The month of June didn’t go as planned. I turned 30. I attended the funeral of a friend whose life still feels too large to speak of in the past tense. I watched the country argue, again, over who belongs and who gets to be protected.
I have not written in a while. Maybe because writing requires you to tell the truth before you have fully survived it.
But June left me with a question I cannot shake:
What does it mean to lose something and still leave with something gained?
That question is not as simple as it sounds.
We often talk about loss as if it is only subtraction. As if something is taken and the rest of life is just the remaining balance. But I am not sure that is true.
Loss does not only take. Sometimes, it rearranges what remains.
It changes the lighting in the room. It makes certain things visible that were always there, but easier to ignore when life still felt generous with time.
Earlier this month, my friend passed away.
She and her husband were, and still are, my friends, in life and in death. During the pandemic, I basically quarantined with them. There are people who become part of your life without ceremony, people who settle into your story so naturally that you do not stop to imagine a future without them in it.
Then suddenly, you are forced to.
I had imagined my children knowing her. Not as a story. Not as a name mentioned carefully. But as a person. As an aunt. As a longtime family friend. As someone they would trust because I trusted her.
It is a strange thing to mourn a future that had not happened yet, but grief has never limited itself to what already was.
She was taken by a drunk driver, and there is no way to make that sentence feel less brutal. There is no poetry that can soften the ugliness of carelessness. There is no theology, no politics, no wisdom deep enough to make recklessness feel anything other than cruel.
And yet, even there, I hesitate.
Because I do not want the final word about her life to be the manner of her death.
That is one of the quiet responsibilities of love. To refuse to let tragedy become the most complete thing we say about someone. To tell the truth about what happened, but to tell a larger truth about who they were.
She was a worship leader, but more than that, she was good. And I do not mean good in the casual way we say it when we do not know what else to say. I mean good in the way that leaves evidence. Good in the way people remember. Good in the way a room fills with stories after someone is gone. Good in the way love keeps speaking after the voice has been silenced.
I spent my 30th birthday at her funeral.
That was not the plan.
The plan was Cabo. The plan was sun, laughter, celebration, and the kind of freedom you imagine should come with entering a new decade. Instead, I sat in a room with people who loved her. I listened to them speak her name. I stood and spoke over her life.
And somewhere in that room, between the sorrow and the songs, between the tears and the testimonies, I realized that turning 30 was not being marked by what I had lost, but by what I was being asked to understand.
Time is not promised.
Love is not wasted.
A life does not have to be long to be complete in its impact.
And celebration is not always loud.
Sometimes celebration looks like honoring someone well. Sometimes it looks like standing in grief without surrendering to despair. Sometimes it looks like deciding that the world may be ugly, but it will not make you ugly in return.
That, to me, is where something is gained.
Not because grief gives gifts. I do not believe we need to romanticize pain in order to survive it. Some things are simply wrong. Some losses are simply unfair. Some wounds do not arrive carrying a lesson.
But even when pain does not teach, it can reveal.
It can reveal what mattered.
It can reveal who shows up.
It can reveal what kind of person you are becoming.
It can reveal whether your hope is decoration or discipline.
And I think that is what I have been wrestling with most — hope.
Not optimism as performance. Not the kind of optimism that denies what happened or rushes people into gratitude before they have had time to grieve. I mean the kind of optimism that survives reality. The kind that does not need the world to be innocent in order to believe it can still be redeemed.
That kind of hope feels more honest to me now.
Maybe because June was not only personal.
While I was sitting with the loss of someone I loved, the country was doing what it often does in June: waiting on decisions, anniversaries, interpretations, and the fragile language of rights.
We marked another anniversary of marriage equality, and I thought about how strange it is to celebrate something that should have never required permission. I thought about the people who loved before the law recognized them. The people who built lives in the shadows and then were told, finally, that the country could see them.
I thought about birthright citizenship and the ongoing argument over who gets to belong here by birth, by blood, by law, by history, by force, by survival.
America has always had a complicated relationship with belonging. It writes promises in broad language and then spends generations debating who those promises were meant to include.
And still, people keep believing in the promise.
That is the part that moves me.
Not the perfection of America, because there is no such thing. Not the innocence of America, because that innocence has always been a myth. What moves me is the audacity of the people who were never fully welcomed but still insisted on shaping the house.
The people who marched.
The people who prayed.
The people who organized.
The people who buried their dead and still went back outside.
The people who were told to wait and decided that waiting was not the same thing as peace.
The people who fought for rights they might never fully enjoy, so that someone like me could inherit not freedom completed, but freedom still possible.
America is nearing its 250th birthday, and I find myself unsure how to celebrate a country that is still so undecided about the humanity of so many of its people.
But maybe celebration is not the word.
Maybe remembrance is.
Maybe responsibility is.
Maybe the work is not to adore the country as it is, but to remain accountable to what it has claimed it wants to be.
That is a different kind of patriotism. Not the kind that waves a flag to avoid telling the truth, but the kind that tells the truth because the truth is the only soil where anything better can grow.
There are people around me who may celebrate America as an image, as a man, as a slogan, as a memory that never belonged to everyone. I cannot join that kind of celebration.
But I can honor the possibility.
I can honor the ones who made a way out of no way.
I can honor the people who looked like me and still believed their children’s children deserved more than survival.
I can honor the flame they carried.
And I can ask myself what I am doing with it.
That is the question June left me with.
Not just what was lost.
But what will I do with what remains?
Because something was lost this month. A life. A future memory. A birthday as I imagined it. A little more innocence about the fairness of the world.
But something was gained too.
Not in exchange. Not as compensation. Not as a neat moral at the end of a painful story.
Something gained because life, even in its cruelty, still leaves us with choices.
I gained a sharper reverence for time.
I gained a deeper respect for the people who make goodness visible.
I gained a clearer understanding that joy is not the absence of grief, but sometimes the refusal to let grief have the final word.
I gained a more complicated, more mature hope.
And maybe that is what it means to turn 30 in a month like June.
To stop expecting life to explain itself before you decide how you will live.
To stop waiting for the world to become gentle before you commit to tenderness.
To stop believing that hope must be easy in order to be real.
Some months take more than they give.
Some months give by forcing you to see what can no longer be taken from you.
Love.
Memory.
Conviction.
Responsibility.
The stubborn belief that something better is still worth reaching for.
June did not leave me with answers. I am not sure I trust months that do. But it left me with a question that feels honest enough to keep:
When something is lost, what kind of person will I become with what is still in my hands?
Maybe that is where the gaining begins.
Not after the grief.
Not instead of it.
But somewhere inside the decision to keep living with an open heart in a world that gives you every reason to close it.