Enlarge Your Soul Through Grief and Loss
Emotionally Healthy Spirituality, prt. 5
Wildwind Community Church
November 7, 2010
David Flowers
1 John 3:18-20 (MSG)
18 My dear children, let's not just talk about love; let's practice real love.
19 This is the only way we'll know we're living truly, living in God's reality.
20 It's also the way to shut down debilitating self-criticism, even when there is something to it. For God is greater than our worried hearts and knows more about us than we do ourselves.
Most of you are aware that my graduate training is in counseling and that counseling is an aspect of my life and ministry that I value very highly. Like other pastors trained in counseling, I am convinced that many opportunities for me to make the greatest impact in the lives of people is by helping to set them free by providing counseling at critical places in their lives. One of the things that counselors end up doing fairly often is helping people through the suffering that is caused by grief and loss. Last week I shared with you about the first big loss I experienced in my life, when my friend Cindy died in a car accident. I was 22 at the time and dirt-poor, but a friend of mine with some resources saw that I was struggling and told me that if I’d be willing to go see a counselor, he’d pay for it. I was, and he did. Now counselors know that it is critical to grieve our losses properly. Did you know there’s a specific diagnosis that describes the unique situation that is faced by someone who has failed to grieve a loss properly? This diagnosis is called “complicated bereavement.” Complicated bereavement. This diagnosis is given to a person who comes in to counseling and has had a significant loss in their life that occurred more than three months ago, which they have not yet begun to grieve properly. And you think “Properly? Who’s to say what kind of grieving is proper?” The answer is that mental health professionals do! See, we know that if you experience a significant loss in your life and if you do not face it and begin grieving it “properly” as soon as possible after the loss, things get more complicated. Stuffing your emotions, denial, refusal to talk about it, pretending it’s okay, allowing yourself to express your grief only as anger, trying to “get back in the swing of things” too quickly, trying to be tough – all of this is junk we often do that complicates the grieving process. We define “proper” grieving as engaging in the kinds of things that we have learned, through experience, help people to get through a loss as easily as possible -- not that it’s ever easy. One way that we can tell whether a person has successfully gotten through a loss is by the absence of symptoms of post-traumatic stress. If you experienced a loss in your life, and years later you are still having frequent dreams about it, if you still wake up in a sweat, if you still can’t talk about it without crying or getting angry, if you find yourself frequently reliving that event, if you refuse to discuss it at all, you are most likely suffering post-traumatic stress as a result of having not properly grieved that loss. Grieving our losses properly at the time of the loss helps some of these “complicating” issues from showing up. As you suppress your loss, you continue to pile layer upon layer upon layer of falseness on top of it. If you have not grieved a loss, you are living in some falsehoods. It is false that it doesn’t bother you. It is false that you’re past it. It is false that it’s in the past (because it’s still controlling you now – the only losses that are ever in the past are the ones we have truly grieved). It is false that God delivered you from the pain. It is false that it doesn’t really need your attention because you and whoever you lost weren’t that close to begin with. It is false that you’re tough enough to get through it okay. It’s false that you’re okay now.
That is all garbage. It is all ways in which we deceive ourselves so that we don’t have to feel the pain of our losses in life. And yet the reality is that the default response to pain is to attempt to run away from it. My friends, if you want to make a difference in this world, if you want to set yourself apart from most other people, determine before you walk out of this room today that you will spend your life resisting the urge to run away from pain. Do that one thing alone and your life will take on a depth and an authenticity that other people will see, but they won’t be able to put their finger on what it is. My friends, you make me a list of the cruelest people the world has ever known, and every one of them was a person who refused to face their pain. Make me a list of the great moral and spiritual giants the world has ever known, and you can bet that every one of them made a decision at some point in life that they were not going to run from their pain. A choice to grow as a person, a choice to move toward peace and love and joy, is always a choice to feel the pain of life instead of run from it. And no, I’m not saying that a choice to spend life running from pain will turn you into Hitler. That is an evasion technique. Do you see that? I say, “It’s important not to run from your pain,” and someone says, “What are you saying, if I don’t face my pain I’ll turn into Hitler?” Just a way of avoiding the issue. I’m saying we can look to a guy like Hitler to see where the choice to avoid pain, followed to its ultimate destination, can lead. And we can look to a guy like Jesus to see where the choice to live with and confront your pain can lead. Not all people who choose to run from pain will turn into Hitler. But that’s the least of our concerns. My concern is not the extremely remote chance that refusing to face your pain could result in your becoming like Hitler. My concern today is the absolute certainty that refusing to face your pain will result in your not becoming like Jesus. Let me say that again...
