Sabbath Devotional :: A Bittersweet Year

https://www.facebook.com/emma.addams/videos/1623667028059518?idorvanity=358285211220660

“Life cannot be won. It can only be loved.” – Adam Miller, “Original Grace”

I love new beginnings. I mark them at every interval I can — a new month, a new week, even a new day. A new year feels like the ultimate new beginning, and I am full of optimism and joy as I anticipate it. This carries over into January as I spend time evaluating my habits and routines, identifying which ones served me well in the past and which ones to jettison. I don’t make resolutions or set big goals – instead, I look for the little changes and adjustments I can make to improve my life.

This pattern “re-set” is naturally accompanied by introspection about the events of the past year. What were the big things that marked the passage of time and who were the people who impacted me and my family? Was there a theme or a common thread I can identify that was woven through my days and weeks? Can I say that I learned any big lessons? Looking backwards suits me far better than choosing a word for the new year, which many women I admire do. I just have never felt like I had enough certainty about what lies ahead that I could boil it down to a word. It felt like setting myself up for disappointment if things didn’t work out and so instead I choose to try and make sense of what is behind me as I prepare for what lies ahead.

Applying this retrospective process to 2022, it quickly became clear that any theme for my year was going to be complicated to unpack. Our family experienced three deaths of close family members, each carrying their own particular mix of sadness and joy. Woven in among these deaths were some unrelated experiences too sacred to share, but that felt like the sweet resolution of decades long challenges which I had settled in for a lifetime of. I regularly find myself in thankful tears as I express gratitude to the Lord for the care and unexpected gifts I have been given this past year.

Grief, joy, loss, gratitude, relief, guilt, sorrow, glee — I felt them all in 2022 and I felt them deeply. And so I can confidently claim bittersweet as the best way to describe the year.

Did you know that the word bittersweet is not used anywhere in our standard translations of the scriptures? This surprised me, because in my mind it is everywhere. I can’t get through a single book in the Book of Mormon without feeling both the joy of conversion and the weight of prophecy of ultimate destruction. The “nothingness” of Mosiah 4 is woven among hopeful words about God’s goodness and the “tasting” of joy as we are filled with love and knowledge. The love that the Anti-Nephi-Lehies feel as they rejoice in Christ is held alongside the fear and sorrow they feel for the wickedness of their brethren.

Alma probably comes closer to describing it than anyone else, as he wrote about his “exquisite and bitter” pains as compared to his “exquisite and sweet” joy in Alma 36. But he is referring to sin, a “scarlet” thing that becomes as “white as snow” (Isaiah 1:18) upon repentance. Christ’s atonement holds the power to transform the filth of our sins into the cleanest of slates.

My personal experiences with sorrow lead me to believe that it works a little bit differently than sin with regard to the atonement. I can hold the bitter in one hand and the sweet in the other and both increase my capacity to love. I am not meant to put one down in favor of the other, but to allow my sadness over the loss of my mother-in-law, for example, to drive me to feel and express greater love to my mother each time we talk. I can both feel helpless and hopeless as I watch my husband grieve the loss of his little sister and experience the deepest love and gratitude for his goodness and vulnerability as he honors her life with such tenderness and care.

It turns out that my best and worst experiences in 2022 were each tied to relationships of love. I felt the sorrow that accompanies loss in harmony with the joy of realization that the departed had changed me for the better. As I watched one of my most beloved family members grow and change in ways I had not anticipated, I was overwhelmed with the purest of love for him and the deepest gratitude that I am part of his life.

And so I begin 2023 with these insights in my heart. I say “I love you” more often than before, look for ways to express excitement at the joys of those around me, petition the Lord for more empathy for my enemies, and am overwhelmed with gratitude for the bittersweet, at times overwhelmingly complicated life I have been given. I don’t want to win 2023, I just want to love people through it.

Explanation of video: Unmentioned in this devotional is the amount of chaos I experienced in 2022, some (much!) of it due to MWEG and our VERY ambitious year. By the end of the 2022 federal legislative session, I was very ready for a break! Whenever things felt especially chaotic, I took to the piano to let off some steam. Etude No. 6 by Philip Glass was one of my go-to pieces, so I recorded it for you last night. Played at a rapid tempo (much faster than what is notated ) , always just one step from going over the edge, it is very satisfying and soothing in its repetition.