I truly hope you find one. I love the American can-do attitude. But I'm also concerned that we don't become so hyper focused on recreating success out of our tragedy that we miss the opportunity to meet with God while still in the midst of it.

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My faith is richer and fuller because I've been able to learn what it means to suffer with Christ and to bring my pain and my grief into the presence of Jesus knowing that it doesn't just magically disappear if I pray enough or if I surround myself with the right people. It also doesn't magically disappear if I have the right therapist or if I have the right tools. All of these things can help. But grief is not a project to complete in our lives. It’s not something to be overcome; it's something to be walked through and to come alongside.

I have found that grief has completely undone me at times. I’m in my early 40s, happily married with wonderful kids in my home, but I've also experienced four miscarriages at all different stages of early and mid term pregnancy. Those losses have been some of my most devastating experiences with bereavement and grief, bringing so much into question in my own life and body and spirituality and soul. And yet through those experiences, I have also learned that it's possible to grieve with hope.

Grief is universal. We can't avoid grief. We can't skirt around grief. Everyone experiences grief. But although everyone experiences grief, not everyone grieves with hope. And in my experience, and from my perspective, hope makes all the difference. As we enter into these Tethered sessions in the days and months to come, I want you to engage with expectation, with hope. I want you to welcome your whole self; you don't have to “get it together” or complete some prerequisite.

We are filming these videos in late 2020, and it’s been quite the year. Here in Australia we started the year with our nation on fire. And then we entered into a devastating pandemic, which we're still not on the other side of from a global perspective. We have all felt the world writhe in pain with civil and political unrest and the racial tension that was exposed after George Floyd’s murder. And we’re still in the thick of a reckoning that not only America is experiencing, but people all over the world are engaging with as we examine how we relate to people of color and admit to ourselves all that is still unhealed. (This is not something that's limited to America; Australia is grappling with our own torrid history as well as present disparities.)

As you know, there's great pain around us—great devastation and great loss. Even as we film this, the West Coast of the US is being consumed by wildfires—more devastation. I could go on and on listing all that is painful in the world. You could too. We must acknowledge the cultural moment we're in is difficult. It's okay to say it. It's okay to name our disappointment. It's okay to name our suffering. It's okay to name what we've lost.

You and I could both write down long lists of things we've lost, the disappointments we carry, and the things that have broken our heart during the pandemic years o(or after). They might be things you think are simple like a family holiday or the ability to attend a wedding or the ‘luxury’ of working without trying to multitask and support your kids during home learning. Or they might be much bigger things like not being able to be with a loved one who is on a ventilator or fighting for their life with COVID. In the midst of it all, I believe God wants to meet us in a place of hope. He really does. This is not about us getting our ducks in a row or learning how to overcome our grief. This is about how to name it and open ourselves up to it and soften ourselves to the possibility that our crisis might actually be—if we're willing—a catalyst for transformation in our lives.

It might be that our crisis—our loss, our deepest pain—is the very thing that opens us up more to God. To be clear, I'm not saying God sanctioned it. I'm not saying it’s all a ploy for him to teach us or sneak broccoli into our spaghetti sauce—God is not a manipulator. But in his kindness, God will meet us in any place of pain or grief. He will meet us right where we actually are, and I truly believe that he’ll be able to find something good and something beautiful there, too.

And so friend, as we go through these sessions, I want to encourage you. Would you be willing to sit in the possibility that there might be pain and beauty wrapped up with one another? That there might be suffering and joy that can actually go hand in hand? That just maybe God is calling us (the Church) as a witness that does not compartmentalize the gospel? That perhaps he calls us not just to celebration or to joyous, happy, rainbow-ish experiences and epiphanies, but also to dark places to find hope in the midst of what sometimes feel hopeless?

May you enter into Tethered with a full heart—a full heart of hope. And if you don't feel hope, then I want to ask you to enter in anyway. Enter and ask God to fill up your hope tank. (Gosh, that sounds cheesy, but I just said it. So it's done. Hope tank, ha!) Ask God to fill you up with hope. This is not something you need to conjure up or believe hard enough for; it's something we surrender to.

This is your invitation: would you surrender? Would you surrender to God? Would you surrender to possibility? Would you surrender to the process of allowing yourself to see that you are undone, but can also be remade? Would you surrender to the possibility that grief does not have to be our final undoing, but can actually be a pathway to grace?

So this is my prayer and my hope for you: May you be filled. May you be inspired. May you be challenged. May you walk away with a few practical tools. (Although they're not going to be prescriptive, I can guarantee you that. So please don't get your hopes up for a formula, because you won't find any here). What you will find in the Tethered sessions is regular women and men who love Jesus, who are committed to seeing kingdom come, who are living in the liminal space between the Now and the Not Yet, trying to understand what it means to see heaven on earth right here in the midst of our grief or pain or doubt or confusion. Together may we emerge with a more expansive vision of God's goodness and a greater capacity to hold on to the hope that holds us.

Be so blessed, friends. You’re already tethered.

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Scripture:

“Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.” Mt 5:4

Reflection prompts:

Have you ever felt burdened or ashamed by your humanity? Why or why not?
Have you given yourself permission to name your losses and grieve? If not, what is holding you back?