Saying Goodbye

Have you ever heard people say, "I'm not good at saying goodbye"? Or perhaps, "I don't do goodbyes"? Today I had to say a lot of goodbyes and went scrounging the internet trying to find a good quote to sum up how I was feeling. You know what I found out? 

Nobody knows how to say goodbye.

I realized that no one can make sense of goodbyes. No one can sum them up. No one can unravel the complex, messy, convoluted emotions that are all tangled up in goodbye. Goodbye is such a short word and yet such a vast emotional experience. Just trying to think about goodbye, when you're truly immersed in it, is like facing the darkness of an unseen path and willing it to go away by merely staring it down. It's paralyzing. It's overwhelming. And yet, there's a glimmer of something that you just can't put your finger on in every goodbye. At first you just have the nagging, grating reminder of the fact that you have to part ways with places and people you know and love. Then comes the horrible, sinking, choking sensation you have when you look back one last time followed by the moment you think your heart will burst with sorrow and you cannot bear the parting. Then, just when you feel completely crushed and that you can't raise your head and take another step comes the gentle whisper that this is not the end. The whisper that says, "Very truly I tell you, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds"(John 12:24 NIV). I realized that today that every leave-taking here in my "home' makes room for more to blossom where God takes me. Goodbye here is not a "farewell forever" or "I'm forgetting you in favor of someone else." Instead, goodbye is a way of loosening your grasp so that you can hold many instead of a few precious friendships. That glimmer, that faint breeze, that wafting scent of hope reminded me that although goodbyes hurt, they are much like giving birth -- the real joy of realized relationship can never come without the pain of letting go of old ways of life, pushing through the pain and grasping new life.