grief

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When We Don’t Get Closure

  In February, we finished off our last high school soccer season. We knew each game might be our last, so we tried to take it all in. We took lots of pictures. My parents came. The girls got sweatshirts made to commemorate it. While it was sad to end, we had closure. Closure is important. We teach our ministry staff, when they come back from overseas assignments, to build a RAFT (Reconciliation, Affirmation, Farewell, and Think Destination). In other words, we take a good look around and see what needs healing, celebration, and grief. Then we look ahead with hope to what is coming next. That aspect of Farewells-saying goodbye well to a season, both to people and places, and allowing ourselves to grieve well, is essential. When we know something is going to end, we pay attention. We notice what we've taken for granted. The ordinary suddenly becomes precious and noteworthy. When we are cut off from saying goodbye well, it is difficult to fully engage with hope in the next one. It's so devastating and unnatural when we are denied the opportunity for good closure. This season we're in is full of cut off endings. When We Don't Get Closure When our daughter went to school the Thursday before spring break, we didn't know it was her last day. We had no idea she wouldn't wear her school uniform or drive carpool again. If we had, we would have done it (and the days leading up to it) differently. This spring we all missed so many events, but maybe the most difficult are the lasts that we won't be able to get back. The things we can't reschedule. Watching the last club soccer season. Celebrating the end of a year-long program. Enjoying the last days of work before retirement. A friend moved away and you didn't get to say goodbye. You had to leave your host country and you don't know when (or if) you'll go back. I've wondered why this feels so wrong, this cut-off grief. I wonder if it's because we ache for shalom-the way that things are meant to be. The peace God intended. We bend toward justice and righteousness. It is good to desire what is right, and this just feels wrong. When we work toward healthy closure, it's like a satisfying ending to a book. We are shalom people. We celebrate goodness. Ending in a place of restoration and peace is in our wiring. It's so jarring when we are kept from that. So What Do We Do? I've contemplated what to do about this abrupt grief we feel. We begin by acknowledging the weight of it. It's another part of living in the reality I talked about in my last post. It doesn't feel right because it isn't. Like stopping a race before the finish line, or quitting a book halfway through a chapter, it's unnatural not to finish well. It's been helpful for me to recognize this. It's a particular…

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How “At Least . . .” Keeps Us From Reality

  A few weeks ago, I lamented a reality in my life. I would tell you what this reality was, but I honestly don't remember. All I know is that my husband didn't respond the way I hoped. His response was, "Well, at least (this other thing) isn't happening to you." (Again, what was the other thing? I don't know. But it didn't help me). And we both laughed. Because we know by now that, as Brené Brown says, "At least . . . " is rarely the beginning of an empathetic response. It's a way to minimize or distract ourselves (or others) from the reality of what we're facing. Over the next few days, we both experienced more challenges that led us, either jokingly or absent-mindedly, to respond to one another with, "Well, at least . . ." Each time, we caught ourselves. We saw how easy it is to evade our own or someone else's pain by this kind of comparison. Call it "putting things in perspective" or "choosing not to complain," but really what we're doing is dismissing our hearts, refusing to acknowledge reality. In some ways, it's a decent strategy. At times, it has protected us from being engulfed by sorrow. But if we know God, then we know there's an opportunity here. The opportunity is to invite Him to meet us in what is true. A prayer I learned recently from Ruth Haley Barton's readings is, "Lord, humble me in the presence of reality." In other words, help me sit in this situation. Help me not to excuse or dismiss or pretend that things are better than they are. Because I believe that You are greater than this. You can redeem. You can heal. This is not beyond you, therefore I can face it. When we sit with God in our own reality, we increase our capacity to sit with others in theirs. And when we refrain from our "at least . . ." responses with them, we leave space for them to do this same practice with God for themselves. Otherwise, our actions not only keep us from having to feel their pain, they actually keep them from meeting God in it. So may we catch ourselves when we are tempted to compare suffering. If our sentences begin with "at least" may we pause. Instead, let's meet God in reality.   Related posts: When Weeping Is Prayer The Challenge to Rejoice and Weep with Others What Is Anger's Real Name? 

