Oh Heart Bowed Down With Sorrow Series

A. There is an old Chinese parable about a woman whose only son died.

1. As you can imagine, she was grief-stricken beyond consolation.

2. She made her way to an old, wise man seeking his assistance.

3. She was surprised and hopeful when he promised to give her back her son if she would bring him a mustard seed from a home where there had never been sorrow.

4. Eagerly she started her search, and went from house to house.

5. In every case, at every home, she learned that a loved one there had also been lost.

6. She returned to the old, wise man without a mustard seed, but with the new found truth that sorrow is common to all.

B. That is a truth that I have tried to keep in the forefront of my thinking throughout my ministry – that every person I meet and every person in our church has experienced heartache of some kind.

1. Let’s do a little survey this morning:

a. Raise your hand if someone you have known has died.

b. Raise your hand if that someone was someone very close to you.

c. Raise your hand if that someone has died recently – in the last year or two.

d. Raise your hand if you have ever had a loss of another kind – the loss of a job or career, the loss of a friendship, the loss of an engagement or a marriage, the loss of your health, the loss of a dream, the loss of innocence, the loss of a limb, or the loss of finances or the loss of a pet.

2. The reality of life is that it is filled with loss and sorrow.

a. Loss is unavoidable, but grief is a choice.

b. We have to choose to grieve, but a lot of people choose not to – so they stuff their pain, and they deny it, trying to go through all the losses of life without ever grieving, but that’s a big mistake.

c. Grief is a choice, because we have to choose to let grief in and to allow ourselves to feel it.

d. The emotions that we will undergo during grieving our losses will possibly be the most painful and confusing experiences we will ever have.

e. Grief is the fixed cost of human attachment – if you love well, you will hurt.

f. Someone wrote: “Love is the fabric of a life well lived. Grief is the tapestry of a life well loved.” (J. B. McPhail.)

3. And when we choose to go through the grieving process, we are often caught off-guard by its messiness.

a. When we allow ourselves to grieve it isn’t something that comes and goes in an orderly fashion – you simply don’t get over a loss or through a loss in a predetermined period of time.

b. Society tends to believe that grief makes you just feel sad – if only grief was that simple.

c. But in reality, when we experience loss and grief we need to be prepared for the fact that grief will drag us through a huge expanse of emotions.

d. We will go from the raw, debilitating and shocking wound of our immediate loss to the long-term feelings of loneliness, isolation and longing for the one or thing we have lost.

e. And our emotions will fluctuate - changing rapidly – intensifying and then retreating again, only to reemerge when we least expect them.

f. The emotions of grief are a mix of many emotions – including: guilt, anger, despair, regret, fear, sadness, envy, hopelessness, worry and self-pity, just to name a few.

g. Not only that, grief is full of paradoxes and the emotions we experience are often a mix of bittersweet and they can seem to be in conflict with each other.

h. As we grieve, we need to learn to make space to feel two seemingly opposite things at the same time.

C. During our sermon series on emotions, we have explored many of those emotions individually that we just listed, but today as we try to focus on the emotions of grief and sorrow, we have to realize that the grieving process is complicated and the emotions involved in grief are many.

1. The actual scope of emotional possibilities is almost endless.

2. But if these feelings are not acknowledged, identified and worked with and through, then they can pull us down into the quicksand of grief, like a weight attached to our ankle can pull us to the bottom of the sea.

3. Unfortunately, many times we try to push these emotions aside because they may not be “acceptable” ways of coping in our opinion or in the opinion of others.

4. While grief has universal aspects to it, it tends to be very personal and unique to the individual.