SPACE
to GRIEVE
Jennifer
Rees-Larcombe
I’ve been coming to Flames of
Fire for the last four years, but surely this last one was the
best ever?
Those summer days in Buith have became
an oasis for me, because I feel I have been walking through a desert.
The journey of grief and adjustment to loss is a long one, and so slow it
is hard to measure your progress but each year
Flames has felt like a mile stone in my recovery.
Perhaps because I work for “Beauty
From Ashes”, an organisation which seeks to support people going through
change and loss, I was asked to give a talk on that subject at Buith, aimed at
people in churches who long to help their grieving friends but don’t always
know how to.
Recently I was at my best friend’s
funeral. When her
brother greeted me I asked how he was coping, ‘Fine,’ he said brightly,
‘we Christians don’t have to grieve do we!’
I said nothing but I heartily disagreed.
Christians are human beings, and when we lose someone we love, all humans
grieve, but I think many of us, especially those in renewal, feel like my
friend’s brother. Refusing
to allow our grief to take its normal course can be dangerous, because buried
feelings can show themselves in physical or emotional illness, or pop up years
later when some other event brings them all to the surface.
I think we Christians can find grief
more difficult to handle than our secular friends because of all the
uncharacteristic emotions that are so completely normal after a major loss.
We are astonished and ashamed at how
angry we feel because we do not understand that anger is a normal reaction.
‘How could he leave me to cope with all this mess alone?’ someone
said to me recently, when she knows perfectly well her husband couldn’t help
dying! When well meaning, but tactless friends say the
wrong thing and we over react, we feel a failure as a Christian! And because we know that forgiveness is vital, we
really struggle endlessly with our resentment against anyone who caused our
loved one’s death or gave them less than perfect medical care beforehand.
Then there’s fear.
During the grief journey, which can last five years or longer, fear is
normal, and shows itself in a range of ways.
Constant butterflies in the tummy, loss of confidence, inability to make
decisions, fear of being out of the home, and a terrible sense of insecurity.
Friends say, ‘You shouldn’t get into such a state, Dear, just trust
Jesus. If you
worry you don’t trust, if you trust you don’t worry.’
Of course they are right, but during grief fears are normal and have
nothing to do with faith. But
when our fear of being trapped in a crowd keeps us away from church for a while
Job’s comforters soon accuse us of losing our faith!
Christians are prepared to accept
sorrow, and ‘a good cry’ is seen as necessary, so long as it is only one!
Crying in church every Sunday for months is soon labelled as weakness.
Worse still, when that normal sorrow turns into depression, as it does
for most people at some time
during the first five years after loss, Christians feel a terrible sense of
failure. We ought to be
leaping for joy and singing hymns loudly, not feeling the whole world has turned
grey and life is just too much effort.
A major shock followed by grief and the stress of unwelcome change can
temporarily effect the chemicals in our brains, we need medical help, but a
doctor told me that Christians are notoriously bad at asking for it. ‘We could give them a few months on
antidepressants and they would be fine again,’ she explained.
‘Nowadays they are not addictive and don’t turn people into Zombies,
they simply act like a plaster cast on a broken leg.
But dozens of slightly depressed Christians try to cope alone, maybe for
years, because they feel that depression is wrong, and having to take pills
would prove their weakness, but we could get them right so quickly.’
The other thing that grieving
Christians find it acutely difficult to handle are all the doubts and questions.
All humans ask ‘why did this happen to me?’ but Christians have the
added pain of asking ‘why did GOD allow this to happen?’
Did I sin? Was it
Satan attacking? Or perhaps
God is not as loving or as powerful as I always thought.’
These questions rattle our faith at a time when we are least able to deal
with them. The normal
numbness that follows a bereavement, can last for months, robbing us of our
sense of God’s presence, until we wonder why He has abandoned us when we
needed him most. Of
course He is always there, even when we cannot feel Him, but sometimes we simply
have to choose, with gritted teeth, to take His word for that!
For some people this side of grieving
can mean a total loss of faith, we even lose the comfort of Heaven!
Again this is normal and we simply have to remember that even if we no
longer believe in God He still believes in us!
If we wait patiently and don’t start looking for some deep-seated sin,
the clouds will lift and we’ll see the Son (sun) once again.
So, be kind to your friends if, like
me, they are walking a path through the wilderness. Don’t give them endless
advice they haven’t asked for; don’t write them off as poor witnesses when
they talk or act in ways that surprise you and listen to them even when you’ve
heard the same stuff hundreds of times before.
Just be there for them, love them and give them time, they’ll come
through it in the end. I
realised suddenly this summer that I have reached the far side of my wilderness,
the grass looks green again and the sky is definitely blue!
As Bob and his wonderful music group led us in worship this year I knew
Psalm 40 was real for me. ‘He lifted me out of the slimy pit…. He put a new
song in my mouth.’ Thank you Flames of Fire, and I’m
coming back for more next year!