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When Weeping Is Prayer

  I read about a family whose 6-year-old twin boys and 9-year-old daughter died while waiting for a bus. I started to pray for the family in their loss, but all I could do was cry. No words. It's not the first time. So often, the weight of the needs around me feels too much to put into prayer. Tragedy in our country. A tough diagnosis. A friend's child's struggles. My child's struggles. Recently, my own work felt overwhelming, and Jesus whispered to me to stop and pray. When I did, tears came instead. But maybe that is prayer. Because isn't prayer about honesty? Isn't it touching the heart of God? And doesn't God weep with us? Prayer is a conversation. He invites, we respond. We come, He listens. And in it, we bring our hearts. Sometimes maybe the way we love best is not with words, but with emotion. We step into others' reality. Allow their pain to become ours. Or we step into our own reality. We allow our pain to show. We let ourselves feel. Our hearts come to the surface, and we let Jesus touch them. We let them be caught and held by the Savior. After all, that's what Jesus did. He stepped into our reality. He embraced our humanity. Allowed our pain to become His, to the point of death. God Weeps with Us And He does it day after day. He is not the God who stands at a distance., but the One who watches for the prodigal. When He sees him He scoops up His robes and goes running. He is the God who bears witness to all the pain of the world, even that which others do not know. Closer than a heartbeat, He is El Roi, the God who sees. He is the God who collects our tears in a bottle, who hears every sigh and sees every longing. What He hopes for from us, more than our words, is our hearts. There is an aversion in our culture to enter pain. We stand at a distance and pray, but our prayer is more, "God may that never happen to me," than, "God this is ours to bear together." Or, when the hurt is ours, the prayer is, "God make this go away so I don't have to feel it" rather than "God here is my heart, please hold me in the midst of the battle." What Our Weeping Says There is a difference between weeping from despair, and tears of honesty. The latter is brave-letting ourselves feel our humanity while we face reality before the One who alone can bring redemption of all that is broken. So I'm learning to let tears be part of my prayer. When they are for others, they are tears that say, "I do not want to stand at a distance from this." I want to stand alongside them, where Jesus is. Most likely, someday I will need someone else to cry prayers for me.…

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What Is Anger’s Real Name?

Sometimes on New Year's Eve, when I'm feeling ambitious and intentional about our family relationships, we review the year together. One question we ask our kids is, "what's one thing you learned this year?" Our last year overseas, our then 10-year-old said, "I've learned that anger is a secondary emotion," and I high fived myself. Partly because it felt like I nailed something good in parenting, but mostly because I was glad our kids learned it so much sooner than I did. It was something I learned that year too, mostly because I experienced a lot of it (we got a dog. It was hard. I got angry. Really angry). Anger is a secondary emotion, meaning that it's not all we're feeling. When we're angry, it's usually because we're feeling something else, something that feels vulnerable. So anger, which makes us feel big, covers the emotion that makes us feel small. Anger was a theme that year for our whole family. It rose in me when we got our dog and everything in my life fell apart. Our daughter lived in it the summer before we moved back to the U.S. For me, the anger covered shame, the shame of failure, of not living up to my image of a successful homeschooling, dog training missionary. Our daughter's anger masked the fear she felt in being so completely out of control and sad in the process of leaving home. What Anger Tells Us Anger is a good barometer. We get angry when something we love feels threatened. Often it's our image. Or it's a way of life we're trying to hold onto. Maybe our deepest desires feel threatened-our desire to be wanted, important, safe, right. Anger doesn't always show up as rage. In fact, often it doesn't. It disguises itself as sarcasm, criticism, stubbornness, contempt. It slips out in clipped words and impatience. Most of us don't linger in anger for long. It feels wrong. We dismiss it, stifle it, or blow it off quickly, rather than allowing it to be a doorway into something deeper. When we don't linger, we never get to the bottom of what we're really feeling. And we need to. Because if we sit with our anger long enough, it will tell us its real name. The Names of Anger It might tell us its name is grief. Maybe shame. Fear. Fear of losing control, fear of not being enough. Weakness. Confusion. Despair. Beneath our anger is our true emotions that need to see the light of day so we can deal with them. One fall, I was, in my husband's words, "kind of mean." That's fair. (He was being gracious-there are stronger words he could use). He said maybe I didn't have much emotional margin after sending our son off to school, the prayer rollercoaster God took us on that summer, and the business of gearing up for a conference that fall that I was leading. Regardless, I'm glad he said something. It gave me an opportunity to…

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We Grieve and Then We Hope

  “I don’t know if I’ll ever find what I have right now again. There’s just so much that’s unknown.” That was our son’s deep cry as we talked one night. He’s slogging through the final weeks of his senior year of high school, staring down freshman year at one of the country’s largest universities. It’s a big transition. His days are consumed with studying for AP tests, shifts at the local grocery store, graduation parties, and college prep. This chapter is closing in a flurry of activity, so much so that finding the emotional space to prepare for the next chapter is difficult. He despairs in the loss, and fears for the future. We all come to places of transition where the temptation is to despair or fear. Instead, we can choose to grieve and hope. Read the rest of the story today at SheLoves magazine.  Related posts: When Grief Surprises You Plan to Stay Where God Calls You Having Hope in a New Season

