Getting to the Other Side of Loss and Grief.

(This is a shortened version of a presentation I gave in a Sunday School class recently.)  Grief is not restricted to when we lose a loved one to death.  EVERY LOSS OF ANY KIND INVOLVES A GRIEF PROCESS OF SOME KIND – i.e. divorce, job loss, significant financial loss, moving, graduating, losing a friendship, finding out a respected person has been involved in major dishonesty, immorality or unethical behavior, etc.

WHAT IS THE MOST PAINFUL EXPERIENCE OF YOUR LIFE?  How was loss involved in this?  (i.e. What did you lose?)  How fully have you grieved this loss?

GRIEF IS PAINFUL AND MESSY.

                Many talk of “5 Stages of Grief” or“7 Stages of Grief” or“3 Stages of Grief”. 

                Reality – there are common emotions most of us feel during grief (sadness, fear, anger, anguish, loss, etc.) but EVERYONE GRIEVES DIFFERENTLY !  And it is likely that each time you grieve a loss your grief will be different.  And the process always hurts and it is always messy.

COMPLICATED OR COMPOUNDED GRIEF CAN BE EVEN MESSIER AND TAKE LONGER – I.E. Your husband leaves you for another man, you lose your job, your finances collapse and you have to live with the parents who abused you, and a beloved pet dies, and the next day your teenage son is arrested.  HOW DO YOU DEAL WITH THAT?

IF THE LOSS IS SIGNIFICANT IT IS COMMON TO START WITH SHOCK AND DENIAL.  “This can’t be real!”  “This isn’t happening!”  “No, that’s not true!”

Pain, sadness, anguish are common emotions.  

DEEP GRIEF DISRUPTS YOUR EMOTIONAL EQUILIBRIUM!  = Don’t make major life decisions soon after a major loss.  You are not at the top of your game!

ANGER is extremely common in loses such as divorce, job loss, losing a friendship, but also is common in loss due to death.  You may be angry at your loved one for dieing!  You may be angry at God for allowing the tragedy that has struck you.

THE ONLY WAY THROUGH IT IS THROUGH IT! A man once told me that day after wife died he went on a 2 year binge!  When he finally sobered up all the pain and loss were still there!  Unfortunately, we have to feel the pain to get past the pain.  You can stuff it or run from it, but sooner or later in some form it will catch up with you.

HOW DO WE GO THROUGH IT?

                Give yourself permission to feel all you feel – even if it is numbness – that will pass!

                Choose to lean on Christ in the midst of storms that don’t make a lick of sense.  Think of Matt Redman's song "Blessed be Your Name", "You give and take away, You give and take away.  My heart will CHOOSE to say, blessed be Your Name!"

                Find safe people to tell your story to – probably over and over!  A huge part of the healing for most people comes in telling the story repeatedly.

                When you are ready, work at applying your faith and theology to your circumstance – don’t rush it, don’t let others give you pat answers.  – “She’s in a better place Pastor” = urge to maime!  True but not helpful at the moment!  Now that truth is very helpful. (See part two to be posted soon.)

                At some point down the road you have to choose to let go of the pain, the hurt, perhaps the anger.  We need to be forgiving even when our offender is unrepentant and undeserving of forgiveness.  We are the one set free when we forgive.

WITH DEEP LOSSES WE DON’T GET OVER THEM WE GET THROUGH THEM BY THE GRACE OF GOD!    Perhaps it is even better to say we learn to live with the loss.  Eventually we are able to do so with somewhat less pain if we honestly deal with it.

                Getting to the other side of loss and grief will always involve accepting a new normal!  Life is never the same after a life shattering experience.  WE are never the same.  We can be bitter or we can be better.

Feeling Fatherless on Fathers' Day

I have moments that I feel fatherless.  My natural father died this past November.  My step-father, who raised me from age 7, died in 2006.  My first wife’s father, who was a father to me from my teens, died in 2000. 

Much of my childhood I felt fatherless.  My step-father seemed cold and distant when he was sober, briefly warm and loving with a few drinks.  But he became dangerously angry and verbally threatening when really drunk.  My natural father wasn’t there (See “Lament for a Father I Hardly Knew).  As an adult I came to know that my step-father had always loved me in his own way, as much as he was able.  I suspect the same may have been true of my natural father.  But the 10 year old boy didn’t understand that.  I had a hunger and a wound and a feeling of incompleteness.  I felt inferior to schoolmates who had fathers who seemed involved in their lives.

God in His merciful providence brought good out of that, I believe.  I was determined to be the father I never had if I ever had sons.  I was not a perfect father – just ask any of my three sons.  But I was there for them and I tried to be involved in their lives. 

My freshman year in high school God brought me to saving faith in Jesus Christ.  After a year of trying to sort out what that was about, in my sophomore year I got grounded in a Bible teaching church.  A Sunday School teacher and the pastor filled some of the father void in my life.  But more importantly I discovered the truth of Psalm 68, ^ESV  Psalm 68:5 Father of the fatherless and protector of widows is God in his holy habitation. (Psa 68:5 ESV).

I began consciously looking to God as my Father.  I turned to Him for direction, correction, assurance.  Loving He has kept bringing human father figures into my life.  He knows there are times we need someone with skin on them!

So this Fathers’ Day weekend I mourn the deaths of my earthly fathers.  I miss them.  I rejoice in what they positively did for me.  I grieve what their broken humanity kept them from doing.  I grieve that my brokenness kept me from reaching out to them more.  There are moments I feel fatherless.  And I chose by His grace to lean on my Father who has never failed me.