And you know, the sad thing is that most people are really okay with this. If I can stuff my pain, if I can refuse to suffer legitimately, if I can avoid the pain of dealing honestly with my losses and grieving them in appropriate and healthy ways, I am willing to trade in any chance of ever being like Jesus. It reminds me of a comedian I heard a while back who said, “You know, I don’t have any huge expectations for my life. I don’t really care if I never jump out of a plane, or if I never write a book, or if I never really accomplish anything that significant with my life at all – I just don’t want to get stabbed . Getting stabbed would be the WORST thing I can imagine. So if I can squeak by without getting stabbed, I’d gladly settle for that.”
I found that extremely funny. But it’s also very sad, because this is how most people approach life, even Christians. I don’t really care if I never accomplish anything great with my life. I don’t care if I don’t make a significant impact for good in the world. I don’t care if I never learn how to love selflessly, or if I ever get past my defensiveness or hostility or pettiness. I don’t care if I end up at the end of somebody’s chain every day of my life, depending on whether somebody likes me or whether they don’t. I don’t care if ultimately I don’t really become like Jesus – as long as I don’t have to face my pain. If I can squeak by without ever feeling the stabbing pain of loss or insufficiency, or fear, or lack of certainty, or loss of faith in God – I’d gladly settle for that.”
It’s too bad. It’s the exact opposite of the life God calls us to, really. Jesus, of course, promised us:
John 16:33 (NIV)
33 "I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world."
You WILL have trouble. Jesus promised us this, and he showed us how true it is! Jesus is sometimes called the suffering servant. The Apostle Paul said,
Romans 8:17 (NLT)
17 And since we are his children, we are his heirs. In fact, together with Christ we are heirs of God’s glory. But if we are to share his glory, we must also share his suffering.
Suffering is a cornerstone of our faith! But everything in us turns from this. Everything in us tries to find ways to avoid suffering. If something is painful, we don’t want any. Many adults are just older versions of three year old children who scream bloody murder over their immunizations. It doesn’t matter that it will be better for them later. They just don’t want to take the pain now.
As a preacher, I had to come to terms years ago with the fact that no sermon I ever preached could ever make anyone do anything. I throw these words into the wind, and pray that someone catches them and puts them into practice. But if I could make anyone do anything at all – ever – it would be this one thing. I would make people stop running away from pain and start running toward it. That’s the greatest single thing you can ever do to increase (I know it sounds strange, but stay with me!) your joy in life. Define pain as any form of discomfort (so it includes fear and other things as well), by the way. I’m not saying be a masochist. I’m not saying stop taking Motrin for your headaches. I’m not saying seek out opportunities to be miserable. Life will present you with plenty of those and all I’m saying is that when life presents you with those opportunities, stop trying to run from them, deny them, cover them, hide them, minimize them, and whistle them away. Stop doing that and start saying, “Here is where my soul is enlarged. Here is where I choose to sit for a while. I will feel my pain. I will admit my fear. I will grieve my losses. I will carry my grief and ask others to carry it with me and help me. I will stop acting like it’s wrong, or sick, for me to ask for help.”
What’s that all about anyway, my friends? Can we talk about that for a minute? What’s up with the default attitude in our society that people shouldn’t get help when they need it? Because you must realize that when we talk about enlarging your soul through grief and loss, we’re talking not only about making a deliberate choice to run towards you pain, but also about a choice to swim against the tide, because society in general will not reward your strength and courage when you decide to admit something is wrong with you and seek help. What’s up with the idea that someone’s a head-case if they go in for counseling? What’s up with this attitude that counseling is for OTHER people, but no one’s gonna hear MY business. No one’s gonna get the dirt on MY life. I don’t need that. It’s fine for you, Dave, and fine for all these other people, but I don’t need it. No wonder we can’t carry our pain. No wonder we can’t shoulder it. Because at the same time we are denying our own pain, at the same time we are choosing not to face it, we are subscribing to stupid myths about rugged individualism, and to the baseless notion that everything worthwhile I need to do in this life I can do on my own. Well, if we truly believe that getting help is a sign of weakness, and if our number one fear is to admit that we are weak, of course we will be opposed to getting help.