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When Grief Surprises You

I'm in a season of grief right now. Oh, I'm not sad all the time. It surprises me, actually. It comes in waves, like the ocean. I've become more acquainted with the ocean now that we live 45 minutes from it. I love walking along the beach at sunrise. The waves are so unpredictable. They surprise you sometimes, coming up further than you expect. You can't predict them. Sometimes the water stays far away. Other times it stretches out and touches your feet, even washing up to your ankles if you're close enough. That's my experience of grief. If only it were a linear, predictable process. Hard at first, and then gradually subsiding. Less and less over time, until you don't feel it anymore. A clear timeline with a precise end date. You do your grieving and then you're done, praise Jesus. Instead, grief feels like a stranger popping out from behind doors at the most unexpected times. When we walked onto the stage to stand with our son at graduation, I was surprisingly calm. Later, as one of his good friends stood there with her parents, I lost it. When I have thought about graduation in the past weeks, I have felt more pride than sorrow. Then a week ago I read an email from friends overseas and the tears spilled over at how well they're doing. His graduation party was all joy, then last week I folded one of his never-to-be-worn-again uniform shirts and I broke down. That's the thing with grief-it's all right there, but we can't control or predict it. I'm often frustrated by this unpredictable guest. Probably because it reminds me that I am not always doing as well as I would like (or like others) to think. It keeps me vulnerable, never knowing when a wave of grief might catch me off guard, when I might start crying about some random person's life, when it's really just touching my own. But I've been learning these last few years that grief is a necessary companion. In fact, it is a doorway to wholeheartedness. I know that part of the reason my grief comes out sideways is that I don't want to deal with it. It's easier to stay focused on my to do list, buying dorm essentials and harping on him to finish those thank you notes (I swear, he's working on them), than to let the waves crash so hard I lose my footing. But losing our footing in grief is what we must do sometimes. More and more I am learning to stop and walk straight into the waves. To let myself dwell on what we are losing, and how much it hurts to lose. To say a proper goodbye to this beautiful season we have lived. When I do, I find that those waves don't drown-they heal. And I'm learning that I cannot navigate the waves alone. It's easier to weather waves of grief when there are people walking beside us, holding us…

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What to Do When It’s Hard

  In the last couple of weeks, I have witnessed all manner of hardship around me. The sudden death of a son. Adopted children wrestling with trauma and fear. Inconclusive test results. Two attempted suicides. A mysterious illness in a child. Moments like this rattle us to our core. They remind us that the world is fallen, and we are frail. They speak to our smallness, and our need for a solid place. Pleas to God for comfort and peace and hope are intermingled with the aching questions of, "Lord Jesus, why?" and, "What now?" and "Where are You?" There is desperate clinging to that which is good, mixed with a wonder and confusion of how we continue to navigate this world that is so hard and uncertain. And when I ponder it myself, here's what keeps resonating in my soul: Lean in. Lean into His voice whispering through the questions and the confusion, "Come closer, sink deeper. Find a place of solace where your soul can exhale and rest. I've got this. I've got you." We set aside what we do not know and grab hold of what we do. Lean in, friends. Hard. Lean into the One who sees it all. Fall on the One who loves you. Collapse in the arms of the One who is more than able. Lean to the point where your feet don't even touch the ground anymore and you're just carried by Him. He can handle it. There is nothing beyond His strength. He is our ezer kenegdo, our warrior helper, who fights for us and helps us. Don't just throw your worries at Him hoping something will stick, hoping for the best. Lean into His promises like your life depends on it. Let your leaning be full of faith, hope, and trust. Don't let your unanswered questions drive a wedge of bitterness or hopelessness between you and the very one who knows what you need and wants to walk with you in this. As Hudson Taylor said, "It does not matter how great the pressure is. What really matters is where the pressure lies-whether it comes between you and God, or whether it presses you nearer His heart."  The promise of abundant life is not the promise of a painless life. It is not the promise of a happy life. It is a promise of resources plentiful for what we will walk through. Here is where we can always lean in and find what we need for the journey. So lean in with your fists, if you must. Lean in with your wailing and doubts and anger, and beat your hands against His chest until it dissolves into grief and you let Him hold you. Lean in with the faith of a child and rest. Rest in His comfort and peace, knowing you don't have to have answers or direction-you just know that someone holds those for you. Lean into His embrace. Listen to His heart beat for you. Hear His voice speak…

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As the Ride Winds Down – Thoughts on the Last Moments of Childhood

