Jesus told us in John 16:33 that in this world, in this lifetime, we will have trouble. There will be pain, tribulation, and suffering, and in the wake of trouble comes grief. Grief is a part of life, we can not escape it.
Grieve is something I never fully understood. I remember as a child getting tragic news about my aunt and cousins trailer catching on fire in the middle of the night while they were asleep and that my cousin Brian didn't make it out. As an eleven year old, I was not sure what to do with this. Do I cry? Do I ask questions? Where do I go with all of this pain? There were many other deaths I walked through at an early age and I only remember shedding tears for a moment because I didn't know how to mourn. Grieving was foreign to me, something I just didn't understand.
My sophomore year in high school I walked through a deep loss of my friend David that one day I sat at lunch with and the next day he was in the hospital after complaining to the coaches at football practice about a headache that led to him passing out. Days later he died. This put my class in a deep slumber for the rest of our high school years. This loss led me to cry out to God and search for meaning and purpose of life. Yet I still did not know what to do with the deep aches and pains my heart was feeling, I just got to point where I just moved on.
At the age of 33, I have lost all four of my grandparents. They will never see me marry or have children and this saddens my heart. Though I was not close with my mother's parents, my heart grieves the loss of them choosing alcohol all those years over truly knowing me.
The year of 2006 was the hardest year I had to walk through as my family and I walked through six deaths, the hardest being my Aunt Cecelia. She and I were attached to the hip any time we were together. Her tragic life was taken unexpectedly and that brought a lot of pain to this heart of mine. There were a lot of questions that to this day have not been answered. I went into deep depression and felt so alone. I wrestled with God and felt others pull away.
I felt the Lord pressing on my heart over the summer to seek Him on what it means to grieve Biblically and it has been a freeing process over these last several months. At first I was resistant and confused why this was all coming back to the surface, but as I began to seek God's Word it became more clear: There is FREEDOM to GRIEVE and the Bible paints a totally different picture then what I have been taught and I want to seek the Lord through pain that comes my way rather it’s death or a disappointment of some sort because there will be more grief to come in this lifetime.
What I have learned is that we know how to cry, we know how to be sad, and we know how to get on with life, but really, we don’t know how to grieve, how to mourn, how to process the pain of deep loss. What Christians often do less well is grieve. We lack a ritual for the long and tiring process that is sorrow and loss. When someone loses a loved one, for about two weeks the church is really the church. People might come by the house, bring flowers or baked casseroles, but then the two weeks end, and so do the sympathy e-mails, calls and cards. That’s definitely how I felt, I was still bawling my eyes out and questioning God, while everyone else, understandably, forgot and went back to their normal lives and I found that I was left alone to deal with the tragic death of my aunt Cecelia and the other relatives that had passed on.
I have been reading “A Grace Disguised” by Jerry Sittser over the summer and is now one of my favorite books. He talks about how all people suffer loss, but that really it's useless to compare losses. He does make a distinction, however, between natural and predictable losses and catastrophic, devastating, irreversible losses. The natural predictable losses include things like growing up... losing your youth, but gaining adulthood; or, watching your child get married... "losing" your child, but gaining a son or daughter in law.
Then there are the catastrophic, devastating, irreversible losses. About these, Sittser writes, "If normal, natural, reversible loss is like a broken limb, then catastrophic loss is like an amputation. The results are permanent, the impact incalculable, the consequences cumulative. Each new day forces one to face some new devastating dimension of the loss. It creates a whole new context for one's life."
“Can anyone really expect to recover from such tragedy, considering the value of what was lost and the consequences of that loss? Recovery is a misleading and empty expectation. We recover from broken limbs, not amputations. Catastrophic loss, by definition precludes recovery. It will transform or destroy us, but it will never leave us the same. There is no going back to the past which is gone forever, only going ahead to the future, which has yet to be discovered. What ever the future is, it will, and must, include the pain of the past with it. Sorrow never entirely leaves the soul of those who have suffered a severe loss. If anything, it may keep going deeper."
So basically I am learning it’s okay to grieve and recovering isn't really an option because a deep, tragic loss forever changes you. It doesn't mean that I’ll remain forever in the pit of sorrow and despair; because by God's grace, He meets us there and carries us through. It’s all part of my story.
So yes I will continue to grieve the loss of loved ones and difficult circumstances in my life. I have the freedom to grieve. I must mourn, but I also must go on living. I never want to be a prisoner of my past or be a victim to it.
So I leave you with the biggest lesson I have gained from this journey, my new favorite verse: “Rejoice with those who rejoice; mourn with those who mourn.” Romans 12:15 This verse has opened my heart and eyes to how beautiful it is to not only celebrate with others in their blessings and joys they are experiencing, but how beautiful it is to grieve with those in deep losses and pains, how beautiful to walk with them, to be in it with them. It seems that our flesh is uncomfortable with tragedy so we run from it. It’s uncomfortable to not only deal with our own sadness, but to try and walk alongside someone else in there pain is harder. We tend to run from it. It’s hard and uncomfortable to stick by friends in pain because it’s a long, long process. Healing is a process. Mourning is a part of life. So in light of this verse I have found, I want to put this truth into practice, to sow that into others lives.
I have been reading “A Grace Disguised” by Jerry Sittser over the summer and is now one of my favorite books. He talks about how all people suffer loss, but that really it's useless to compare losses. He does make a distinction, however, between natural and predictable losses and catastrophic, devastating, irreversible losses. The natural predictable losses include things like growing up... losing your youth, but gaining adulthood; or, watching your child get married... "losing" your child, but gaining a son or daughter in law.
Then there are the catastrophic, devastating, irreversible losses. About these, Sittser writes, "If normal, natural, reversible loss is like a broken limb, then catastrophic loss is like an amputation. The results are permanent, the impact incalculable, the consequences cumulative. Each new day forces one to face some new devastating dimension of the loss. It creates a whole new context for one's life."
“Can anyone really expect to recover from such tragedy, considering the value of what was lost and the consequences of that loss? Recovery is a misleading and empty expectation. We recover from broken limbs, not amputations. Catastrophic loss, by definition precludes recovery. It will transform or destroy us, but it will never leave us the same. There is no going back to the past which is gone forever, only going ahead to the future, which has yet to be discovered. What ever the future is, it will, and must, include the pain of the past with it. Sorrow never entirely leaves the soul of those who have suffered a severe loss. If anything, it may keep going deeper."
So basically I am learning it’s okay to grieve and recovering isn't really an option because a deep, tragic loss forever changes you. It doesn't mean that I’ll remain forever in the pit of sorrow and despair; because by God's grace, He meets us there and carries us through. It’s all part of my story.
So yes I will continue to grieve the loss of loved ones and difficult circumstances in my life. I have the freedom to grieve. I must mourn, but I also must go on living. I never want to be a prisoner of my past or be a victim to it.
So I leave you with the biggest lesson I have gained from this journey, my new favorite verse: “Rejoice with those who rejoice; mourn with those who mourn.” Romans 12:15 This verse has opened my heart and eyes to how beautiful it is to not only celebrate with others in their blessings and joys they are experiencing, but how beautiful it is to grieve with those in deep losses and pains, how beautiful to walk with them, to be in it with them. It seems that our flesh is uncomfortable with tragedy so we run from it. It’s uncomfortable to not only deal with our own sadness, but to try and walk alongside someone else in there pain is harder. We tend to run from it. It’s hard and uncomfortable to stick by friends in pain because it’s a long, long process. Healing is a process. Mourning is a part of life. So in light of this verse I have found, I want to put this truth into practice, to sow that into others lives.
