Embracing Grief and Loss

5th message in our series: Putting the Pieces Together: a Journey toward mature discipleship*.

Where were you when President Kennedy was shot?

When the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded?

When the September 11 terrorist attack happened?

We are in our 5th message in our series: Putting the Pieces Together: a Journey toward mature discipleship. Today we are exploring the topic of embracing grief and loss. The events I mentioned as I opened are certainly giant focal points of national grief and loss; not only did most of us experience them, but we remember them vividly. Besides national events, many of us have experienced devastating losses, such as the death of a child, premature death of spouse, disability, divorce, rape, emotional or sexual abuse, irreversible cancer, infertility, shattering of a life-long dream, suicide, betrayal, let down. But those aren’t the only things that affect us. We all experience so called “insignificant losses” such as graduating high school/college & lose financial/emotional security; move away and lose former friendships; relationships change; children gain independence (empty nest); leadership changes in the church; church constructs a new building; grandparent dies; fire destroys cherished photos; death of a faithful pet, etc. What might be insignificant loss for one might be catastrophic for someone else.

In his book A Grace Disguised: How the Soul Grows Through Loss, Gerald Sittser says this: Catastrophic loss by definition precludes recovery. It will transform us or destroy us but it will never leave us the same.

Grief and loss are universal: We all experience sorrows and are invited to grieve and grow through them. Unless we grieve our sorrows and losses, we will never become emotionally healthy; we will never achieve wholeness. Simply covering or ignoring the pain leads to disaster (glass jar analogy).

Some people view grief as an interruption, an obstacle in the path of serving God. In essence, it’s a waste of our time. That’s why you get a lot of “get over it and get on with your life” sentiment from good, godly people who, deep down, really just want to help.

But the Bible doesn’t tell us not to grieve; quite the contrary; it shows a Jesus who wept over the death of his friend Lazarus and over the city of Jerusalem. Jesus, being fully human, experienced the full range of human emotions, including grief and loss. Can you imagine Jesus in the following situations:

• At Lazarus’ tomb, what if Jesus hadn’t wept but said, Get a grip; I’ll take care of this.
• What if his prayer over Jerusalem had gone like this: I wanted to gather you as a hen, but you made your bed and now you get to sleep in it. I’m moving on without you.
• When He was on the cross, what if instead of crying “My God, why have you forsaken me?” He shouted out “God is great! God is victorious! Praise him!”
  

This is why we don’t find a command not to grieve; we find a command that we aren’t to grieve like those who have no hope (1 Thessalonians 4:13).

You may be wondering what “normal” grieving even is. Let me take a few moments to talk about that. In his book “Good Grief” Granger Westberg details ten stages of grief. They are:

1. State of shock (temporary anesthesia): be with the person, but resist the urge to do everything for them. Doing the work will help them move from this stage.

2. We express emotion: sometimes it’s without warning that the emotion explodes from us; this is what we ought to do: allow ourselves the freedom to express the emotions that we actually feel. No “don’t cry” – crying isn’t a sign of weakness and doesn’t lead to nervous breakdown.

3. We feel depressed and very lonely: we are sure nobody else has ever grieved like we are doing. This is a healthy and normal part of grief! It’s like on a cloudy day where we think “the sun isn’t shining” when the sun is really shining, but the clouds just cover it. It’s a normal thing to ask “Why so downcast, O my soul?” Jesus even asked, “Why have you forsaken me?”

4. We may experience physical symptoms of distress: headaches, backaches, still sick after treatment.

5. We may become panicky: we can’t think of anything other than the loss; we can’t concentrate. This isn’t abnormal! It’s normal! Even if we don’t want to get out, we have to try to. We must not wallow in our grief; that will only prolong our grief work.

6. We feel a sense of guilt about the loss: guilty about what we did or didn’t say/do before the loss, or unhealthy neurotic guilt about “not being there” – we must face both guilts.

7. We are filled with anger and resentment: resentment is not a healthy emotion, and if, allowed to take over, can be extremely harmful. But it is a normal part of the grieving process and can, by the grace of God, be overcome.

8. We resist returning: everyone else has forgotten our tragedy; someone must keep its memory alive. We must not let things get back to normal! (pace of life has a lot to do with this: we’re off to something new immediately, and we don’t take the time to help work through someone else’s losses). No wearing black armbands/veils. People afraid to talk about the deceased.

9. Gradually hope comes through: a little glimpse of hope in one experience or another.

10. We struggle to affirm reality: not “become our old selves again” one way or the other; healthier or sicker. Develop a better, deeper faith in God as a result of grief experience. Everything hasn’t been taken from you. Life will never be the same again, but there is much in life that can be affirmed. This is not a work that should be done alone.