This summer I spent a good amount of time with my niece and nephew, who have a combined age of 3 1/2, and I was taken back to those early days. Days when it felt like time stood still. When I never actually finished a story in a conversation because someone was suddenly tugging on my leg (they were such good stories too). When I was proud that I showered or made dinner. (Who am I kidding? I'm still proud when I make dinner). Fast forward to me now. The seasons go by like the days used to pass. Now it's their stories and jokes I love to hear. They're making dinner (praise Jesus). But I'm realizing that this ride is starting to slow down. In a few weeks, I will sit in the silence of a house void of children as they head back to school. I know that I will blink and it will be my reality every day. I no longer have to buy sippy cups or crayons or children's toothpaste. We don't go to the library or playgrounds to pass the time. I'm staring down the last years of their childhood. Like a kid who feels the carnival ride is winding down, I want to eke out the last moments of this precious ride. Enjoying the Last Moments That's why, kids, I want you to just come and sit with me in the evenings. No, not even to do anything, but just to be together. I linger for end of the day unexpected questions at bedtime. And I sneak back in after you're asleep just to look at you (I'm creepy like that. And also because, sweet girl, you say wonderfully nonsensical things when you're half-awake). I love that I get to drive you to school. It gives me just a little more time with you. I look forward to seeing you every morning and I thank God that I get you one more day. Those moments when you do still need me are so precious. I want to go crazy making sure we do all those last "we said we would" activities and vacations. Let's play games and go for walks together. I will fight for weekly family time, even if all we do is sit around together and wonder what we should do. This is when I wonder if we've taught you everything and how you'll do without us (I'm sure you'll be fine - it's me I'm worried about). I want to tell you everything I think you'll need to know for all time (I realize you'll just be graduating though and we will continue to communicate, but just in case). I question if we've loved you well and if you will say you enjoyed the ride too. It's slowing down, but it's not over yet. I'm sitting alone one night and she comes in to say, "I was turning on my fan and thought, 'I just want to see my mommy.'" He's at home alone and decides he's bored…

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What Will We Tell Our Children About These Tragedies?

Our kids return tonight from a month long mission trip during which they have been out of contact and presumably unaware of all that is happening in the world. I wish the only thing I had to explain to them is why people are looking at their phones even more than usual, to the point of running into other people and walls and such. Instead, after sending them off just after the Pulse shooting in our own city, we have to tell them that while they were gone, the nation was in uproar over the sudden deaths of two black men at the hands of police. We have to explain to them that during the protests that followed, five police officers were shot and killed. There were bombings in Baghdad and Turkey that killed over 300 people combined. And last night in France, more than 80 people were killed during a celebration. Lord, have mercy. How do we deal out this information? How do we help them understand why? Part of me wants to shelter my kids from knowing the horror that this summer has brought, but they must know. They must know because we want them to be people of compassion, people of the world, people who enter in to the sorrow of others and weep with those who weep. Will it make them fearful? I don't know. Maybe. But I know the path to peace is not to ignore reality or choose to only see the parts of it that make us comfortable, that we agree with, that directly affects us. We cannot hide from the truth, but we can choose how we respond to it.  We can choose, as a family, to be people who cling to God. We can't explain to our kids why all this is happening, but we can remind them that there is always hope because of who He is. We can cry out to Him for mercy, healing, strength, wisdom, compassion, guidance, help. We can be people who remember that this is not our home, He is. So we will tell our children about the atrocities our world has seen this past month. We will tell them, not to make them fearful, but to make them aware that this is the world we live in. We will tell them that this is when we look up, not for answers, but for help, to navigate this world as people who love it well but hold it loosely. We will cry together for the world. We will pray together for it. We will live, not in fear, but in hope, in trust, in faith. We will face the truth and respond by looking to the One who alone can save.

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Hope in a Broken World

  A friend's father loses his battle with cancer. News of an impending divorce. The unexpected death of a young man. Abusive words spoken and then rationalized as biblical. One after another, over the span of a week. Broken. We live in a broken world. I desperately don't want it to be. I want to have a world where fathers don't die so young, and people keep loving one another, and children stay with us and people bless and don't curse. I want families intact and relationships strong. I want safe, trusted, constant, faithful. But we live in a broken world. So I take this reality to God and say, "What do I do? How do I pray? How do I live in this?" And He reminds me that he promises to be close to the brokenhearted and to heal them and bind them up. He tells me that He weeps with us and endures with us and walks the hard roads with us, that His compassion is endless and overflowing and His mercy starts all over again every morning. He tells me to trust in this. So I say, "Come, Lord Jesus." Come into our brokenness. Come and be all that you promised to be so we have a solid place to stand in it. We live in brokenness but we are not without hope. My hope is not that the world will stop being broken, but that we will meet the lover of broken hearts in the midst of it. We will experience Him healing and binding us, bringing beauty from ashes, redeeming the darkness. We will cling to the hope that one day there will be no more brokenness, and every tear will be wiped away. All will be right. So we keep walking through the brokenness, not in defeat but in hope. Hope in the one who is close to the brokenhearted. "Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you in turmoil within me? Hope in God; for I shall again praise him, my salvation and my God."  Psalm 43:5 Related Posts: Finding God Hard 

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