Gratitude & Grace

Last Saturday evening, at the Immanuel Ladies' Fellowship, Janet McClurg taught on grief in the Christian life. As Janet said and many can testify, we live in a culture that despises grief and sorrow. It creates awkward pauses in conversations, is rushed over by means of entertainment and is warded off by anti-depressants. However, as Christians, we should not be surprised by suffering and pain, for we know they are a certainty in this life.

Janet's talk lays a very good and helpful foundation for knowing how to deal with grief - both for the one who is grieving and for the one who is seeking to comfort. In view of that fact, what follows is a reproduction of my notes. If there is any confusion, it is most certainly my fault as a poor note-taker.

"Good Grief"
Psalm 42:5 "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."

A. We tend to AVOID grief at all costs.
There are two primary ways in which we avoid grief. This avoidance is not merely the attitude of unbelievers; it is also the predominant posture of the church.

First, we seek entertainment and distractions, filling any solitary and quiet time with a barrage of music, television, movies, almost anything to stay sorrowful emotions and thoughts.

Second, many people people turn to drugs - both recreational and prescription drugs.

But we must understand that
B. Grief is BIBLICAL.

Ecclesiastes 7:1-4 "A good name is better than a good ointment, And the day of one's death is better than the day of one's birth. It is better to go to a house of mourning Than to go to a house of feasting, Because that is the end of every man, And the living takes it to heart. Sorrow is better than laughter, For when a face is sad a heart may be happy. The mind of the wise is in the house of mourning, While the mind of fools is in the house of pleasure."

Deuteronomy 34:8 "So the sons of Israel wept for Moses in the plains of Moab thirty days; then the days of weeping and mourning for Moses came to an end." A note on this verse: the people of Israel had a set time for mourning, and it was an entire month. We also ought to allow people time to mourn, in spite of this "fast-paced" culture in which we live.

Isaiah 53:3 "He was despised and forsaken of men, A man of sorrows and acquainted with grief; And like one from whom men hide their face He was despised, and we did not esteem Him." Jesus Christ was called a man of sorrows, and in verse four, we are told that he bore our griefs and carried our sorrows.

John 11:35 "Jesus wept." Jesus wept, and in this he displayed his humanity and his compassion. The characteristic of the Christian life should be a readiness to weep with those who are weeping.

Revelation 21:4 "and He will wipe away every tear from their eyes; and there will no longer be any death; there will no longer be any mourning, or crying, or pain; the first things have passed away." This implies that our tears have not yet been wiped away and that we must mourn a little while longer.

C. Grief has CAUSES.

The human life is lived in relationship, not just to other people but to all other things. Any time a relationship is severed, you have a death*.
Question: in Psalm 42:5, is the psalmist asking a rhetorical question (why are you cast down?), or is he truly seeking the cause of his grief?

So we have a principle to consider, and this is called "Name the Sorrow". Death is suffered in broken relationships, and people experience a hierarchy of four different types of relationship in which death* can be experienced.

1. Primal - relationship with God
2. Communal - relationship with others
3. Natural - relationship with creation and our work
4. Internal - relationship with self

The Fall was the first break with the primal, and, consequently, all other relationships are messed up. Accordingly, any break of relationship in a higher level of relationship affects all the relationships below it.

When you are sad or depressed, if you examine these relationships, you may be able to name the cause and begin to deal with that specific grief. The world gets depressed because it doesn't deal with grief.

D. The main cause of grief is DEATH.
Death=Broken relationships
While physical death is one of the severest and most acute sorrows that people can suffer, there are many other "little deaths" that tear at our souls.

E. There are EFFECTS.
or "The Grieving Process"
C.S. Lewis, in A Grief Observed, gives a good description of the grieving process. When he wrote this work, he was dealing with the death of his wife, and so was trying to navigate the waters of sorrow. At first, he never had any intention of publishing A Grief Observed, but he realized that it might be helpful for other people. This is how he described the grieving process.
"Grief is like a long valley, a winding valley where any bend may reveal a totally new landscape. As I've already noted, not every bend does. Sometimes the surprise is the opposite one; you are presented with exactly the same sort of country you thought you had left behind miles ago. This is when you wonder whether the valley isn't a circular trench. But it isn't. There are partial recurrences, but the sequence doesn't repeat."

The grieving process is not linear, though it may described in linear terms. People will flip flop back and forth through the stages, and we should not be surprised at this. Sometimes, the process will seem like a spiral or the waves of the ocean. You may be coming out of the deeps, facing land, when a strong wave crashes against your back and drags you back in.

3 Stage
1. Shock - cannot comprehend the grief
2. Wrestling the Angel
a. with the will - denial
b. with the heart - anger
c. with the mind - trying to rewrite the past - "if only ____"
3. Sorrow - just sad
It is at the third stage where the cleansing and subsequent healing begins. Just as a wound must bleed to avoid infection and begin the healing process, crying is the bleeding of the soul that must happen for healing to begin. The place to cry is the cross. See Psalms 42 & 43 where the psalmist takes his sorrow to God.

A note for the one who would comfort: if you are with someone who is mourning and don't know what to say, you don't have to say anything. It is easy to underestimate the "ministry of presence," but oftentimes your presence is a far greater comfort than anything you might be able to say. Have ears to hear the grief poured out on you. There will be a time to speak, but wait. Allow the grieving person time to grieve; healing may, and probably will, take a long time.

F. Grief must be seen the eyes of FAITH.
We must go to Jesus at the cross with our sorrows - to grieve with him, and he grieves with us. Elisabeth Elliot suggests spending three hours at the cross in the midst of sorrow. We need to allow each other the time to do that.

(Ashlea's addendum: Michael Card's album "The Hidden Face of God" is a tremendously beautiful and honest look at suffering. The first song on the album is "Come Lift Up Your Sorrows."

If you are wounded, if you are alone,
If you are angry, if your heart is cold as stone,
If you have fallen and if you are weak,
Come find the worth of God
That only the suffering seek.

Come lift up your sorrows
And offer your pain;
Come make a sacrifice
Of all your shame;
There in your wilderness
He's waiting for you
To worship Him with your wounds,
For he's wounded too.

He has not stuttered, and He has not lied
When He said, "Come unto me,"
You're not disqualified;
When your heavy laden, you may want to depart,
But those who know sorrow are closest to His heart.

In this most Holy Place
He's made a sacred space
For those who will enter in
And trust to cry out to Him;
You'll find no curtain there,
No reason left for fear;
There's perfect freedom here
To weep every unwept tear.)

G. Grief is the GRACE of God.
It is a gift of God. Grief is the means by which God pulls us back to himself.
The road out of grief is growing in gratitude. If we do not arrive at gratitude, there can be no true healing. We must remember, and sorrow teaches us, that God gave us all things, though we deserve no good thing. Sometimes God takes away things he has given us, things that we never deserved. He does this in order to loosen our grip on those things and to give us different gifts instead. And ultimately, he is conforming us to the image of Jesus Christ.


A Bibliography for Suffering

>Scripture
>Nature
>Mourning into Dancing, Walter Wangerin, Jr. (1992) Zondervan Publishing House
>A Grief Observed, C. S. Lewis. (1961) Harper Collins Publishers
>Tracks of a Fellow Struggler, John R. Claypool. (1974) Morehouse Publishing
>The Widow Directed to the Widow's God, John Angell James. (1997) Soli Deo Gloria Ministries


*'Death' may or may not refer to a physical death.