Not Everything Needs a Phoenix

When was the last time you felt like you might have a mental breakdown?

For me, it was a few weeks ago, on a layover that wasn't supposed to exist.

We were flying from Phoenix to Dallas to Amsterdam. We got into Dallas and were excited to board our international flight (a first for our kids). A ten-hour flight is one you've got to mentally prepare for, and we were ready. We boarded the flight and settled in while the plane taxied from our gate to the runway for our 4 pm departure.

A few minutes later, we felt the engine turn off.

Then the captain's voice announced that an intense storm was blowing in, and he decided to wait it out. It would mean we'd sit there for about forty minutes to let it pass. Not ideal, but also not the end of the world. About thirty minutes later, we got another announcement that we'd still be waiting out the storm and no immediate end in sight. Thirty minutes after that, the same update (and an acknowledgment that, evidently, they're required to update you every thirty minutes whether or not there's anything new to say). We'd added over an hour to a flight that hadn't left the ground.

It was about thirty minutes after that when the pilot came back on and informed us that "apparently, it's not our day." There was an issue with our plane and we'd need to head back to our gate to deplane and figure out a fix. Evidently, this would also require a new flight crew.

Now we started to wonder if our plans would be irreparably altered. We started doing the math and trying to figure out what this meant. We were set to arrive in Amsterdam in the morning, so our first-day activities would need to be rescheduled.

We got off the plane and were given a new departure time a few hours later. We waited in the airport, hoping that this time everything would finally get figured out since the storm would no longer be an issue. Later that evening we made our way back to the same gate with the same group of frazzled travelers. When it was time to begin boarding, we heard them announce that we did not actually have all of the crew and we would need to delay our time a bit. We sat through a few more of these announcements until they delivered the final blow: our plane was not leaving that evening. We would have to do a complete reset and depart the following day at 4 pm.

That was the first moment of bedlam. Hours of frustration and delays erupted from people in all sorts of ways. Not only would we have to reschedule our plans, but we would also have to cancel and miss one of the two nights in Amsterdam. Our Europe trip was designed to maximize the time we had around our kids' commitments in the summer, and this felt like a blow.

Out-of-state travelers got a list of hotel options. I picked one, none of them close to the airport, and ordered a Lyft. I selected the XL size, since there were five of us with bags. The XL that showed up could not, in fact, fit five people and bags. It drove off while I ordered another one.

All of these annoyances built on top of each other. It was about 11:30 pm when we pulled in. And that's when I saw the check-in line wrapping around the front of the building and out into the parking lot.

I nearly lost it.

There was one guy at the front desk frantically trying to accommodate all of these canceled flyers. And I'm not exaggerating when I tell you that it took us an hour and forty minutes of standing in that line until we had the keys to our rooms. I went to bed around 2 am as a slightly broken man.

I'm aware these are first-world problems on a trip plenty of people would love to take. I'm also aware this is the kind of story that's supposed to end with a lesson. Something about patience, or surrender, or finding peace in the chaos. I kept waiting for that feeling to show up somewhere in the hotel line. It never did. There was no moment of clarity next to the vending machines. It was just bad, for a long time, and then it was over, and we went to Amsterdam.

We hate when life hands us these types of experiences, especially when they are longer than a night's delay. As I write in The Edge of the Inside, many of us go through seasons of disillusionment and are then left trying to rebuild.

In my years of liminal space following my departure from full-time ministry, I decided to finally get my first tattoo. I had thought about what I wanted for years, but had never pulled the trigger. Getting tattoos seemed like a liability for a Lead Pastor. But since I didn't want to do that anymore, it felt like the right time. So I tattooed a Phoenix on my arm as a visual reminder of new life rising from ashes.

The theologian Jürgen Moltmann said that "Christian faith isn't just a conviction, a feeling, and a decision. It invades life so deeply that we have to talk about dying and being born again, which is what corresponds to the death and resurrection of Christ." In addition, I've found that death and resurrection are part of the human experience, whether or not you believe in Jesus. 

I didn't survive the unraveling of my career and my theology by gritting through it over a weekend. It took years before resurrection was a word I could use about any of it. I needed a story large enough to hold what I'd lost, and once I'd sat in the loss long enough, resurrection was the only story that fit.

A canceled flight doesn't need a story that size. It's not actually about scale of inconvenience, either. It's about whether the loss is big enough that you can't get through it without believing something is being made out of it. The hotel line wasn't, so it wasn't. My faith collapsing was, so it had to be.

Which means the language of resurrection isn't a universal law draped over every bad thing that happens to us. It's closer to a tool we reach for only when the alternative is not making it through. Most of what we lose in a given week doesn't qualify. It's just loss. It doesn't owe us a phoenix.

In the Biblical book of Job, after he experiences losses in almost every way imaginable, we read that "Job scraped his skin with a piece of broken pottery as he sat among the ashes" (Job 2:8).

He doesn't get an explanation in that moment. He doesn't get one for a long time. His friends show up and immediately start trying to make his suffering mean something, certain it must be punishment, or lesson, or some hidden purpose. The book treats that impulse as the actual failure. Job just sits in ash that doesn't resolve into anything, for chapters, because the loss is too large for an easy story and he isn't interested in a cheap one.

I can see a photo of myself and instantly tell whether it's before or after my season of undoing. The tattoo on my arm marks a loss that was big enough to need a phoenix, and it eventually got one. The hotel line wasn't, and didn't.

So the question worth asking isn't whether pain redeems itself. It's whether the pain in front of you is actually big enough to need a phoenix, or whether you're reaching for one because sitting in the ashes without a story feels unbearable. Some things you rise from. Some things you just sit in for awhile.

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Photo by The Cleveland Museum of Art on Unsplash