The Unnamed Burden

“You have kept count of my tossings; put my tears in your bottle. Are they not in your book?” – Psalm 56:8

David Brooks writes, “We have entered the endurance phase of this pandemic.” When people ask now how we’re doing, I find myself rather at a loss. Nothing has changed, logistically. Yet there are constant ups and downs. In his book A Grief Observed, C. S. Lewis writes, “One never meets just Cancer, or War, or Unhappiness (or Happiness). One only meets each hour or moment that comes. All manner of ups and downs. Many bad spots in our best times, many good ones in our worst. One never gets the total impact of what we call ‘the thing itself.’ But we call it wrongly. The thing itself is simply all these ups and downs: the rest is a name or an idea.”

We are not meeting a Pandemic. We are meeting each hour or moment that comes as we press on in a world of monotony and future uncertainty, and I’ve found many of those hours and moments unpredictable. Some days are good, some days are bad, and I’m at a loss to explain exactly why, since all days are circumstantially identical. I sometimes feel more depleted by the end of the day than I used to feel. Is it that my work is harder? Perhaps. But it’s also the weight of simply doing what we’re doing, enduring.

Lewis writes in the same book: “I once read the sentence ‘I lay awake all night with toothache, thinking about toothache and about lying awake.’ That’s true to life. Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery’s shadow or reflection: the fact that you don’t merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer. I not only live each endless day in grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in grief.”

That’s the unnamed burden of this time: not just the unknown, but thinking about the unknown. Not just the monotony, but our awareness of the monotony. Not just the ups and downs, but wondering about the ups and downs. This burden runs like an invisible undercurrent through our day; it eats into our emotions, messes with our attention spans, can cause subconscious anxiety or dread. But this is a burden we don’t have to suppress, or deaden ourselves to, or drug ourselves from—this too is a burden we can cast upon God. We have a God who counts our tossings at night, who sees and keeps and remembers not only every sorrow, but every thought about the sorrow.