How to have hope amid grief
We can have hope amid grief. A grieving person can experience fear, anger,
guilt, and depression. A grieving person may also feel that they are being
judged by others who think that their loss was not as significant or
painful as someone else’s. It is essential for a person experiencing grief
to find people they can open up to about their experiences with loss. This
will help them explore their emotions and find meaning in their
experiences with grief.
Table of Contents
The Meaning Of Grief
The word grief is a derivative of the Latin verb, which means “to burden.”
It is probably the most intense, complex, and prolonged human emotion that
we know of, and it cant be narrowed down to an exact science.
Grief is the only human experience that we must enter voluntarily. If you
think about all other human encounters, they happen to us. Grief is a
choice that we must make. The reason that we choose grief is it helps us
heal. Grief heals, restores, and redeems. Grief changes and transforms
things in our life that have gone badly. Grief is the only place we can go
to get comfort when things in our life go wrong. We have this fantastic
reminder by Solomon concerning grief in Ecclesiastes 7:2-4
It is better to go to the house of mourning
than to go to the house of feasting,
for this is the end of all mankind,
and the living will lay it to heart.
Sorrow is better than laughter,
for by sadness of face the heart is made glad.
The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning,
but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth.
Grief is where we must go if we are to ever get over our losses; it is
where we must go if we will ever let go. If we want to have room for new
and better things, we must let go and free our souls from the painful
past. If we do not release our losses, we will be stuck emotionally and
spiritually. It does not mean that we forget; it means that we let go.
Otherwise, we will be tied to someone dead and if they are a loved they
would not want that, someone who is unavailable, someone who will never be
able to give us the approval that we long and yearn for and are even
trying to earn, or we will be tied to a fantasy of what we think life
should look like. Whatever this tie is, it is an emotional tie to
something from that past, and it keeps us stuck in our present life.
We are a people who are designed to have finality. We finish things, so
when it comes to grieving losses and pain, we learn to be sad so that our
hearts can one day enjoy happiness. We cry and say the words to get the
loss and pain out.
In grieving, we make this conscious effort to release our attachment to
people, goals, wishes, religious/family systems, or whatever it might be
that we can no longer have.
We so often fail to recognize that we are a people who are made to do
things in community. Grief is no exception to that we need to grieve in
community, and yet so often, we find that we grieve alone. We need to
grieve in community to have the love, support, and comfort we desperately
need in our losses. When we do not have that support, we get stuck in
despair because we do not have a love of others to hold us up enough for
us to let go of our losses. We also need structured activities as part of
grieving things like support groups or a time, space, and place where we
can be heard, empathized with, understood, and supported to give us the
necessary support to engage in the process of grief.
The scriptures tell us, “And taking with him Peter and the two sons of
Zebedee, he began to be sorrowful and troubled. Then he said to them, “My
soul is very sorrowful, even to death; remain here, and watch with me.”
(Matthew 26:37–38 ESV. Jesus says that His soul was very sorrowful even
unto death if that is not grief, I don’t know what is.
What are some of the effects of grief?
1. Common emotions that are involved in grief
– Bitterness
– Emptiness
– Apathy
– Love
– Anger
– Guilt
– Sadness
– Fear
– Self-pity
– Helplessness
– Hollow
2. Our bodies reflect the grief with physical symptoms like
– Tightness in the chest
– Heart palpitations
– Dry mouth
– Shortness of breath
– Hollowness in the pit of the stomach
– Disrupted sleeping and eating patterns
3. There are some symptoms of normal grief.
– Distorted thinking patterns; irrational or fearful thoughts
– Feelings of despair and hopelessness
– Out of control or numbed emotions
– Changes in sensory perceptions (sight, taste, smell, etc.)
– Increased irritability
– Increased talking or even reduced communication
– Memory difficulties
– Inability to concentrate
– Obsessive focus on a lost loved one
– Losing track of time
– Increased/decreased appetite
– Increase/decrease sexual desire
– Difficulty falling asleep or staying asleep
– Dreams in which a deceased loved one visits the griever
– Nightmares that often include a theme of death
– Increase in occurrence of physical illnesses-headaches, stomach
aches, flu, etc.