Let me show you how deep this rabbit hole goes – the whole way that society shuns any movement a person might make toward emotional and spiritual health. Take the attitude in our society about medications for conditions like anxiety and depression. Now I’ve never taken any of these medications (and I’d tell you right now if I had taken them or was taking them now), so I’m not saying this to defend myself in any way. But let’s say you have a person who is seeing a counselor for severe anxiety (which you probably don’t know anything about because he hides it from you because he already knows what you think about people who admit they need help). His counselor thinks a mild sedative might help him get some relief in the short-term so he can focus on working through the counseling process in the long-term and finding out what’s going on with his anxiety. But word leaks out to a few of his friends and family about it, and they start giving him hell. You don’t need that junk! What are you, a basket-case? I didn’t know you were a head-job.
The strange and sad thing is that many of the people making these comments are the same people who, just last night, were drinking with him at the party. There they were together – engaging in our society’s accepted way of feeling better, of dealing with your problems. And that’s what I’m driving at. Do you see it? Drinking is acceptable in our society because it allows everyone to do together what people most want to do in relationship to problems. RUN FROM THEM. Deny them. Put on a happy face, party down, get social. Act as if it’s not an issue. But as soon as you turn to a scientific drug that was created for the express purpose of helping someone see themselves more clearly, to help them not to RUN from their problems, but actually face them, stop running, and get themselves straightened out – now you incur the sarcasm, the dismissive comments, even the anger of people who you were just drowning your sorrows with over a beer the previous day. Because we can drown our sorrows every night until the bar closes – but God forbid that somebody we know decides to stop drowning them and to start listening to what they are trying to tell him. And in my example I’m using a guy for a specific reason. We have this kind of chauvinistic attitude in our society, where we actually kind of expect women to be “head cases” and to have “issues,” but of course men aren’t like that. Men then, have extra pressure to act as if all is well. Of course we know that’s not true for ANYBODY. The truth is I’m not okay. And you’re not okay. But that’s okay. That’s okay, see that’s grace. But the pressure to act as if everything is okay works really well for men, because men of course have to be tougher. Men, of course, have to be in control. Men, of course, have a harder time – generally – identifying and talking about feelings and their own thinking than women do anyway, so the thought of going into counseling might be intimidating for a woman, but it absolutely sends chills up the spines of most men. But instead of saying, “Counseling sounds like an incredibly scary process. I might see some things I have been trying all my life not to see, and if I see them it will hurt, first of all, and then second I will feel like I maybe should do something about it, and I don’t want to change.” That’s what’s going on, but since we’re not the kind of people, generally, who accept and acknowledge our pain, instead of saying that, we make some ridiculous comment (and let there be no doubt – this comment is truly, madly, deeply, transcendently, stunningly, absurdly, obviously, patently, completely ridiculous) like, “My life is nobody else’s business but mine,” as if the way we think, feel, function, the way we relate to others has no effect on anyone else on the planet – as if we live in a bubble. This is how we fool ourselves. It is the contradiction of wanting to be connected and loved in ways that are convenient for us, and that feel pleasant and feel good, but when it’s not convenient, and doesn’t feel so good, turning around and acting as if we live completely cut off from all other human contact and whether or not we get help is nobody else’s business. It’s just absurd. It’s ridiculous, and I really believe that most people who say it KNOW it’s ridiculous – but it’s the thing to say if you’re not willing to actually get the help you need.
Now I’m not entirely unsympathetic to this. The journey toward being willing to openly face our pain can be a long one, and those of us who decide to do it will follow different paths. I don’t know what path you will follow, but if you decide to face your pain, if you decide to acknowledge the grief and loss in your life, I know that it will involve some version of six of the most healing words any human being can ever say. “I am hurting. I need help.” As you reflect on the loss and grief in your life (whatever it may consist of), I challenge you to look in the mirror at your house and say these six words. Some of you won’t even be able to get them out of your mouth. Others of you will find that after you say them you immediately roll your eyes – at yourself. You can’t take your pain seriously. See, that’s true of most of us. Most of us do not take our pain seriously, but then take our efforts and our competence and our knowledge way TOO seriously. We need to take everything else about ourselves less seriously, and start taking our pain more seriously. Others of us think we take pain seriously because we whine about it all the time and spend every second of the day thinking about it. But that’s not taking pain seriously – that’s being a fan of it. That’s needing it and not knowing what we’d do without it. Some of you will laugh merely at the mention of this exercise. You’re still so stuck in your false self that you can’t even deal with the IDEA of looking yourself in the eye and saying, “I am hurting. I need help.” Not even if you’re all alone in your house and no one will ever know you did it.