If you’re wondering, this was written with tears.  Tears and prayer, pain and hope.  Hope that I will see some of those men again and we will have talks we couldn’t have here.  Hope that the failures I had as a father were mixed with enough strengths by God’s grace that my sons have more of a foundation than I had.  Hope this blog might spur one father to seek God’s help to do a better a job.

Father?? Really?

William Tyndale’s translation laid the foundation for the King James Bible.  I find His translation of Ephesians 3:14-15 pregnant with meaning as I consider Fathers’ Day. “¹⁴ For this cause I bowe my knees unto the father of oure lorde Jesus Christ  ¹⁵ which is father over all that ys called father In heven and in erth.”  In the Greek the second occurrence of  “father” in verse 15 is “patria” (the first is “pater”).  They are related words.  Most often “patria” is translated “family”.  Of more modern translations the New Jerusalem Bible is the only one I found that follows Tyndale somewhat.  They translate, “¹⁴ This, then, is what I pray, kneeling before the Father, ¹⁵ from whom every fatherhood, in heaven or on earth, takes its name.”  But several study Bibles or footnotes make note that “patria” could be rendered “father” or that it is related to the word for “father”.

“The Father of all fatherhood”…… “Father of all that is called father”…… 

I am tempted to say that God has chosen to reveal Himself as Father.  Yet Scripture seems to say something even more outrageous to our modern ears.  The first person of the Trinity IS Father. 

Even aside from feminist thinking, this is challenging for many people.  Some earthly fathers are scoundrels!  As a pastoral psychotherapist I hear horror stories of what some fathers have done to their children.  You hear similar stories in the news, stories of abuse, torture, incest.  It is far more potent when you are sitting a few feet away and looking in the eyes of a survivor who is telling THEIR personal story of mistreatment. 

Then on a different level there are the fathers who simply are not there.  There are fathers who are there physically, don’t beat their children with their fist, yet beat them down with criticism and put downs.  There are fathers who get drunk or high and scream in their children’s faces for hours.  Some fathers are wonderful, some are horrible.  Some are a confusing combination of violence and tenderness (see my previous blog about human nature).

Drs. Tim Clinton and Joshua Straub in their book “God Attachment” quote several studies that confirm what I always heard in Sunday School and sermons.  Our image of God the Father is powerfully impacted by our relationship to our earthly father!  Dads, you need to take this seriously!  If you are harsh and demanding your kids will usually instinctively expect God to be harsh and demanding!   If you seem distant and disinterested in them, at the deepest level of their wounded heart they will usually expect God to be far away and uncaring.  But if you are nearly always accessible, involved, caring yet firm then they will usually expect their heavenly Father to be the same. 

Many of us carry “father-wounds” of one degree or another.  This does not mean we are hopelessly broken.  It may mean for many that you will face challenges in experiencing God as He really is.  It may mean impairment in other areas of life.  But our loving Father has provided means by which we can find healing.  If you have struggles in this area seek out a safe, Biblical church.  If your struggles are deep enough you may also need to find a counselor who is aware of these things and able to help.

What Does the Atomic Bomb Have to Do with Human Nature, Theology and Your Marriage? ... (or Glory, Shame, and Hope)

Genesis one declares that the first humans were created in the image and likeness of God.  That is an unbelievably complex and profound statement.  In Genesis three we are told about the entry of sin into human experience.  In stark and frightening terms the inspired writer informs us that in some sense Adam and Eve died the moment they broke covenant with God by eating from the forbidden tree.  

I believe when these two events (creation and fall) are viewed through the lens of the rest of Holy Scripture we see that now we are fractured image bearers.  We still bear the image and likeness of Almighty God, yet that image has been marred, twisted, contorted into sometimes nightmarish shapes.  Adolph Hitler shows the image of God in inspiring and powerfully leading a nation in a new direction.  But the direction is hellish and demonic!  In the same time period teams of scientist in the United States working on the Manhattan Project brought into fruition nuclear technology.  This technology begins to get into the very building blocks of creation!  The first use of that technology is a bomb.  A bomb that may well have saved the precious lives of many American servicemen yet took the equally precious lives of 90,000–166,000 people in Hiroshima and 60,000–80,000 in Nagasaki, Japan.  Such tremendous knowledge and learning that yielded a technology with awesomely wonderful and fearful potential.  Created by fractured image bearers.

In each of our lives we are fractured image bearers with wonderful and fearful potential.  We are capable of kindness, unselfishness, deceit, cruelty, generosity, and insensitivity.  And sometimes all of the above in the same day!  

At our best we try to minimize or even eradicate the evil inside of us.  Often we try to hide it from others, and even ourselves.  We use various defense mechanisms to do this.  Jeremiah 17:9 (ESV), “The heart is deceitful above all things,   and desperately sick;   who can understand it?”  

Let me suggest some practical applications of these truths:

#1 We should not be surprised that we (and everyone around us) are a confusing mish mash of excellence and failure.  Sometimes we will shine, but at other times we will fall flat on our faces.

#2 We should not be surprised that marriage takes a lot of work.  Every marriage involves bringing two broken image bearers together with all their mix of glory and fallenness.  AND these broken image bearers were raised by other broken image bearers and live in a world of fallen image bearers.  So why does anyone think “If I just find the right person, marriage will be easy”?  My friend, you and I are so messed up even if we find “the right person” THEY will have to work to make being married to us work!

#3 We are utterly and completely dependent on the grace of God in Christ Jesus for lasting joy and satisfaction in this life (as well as eternal life in the life to come).

#4 Sometimes we need the help of other fractured image bearers, who are trying to humbly lean on God’s grace, to help us deal with the pain, frustration, and confusion of this life.  An objective voice that is led by the Word and the Spirit can be of great help along the way.