My parents have this saying that I just love, “Everybody’s got their thing.”  And what they mean by that is every person we encounter is carrying around with them a trauma, a burden, a rejection, a hurt, a grief.

Everybody.

I would add this: The only people that don’t have a “thing” are the people you don’t know very well.

It is not just you.  It is not just me.  We are all carrying around a grief.

I remember doing a small stint of substitute teaching a few years back in the elementary schools.  I remember one particularly difficult kid who could…not…sit…still.  Always getting into somebody else’s stuff.  Never able to keep his hands to himself. Always and never.

One day I looked over to his desk…and he was gone.  On closer examination, I realized that he was under his desk.  And he was swimming.  He was swimming under his desk.  (I think it was the breast stroke.) Par for the course with this kid.

What was this kid’s problem? Didn’t he know that I had a lesson plan to attend to?  That I was trying to educate him?Didn’t he have any respect for his elders?  Didn’t he know that I was one of these “elders”?

Later on that week I was talking with another teacher about this kid, explaining that sometimes he felt the need to swim a couple laps on the linoleum during class.  Here’s what she said, “Oh yeah.  I know that kid.  Last week I saw his family parked in the corner of the gas station, trying to sleep in their car.  That kid was holding a blanket over the broken window to keep the cold out.”

It had been seventeen degrees that day.

Everybody has their thing.

The only people who don’t are the people you don’t know very well.

In the ancient Hebrew Scriptures, there is this line about how people are made, “So God created humankind in His own image, in the image of God He created them; male and female He created them.”

Now, this “image of God” language carries a couple of different meanings.  On the one hand, it is meant to be about what we do: we are to reflect the image of God in the world.  But on the other hand, and this is what I want to key in on here, it is about who we are: it is familial language.

It is used like this later when a man named Adam has a son, “When Adam lived 130 years, he had a son in his own likeness, in his own image…”. This is a very Hebrew way of saying that this is family.

According to the ancient Hebrews, God made us—all of us!—in His own image.  Which means that we are all his children.  From the beginning. Later, we hear language of us being adopted by God through the suffering of Jesus.  This is a re-membering of the way things have always been: we have always belonged to each other, always been brothers and sisters.  

It takes Someone suffering to remind us.

Because even though we are born belonging…we always seem to forget.  It seems that everything is geared toward us forgetting.  Grief has the capacity to cut through that loss of memory, to make each other visible again.

And this is, perhaps, the door that grief opens for us, the goodness that it can offer.  Because when we are touched by a grief, suddenly we find ourselves on the inside of something.  We know grief more than we know about grief.  Know chronic pain.  Know loss. Know anger.  Know despair.  And now we know something of what everybody else is carrying around with them everyday.

If we let grief do its good work, bitterness might turn to compassion, “why me” might turn in to “why anybody”?  We might treat that person who is clearly having a bad day differently.  What might they be carrying? We might approach that kid swimming in the middle of the class more gently.  What don’t I know about where they slept last night? We might ask more questions about how they ended up in that orange jumpsuit, or in line in front of us fumbling with their WIC papers, or in our newsfeed posting that atrocious meme.

Jon Foreman has put it like this: “The moment I start cursing at the traffic or the phone, I remind myself that we have all got cancer in our bones.”

What if we allowed grief to be a signpost on the way to solidarity?