At any rate, if and when you decide to stop running from your pain, running from the losses in your life (deaths, diseases, divorces, disasters, discouragements, depressions, dysfunctions, etc.), you will be shocked to find that there will be people in your life who claim to love you, who would rather you just continue drinking to numb your pain. Or watching TV. Or working too much. Or eating. Or having sex, or looking at porno, or whatever you have always done to numb the pain. Even if they’ve always complained about your doing this stuff, they would rather have you go back to it than to get healthy. They don’t WANT you to get healthy. They don’t WANT you to enlarge your soul, and this isn’t because they don’t love you, it’s because it’s not really about you. Others in your life will resist your honesty and your journey because you will be one more person who knows that the emperor has no clothes – that you and those around you are false. One more person waking up. One more person who stops playing the “I’m okay, you’re okay” game. One less Pinocchio, one more real boy or real girl. If I love you, and you start to wake up, I’ll see your authenticity starting to come out, I’ll see that you’re doing what you need to do to get healthy, and I’m going to be reminded that I need to wake up too (because deep down, all of us know it). Only maybe I’m not ready to wake up. Maybe I haven’t hit the bottom yet. Maybe I still WANT to live in the false self, because I’m just too afraid to get real. And so I will resort to whatever it takes to get you to go back to sleep. Nothing personal, it’s just that the light in you is too painful for me. That’s another huge reason why many people will not face their pain. Because often when we try, we are not congratulated and encouraged, but rather we are ridiculed and isolated. It can be a very, very lonely journey.
That is why I’m bringing it to our whole church. Imagine a whole community of people on this journey together! Sure, your spouse may not be on the journey with you (hopefully they are!), but at least there are SOME people who understand, some who can encourage and support you. At least you don’t have to feel completely alone. And imagine what we will be as individuals, what our marriages and families will be, and what our church will be, as some of us begin to really get honest.
Which brings me to my last point. People who come into churches frequently leave saying, “Those people were fake. They were inauthentic.” I want to reverse that. If people are going to leave Wildwind, I want it to be because THEY aren’t ready to get real. They aren’t ready to face their own pain. They aren’t ready to get whatever help they need. I want the whole culture and environment of our church to shout, “Time to get real.” Folks, if we’re not doing that in the church, what the heck are we doing? If we’re not doing that, we are claiming to follow Jesus who is the truth, but then living in falsehood, contradicting everything we say we believe. That is why our religion gets reduced to sets of doctrines and dogmas – it’s far easier to say, “I believe it’s true that Jesus Christ rose from the dead” than to say, “I believe it’s true that I am afraid of intimacy.” “I believe it’s true that I live and die by other peoples’ approval.” “I believe it’s true that I am empty inside.” “I believe it’s true that my marriage is in shambles.” “I am hurting. I need help.”
We all have our hurts – things we need to grieve for – things we are covering up. The question is whether we will be content to leave them buried, or whether we will expose them to God – to truth – and trust that God can bring healing when what is buried finally sees the light of day. Talk about enlarging your soul, and expanding your faith. Let others talk about belief statements and doctrines and church stuff. It has its place, but until we are ready to face the truth, it will just be one more thing helping us keep our secrets buried. Let’s grow through this. Time to lift the lid – start by seeing it for yourself. Take time to think and reflect and pray and journal – do your daily offices and let those questions get in. God is there.
1 John 3:18-20 (MSG)
18 My dear children, let's not just talk about love; let's practice real love.
19 This is the only way we'll know we're living truly, living in God's reality.
20 It's also the way to shut down debilitating self-criticism, even when there is something to it. For God is greater than our worried hearts and knows more about us than we do ourselves.
That is the basis for our confidence. We can face the truth without fear, knowing God is there, and is greater than our fears. So it’s not just “I am hurting. I need help.” It’s also, “God is here.”
