“I hope you celebrate today!” my therapist said as I left the clinic. Minutes before our session, I’d gotten the news that after 6 months of job searching, I’d been offered an internship at InterVarsity Press. (Yay! I love IVP and I’m thrilled.) This moment got me thinking about celebration.
As I wrote in this week’s What I Love Wednesday, therapy has taught me to savor and celebrate wins, big and small. The practice of celebration, even if it’s treating myself to coffee or a pastry, reminds me to embrace the joyful moments when they’re here.
Celebration Alongside Grief
To celebrate is to “acknowledge (a significant or happy day or event) with a social gathering or enjoyable activity.”
Celebration is a marker, a way to joyfully honor something or someone that’s important to us. What we celebrate points to what matters or what we consider valuable. We celebrate marriage and friendship anniversaries, birthdays, holidays, weddings, and graduations.
Celebration can be hard in a culture that tends to sideline pain, suffering, and death. Do we really need more joy when so much pain gets ignored? How can we celebrate when we’re surrounded by so many things to grieve and lament?
Celebrating doesn’t say, “everything is good.” Instead, celebration looks at a particular thing and says, “this right here is good.”
Celebration is a way of rightly naming our experience of the world. Just as we need to honestly acknowledge what’s going wrong, we can also make space to acknowledge what is good and right–even when what’s right is messy and imperfect.
When Celebration is Scary
Celebration can be quite vulnerable. Brené Brown coined the term “foreboding joy” for the fear we feel when something good happens. We anxiously wonder how long joy will last and we fear the good thing will be taken from us. Better to not enjoy the moment, right? Perhaps skimming over our joy or not getting our hopes up will protect us in case disappointment does come?
Interestingly enough, Brown notes, minimizing our joy doesn’t protect us from pain, it makes the pain more difficult when it does come. Joy buoys us in our pain because we have positive emotional reservoirs to draw from.
Celebration in the Life of Jesus
Jesus’s first miracle takes place at a celebration: the Wedding at Cana. Jesus, his mother, and his disciples are celebrating their newly married friends–dancing, eating good food, and drinking fine wine. As we know the story goes, the wine runs out and Mary comes to Jesus with the problem, aware of his ability to do something about it.
So Jesus being who he is, takes six huge water jars and turns them to wine–a miracle hidden from everyone besides the servants, his mother, and the disciples. Jesus, already caught up in the party for its own sake, secretly performs this miracle so that the festivities can continue.
Amy Peeler puts it this way:
When Jesus began to reveal his identity through the performance of miraculous signs, he did so by blessing and continuing a celebration. He performed a miracle not to meet a need but to meet a desire for honor and joy in community. Because he does so, a manager avoids reproach, a family avoids shame, but for almost everyone else there, he does so simply so that their joyful celebration can continue and even improve…such a sign attests that God works miraculously not just to save lives but also to make life worth living. (emphases mine)
Jesus, a fully human man with a complex emotional life. Jesus, man of sorrows, well acquainted with grief, not always sure where he’d lay his head at night. Jesus, someone who knew how to enjoy life, and went out of his way to celebrate.
Wins, Big and Small
Many of the important experiences of our life are etched into our culture and have their own spot in the card section at the store. Another reason I love the card section. How beautiful that we create these physical mementos of important moments?
Yet, in the hurry of our culture, we may struggle even to soak in these big wins. Before we’ve taken in our accomplishment, our sights are set on the next item on our to-do list. Sometimes we skim over celebration because our schedule is overwhelmed. This is easy to fall into. That’s why I took it to heart when my therapist reminded me to celebrate a big win like this one.
Even still, there are moments in life worth celebrating that don’t make it to the card section. A moment we told someone how we felt (regardless of the outcome), a long-awaited answer to prayer, a pay raise, a sunny day. Bravery, growth, and vulnerability are all worth celebrating.
The small things are worth celebrating. The big things are too! Let’s make space to enter into joy when it comes.
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