Please don’t just superficially move forward from a loss without adequately grieving it. Until we allow ourselves to feel the pain of what was lost, we cannot move forward.

Lewis Smedes: We will not take healing action against unfair pain until we own the pain we want to heal. It is not enough to feel pain. We need to appropriate the pain we feel: be conscious of it, take it on, and take it as our own. The Art of Forgiving: When You Need to Forgive and Don’t Know How.

Jesus truly feels our rebellion, waywardness, unwillingness to receive him as he hangs alone on the cross and cries, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing” (Luke 23:34).

A key to embracing grief and loss is to pay attention to Scripture as a part of the grieving process. This means you have to slow down. Pay attention to the book of Psalms: it is full of laments that remember that life can be hard, difficult, even brutal. They take notice of the apparent absence of God. They cry out for comfort and care. Laments wrestle with God’s faithful, loyal love (hesed)

• Psalm 43:2: Why must I go about mourning, oppressed by the enemy?
• Psalm 77:8-9: Has his unfailing love vanished forever? Has his promise failed for all time? Has God forgotten to be merciful?
• Psalm 88:6-7 You have put me in the lowest pit, in the darkest depths. Your wrath lies heavily on me; you have overwhelmed me with all your waves.
  

Pay attention to Pain. We use work, drugs, TV, alcohol, comfort food, shopping, busyness, unhealthy relational attachments, even serving others to medicate the pain of life. We have fostered a national inability to deal with pain of any kind. Our culture trivializes tragedy and loss; every night on the news we are given pictures of crime, wars, famines, murders, and natural disasters. They are analyzed and reported, but there is no lamenting. We are too busy trying to keep everything as it is and getting our own way; when a loss invades our life, we become angry at God and treat it as an alien invasion. Is there any wonder that there is so much depression (and explosion of drugs prescribed for anxiety & depression) in our culture?

This is unbiblical and a denial of our common humanity. Ancient Hebrews physically expressed their laments by tearing their clothes, wearing sackcloth and ashes. Jesus himself offered up prayers and petitions w/ loud cries and tears (Hebrews 5:7). After the fall of Jerusalem, Jeremiah wrote the book of Lamentations. In scripture, the God-like response is neither spin nor a cover-up. Jesus dealt honest and prayerfully with his losses and disappointments and all of their accompanying emotions.

Here are four concrete steps to become more mature disciples of Jesus Christ with regard to loss:

1. Stop and pay attention to your losses, large and small, in the past and in the present. If you’re new to this, take a day to go away on a retreat with God to pray and journal about significant events in your past that you maybe haven’t grieved. Slow down the pace of your life. Losses aren’t something to “get over” but are of great value to God and your spiritual health.

2. Equip others to do #1 as well.

3. Learn the Psalms to give you a biblical basis and framework for grieving. Write your own psalm out of your experience with God through life.

4. Write a simple timeline from birth to the present. Identify and describe difficult or sad events in your life.

Remember the compost pile where decaying substances, covered with dirt, become wonderful, a rich, natural fertilizer tremendous for growing fruit and veggies, but you have to be patient and wait… sometimes for years. We can’t understand the worst events of human history, but out of the greatest evil, Jesus’ death, came the greatest good. God transforms evils into good without diminishing the awfulness of the evil.

Then and only then can we Allow the old to birth the new. In his powerful book Lament for a Son, Nicholas Wolterstorff describes horrible loss this way:

Through the prism of my tears I have seen a suffering God. It is said of God that no one can behold his face and live. I always thought this meant that no one can see his splendor and live. A friend said perhaps it meant that no one could see his sorrow and live. Or perhaps his sorrow is splendor.

In Matthew 5:4, Jesus told the crowds: Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted

New, inner change that results from grieving include:

• We are becoming compassionate as our Father is compassionate.
• We have greater concern for the poor, the widow, the orphan, the marginalized, the wounded (those who God’s heart beats for).
• We are less covetous, less idolatrous.
• We are liberated from having to impress others.
• We are able to live more comfortably with mystery.
• We are characterized by humility and vulnerability.
• We place God at the center of our lives and reject superficial, trivial pursuits.
• We experience an enhanced sense of living in the present rather than postponing life; we rearrange our life's priorities.
• We enjoy a vivid appreciation of the basic facts of life: seasons, etc.
• We have fewer fears and more willingness to take risks.
• We are kinder.
• We understand what binds us as followers of Jesus living in community is our brokenness.
• We sense that we are aliens and strangers here on earth – we’re built for heaven.
• We are finally at home with ourselves and with God.

And isn’t that what we want and what God wants for us?
*Note: this message, along with others in this series, has been adapted from Peter Scazzero's book The Emotionally Healthy Church.