Serving Well. Jonathan Trotter

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СКАЧАТЬ moved away, or your child’s new friend moved away. Far away. Like other continents away. And your kid’s broken heart breaks yours.

      Someone died and you didn’t get to say that last, fully present, goodbye. Family members celebrate a birthday, or the whole family celebrates a holiday, and you’re not there because the Pacific’s really big, and you’re on the wrong side of it.

      Or your child can’t remember her cousin’s name, and she doesn’t even know that’s sad. And you realize there are just some things Skype cannot fix.

      And you grieve, and your kids grieve. Maybe. But what if all these things happen again? And again. You have another round of airport goodbyes, another holiday season with sand. Another Christmas with crying.

      What if grieving gets old and annoying and time-consuming and exhausting? What if it becomes easier to just not grieve? To not let others grieve? I’ll tell you what happens: grief itself gets outlawed and a curse descends. And everyone learns that some emotions are spiritual and some are forbidden.

      Has your grief ever been outlawed? Have you ever felt that your sadness or grief was wrong and not very spiritual and you should be over this by now? If so, I am very sorry. The prohibition of grief is a terrible, terrible curse.

      Sometimes it’s outright: “Don’t cry, it’ll all be okay.” But oftentimes it’s more subtle (and spiritual) than that. It’s the good-hearted person who says, “It’s not really goodbye, it’s see you later,” or “You know, all things work together for good.”

      What if your kids miss Grandma and McDonald’s and green grass, and someone tells them, “It’s for God,” or “It’ll be okay someday; you’ll look back on this as one of the best things that ever happened to you.” What if you tell them that? Grief gets banned, and what was meant as a balm becomes a ticking bomb. The intended salve starts searing.

      When loss happens, why must we minimize it? Why are we so uncomfortable with letting the sadness sit? Are we afraid of grief? We sometimes act as if you can’t have grief and faith at the same time. Sometimes, shutting down grief seems spiritual. We tell ourselves and others, “Forget the past and press on. God’s got a plan. God is sovereign.” We use Bible verses.

      But banning grief is not biblical, and it’s not spiritual.

      Maybe we feel that grieving a loss of something or someone shows that we don’t have all our treasures in heaven. Perhaps we delude ourselves with the twisted notion that if we had all of our treasures in heaven, our treasures would be safe, and we’d never experience loss. And although this is crazy talk, we speak it to ourselves and others.

      Does grieving really signal a lack of faith? Would the truly faithful person simply know the goodness of God and cast themselves on that goodness? No one would say it, but we sometimes treat the sovereignty of God as an excuse to outlaw grief. I mean, how could we question the plan of God by crying?

      We may feel that grieving a loss that was caused by someone else (through neglect or abuse) shows a lack of forgiveness. And although we know it’s not true, we act as if once a person’s truly forgiven an offender, the painful effects and memories disappear forever.

      What if the loss was caused by parents or a spouse who decided to become an overseas missionary? Does the goodness and holiness of their decision negate the grief? Of course not, but sometimes we feel that the truly spiritual would recognize the godly sacrifice and be grateful. As if gratefulness and grief are mutually exclusive. As if a decision has to have one hundred percent positive or one hundred percent negative results. Gray exists, after all.

      Maybe you made the decision to move overseas and it was a God thing and your call was sure, but now it’s just really, really hard. How will you deal with your own grief? Will it threaten you, or will you courageously allow yourself to feel it?

      Remember, grieving isn’t equal to sinning.

      Sometimes, outlawed grief goes underground. It becomes a tectonic plate, storing energy, swaying, resisting movement, and then exploding in unanticipated and unpredictable ways. A tectonic plate can store a heck of a lot of energy. Sort of like grief, once outlawed. It descends below the surface. And sometimes heaving tectonic plates cause destruction far, far away. It takes highly educated people with technical machines to pinpoint the actual location of the destructive shift.

      Have you ever experienced an earthquake like this, caused by buried grief? It might not be obvious at first, but after a little bit of digging, you realize that the pressure and tension had been building for a long, long time.

      So please, allow grief in your own heart and in the hearts of your family members. If you’re uncomfortable with other people’s grief (or your own), you might want to look deep, deep down in your own soul and see if there’s some long-outlawed, long-buried grief. If you find some, begin gently to see it, vent it, feel it. Begin talking about it, slowly, with a good listener.

      And if you come across someone who’s grieving a loss, please remember that they probably don’t need a lecture, or a Bible verse, or a pithy saying. But they could maybe use a hug.

      When Grief Bleeds

      by Jonathan

      Grief is a powerful thing, echoing on and on through the chambers of a heart.

      Loss singes the soul, and death does indeed bite.

      We are not the only ones who grieve, to be sure, but those who’ve lived abroad certainly know this to be true: it hurts to leave. It hurts to return. And when others leave, whether by death or call or transfer, that hurts too.

      Our stories are the ones written with contrails, straddling continents and seas. And these stories, the good and the bad, the ones that heal and the ones that hurt, must be written, and remembered.

      Some would say to get over it. Stop crying. Some might accuse: Too little faith. Too little thought of heaven. Too much focus on the past. As if holiness requires Novocaine. Numbness. But grief is an indelible part of our story now. Grief bleeds through the pages of our lives, marking the pages and stories that follow.

      Failing to acknowledge these chapters is to censor, to edit out, to delete plot twists and main characters, to murder history.

      So we leave the pages as they are, splotched and imperfect. Because on every single ink-stained page, he remains. Comforter. Rock. Shepherd. God. He remains the God who grieved, the God who understands, the God who comforts. He remains, and he is enough.

      So we keep feeling, refusing to numb. We keep sketching out these life pages, confident that he knows our stories. He loves our stories. He redeems our stories. And we keep trusting that in the end, our stories are actually a part of his story.

      And he’s really good with words.

      C. S. Lewis, Sadness, and What Eternal Hope Looks Like

      by Jonathan

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