Grief. it is not a thing we like to think about, it is not something that we very commonly talk about, even with those that are closest to us.
And that is because grief is so incredibly difficult. It is an agonizing emotion to deal with. to deal with loss of any kind.
Grief is the anguish experienced after significant loss, usually the death of a beloved person. Grief often includes physiological distress, separation anxiety, confusion, yearning, obsessive dwelling on the past, and apprehension about the future.
Loss. That is something else that we don’t like to think about or ponder, but it is something that we have in common, as everyone here has lost something or someone precious to them.
If it’s recent, if it’s long ago, we remain impacted, changed by the loss.
The longer you’re alive, the more you have experience with grief and loss. At 43 years of age, I lost my older brother, Craig. At 48 I lost my father. At 51 I lost my mother.
Of course they’ve been many other points of grief along the way, many other losses, many other points of grief that challenge the way that I look at things.
And of course each person here has their own story of loss.
Shortly after my brother passed away from cancer in 2007, I had to lead a good Friday – themed worship service for the Mission staff.
I put my heart and soul into it, and perhaps in part because of the recent loss of my brother, who was also my closest friend, remembering the earth shattering loss of Good Friday really hit home.
After the service, another leader at the Mission came up to me and said, “you know Matthew, when something terrible happens in your life, you either run in to who you are, or you run away from who you are. I’m so glad that you have run into who you are''.
I've often thought of that over the years, particularly when supporting others who are dealing with grief, and in this context also, as we are all, in this room, people who have suffered significant loss and grief.
And one of the things that we need to grieve, or need to learn how to grieve, is the loss of who we were before our trauma, before that moment, before we were wounded, before who we were was interrupted by the trauma we experienced.
But how do you grieve the loss of that aspect of your being that’s tough to remember… That part of you that existed before your trauma?
That part of you that perhaps felt more grounded, more secure; that part of you that looked at life and at yourself and at people close to you in a good way, a happier way.
The first thing I want to say is that it is essential to grieve.
When my grandmother, who was living with my mother and me, passed away, my father was living and working in Nova Scotia. He made the decision to not return for her funeral.
A few years later he was back in Ontario, and until the day he died, he often voiced that regretted the decision to not say goodbye to his Mom, to not honour his Mom for the sake of expediency, or convenience.
He learned by that mistake how important it is to grieve. Because he didn’t grieve, part of him was stuck.
Scripture has important things to say about grieving loss. As with most of the Bible, the message from it is very different from what we often hear in the world around us,
even though our culture formerly was shaped in large part by our Judeo-Christian heritage.
Here’s one thing you may have heard that's found in Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount:: Matthew 5:4 - Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.
The last thing we feel when we mourn is any sense of good.
Let alone any sense of being blessed as we grieve. But there is a principle and a promise in this statement of Jesus.
The principal is that a positive outcome, an outcome that won't leave us trapped, despite the grief we feel now, awaits those who mourn. Contrary to what we feel in the moment, something good is coming to those who mourn.
Mourning feels like it’s never going to stop. But grief is a journey and a process and not a destination.
My experience of grief is that it is overwhelming and feels, often, like the end of the world. So I have often been encouraged by this passage.
And it also contains a promise. And that promise Is that there is a comforter who will comfort us. The pain we are feeling right now will not last forever.
Here is another passage, 2 actually that have a similar message:
Psalm 147:3 - He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds.
Psalm 34:18 - The Lord is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit.
When we mourn, we mourn something that has been lost, or someone who has been meaningful in our lives who is no longer present, and the impact on us emotionally is that our hearts are broken.
Our spirits are crushed. But here we see that God is near to us, He is present to us when we are brokenhearted, and we see that he is actively working to restore us even as he binds the wounds we have experienced.
God heals the brokenhearted, binds up our wounds, and He does this from close up. He is closer to us than our own breath.
Once last passage:
Isaiah 43:2 When you pass through the waters, I will be with you; and when you pass through the rivers, they will not sweep over you. When you walk through the fire, you will not be burned; the flames will not set you ablaze.
It’s normal for us to feel alone in our trauma, alone in our pain, alone in our struggles and anxieties.
I recall that feeling of being alone, cut off, stranded in my own pain and loss. It can be a dark and desperate place.
One of the many things that shocked me about becoming open to the possibility of God, open to the possibility that I didn’t have a perfect understanding of the world and that maybe I’ve been missing something...one of the things that jolted me the most was coming to realize that I am in no way ever alone.
And because I am never alone, no matter how I feel about any challenge I’m facing, any battle I’m fighting and any point of stress or anxiety I’m in, I am accompanied.
And because I am accompanied by God Who promises to be with me through any and all of these stresses listed here symbolically, I have far more capacity to deal with and endure and even thrive despite my suffering, despite my anxiety, despite my trauma.
I’ve been kind of testing this out for the past 45 years - can I really trust that God is with me and that God is good and that I can put all of my confidence in God?
And I’ve found, you won’t be surprised to hear, that this is unfailingly true.
So may we learn to turn our hearts to God, to run in to God rather than away, as we grieve, as we mourn and as we struggle with these, the deepest hardships of life.