– Shattered beliefs about God, life, the world, purpose, etc.
4. Grieving includes “mourning.”
– Mourning is derived from the Latin word that means “to be anxious.”
– Mourning is the process of remembering and recalling what was lost.
– It usually causes us to feel anxious or uncomfortable; this is why
we often want to avoid the process.
– Grief is often described in terms that show it is a process
– Stages – We do not pass through stages sequentially
– Phases – Phases often overlap that are rarely distinct
– Tasks – This is usually a more accurate depiction of the process
and implies that the mourner needs to “take action” and “do something.”
5. Grief has a purpose
– There is an expression of experiential feelings about a loss
– It is a protest at a loss as well as a desire to change what
happened and have it not be true
– We acknowledge the effects of the devastating impact of a loss
– The primary purpose of grief is to experience the reactions to face
the loss and begin adapting to it. The only authentic was out of fried is
through it.
– Anyone going through grief must be encouraged to do their work. It
can be postponed or delayed even, but when that happens, the result is
ultimately depression (I know this to be true)
– What often happens when grief is delayed is that instead of feeling
sadness, you feel apathy and a general numbness.
Denying Grief
Denying grief is where so many people land, and for some reason, this
seems common in the Christian world and even more common among pastors.
When we are not encouraged or allow ourselves to go through a grieving
process where we allow the “little deaths” of our losses, our world, and
our relationship are ultimately impacted. So we have this idea that we are
“raising above” our hurt, and instead, we are in denial that we have even
been hurt. So we are refusing to acknowledge and mourn our losses, but
this will eventually surface. When we carry unresolved into future
expereinces and relationships, there will be unrest, conflict, and ongoing
depression. There is also often delayed anger. This is because anger is
far easier to experience than sadness, so anger becomes our go-to. Sadness
keeps our hearts soft towards God and will help prevent eventual
hardheartedness. When we deny sadness, we lose touch with who God is and
His tenderness and His giving of grace. We move into areas where we become
insensitive and cannot feel grief and remorse even over our sin. We are
not a people created to hand the existence of both good and bad in the
same space; God allows sadness as a way for us to deal with our hurts and
our disappointments.
Whenever we deny our need to grieve, we are refusing to say goodbye to
people we love, places, missed opportunities, disappointments, youth,
vitality, health, relationships, or whatever had been “taken away” from
us. This refusal to grieve serves to condemn us and makes us rigid.
Genuine grief is the deep sadness and weeping that expresses the
acceptance or our inability to do anything about our losses and what id
found in every human being’s life. Grief is a reminder to us that we are
not in control of our lives like we think we are or believe we are. When
we are sad, it shows that someone or something matters to us, and we
choose to invest in that person or experience. Shattered commitment has
come at a great cost. There are some things we should understand about
grief.
A. It is intensely person; we cannot compare our process with anyone else.
B. Is difficult work not to be done in isolation.
C. It allows us to make necessary changes in order to live with our losses
in a healthier manner. Our goal is to move from “Why did this happen?” to
“How can I learn through this experience.
Why is a search for meaning and purpose in the loss
How is a search for a way to adjust to the losses
D. Grief will take longer than we expect. It will intensify on the
anniversary etc.
How can we work our way through this grieving process?
1. Make a list of your losses and their effect in your life.
2. Daily statements to say to yourself
3. I believe my grief has a purpose and an end
4. I am responsible for my own grieving process
5. I will not be afraid to ask for help
6. I will try not to rush my recovery process
7. I choose to face the loss and feel the pain, knowing it will end
8. I recognize that the waves of pain will be alternated with lulls
of rest
9. Consider inviting others into your grieving process by sharing
about your loss with them.
10. After you make your grief/loss inventory consider sharing it with
a safe friend or a family member or counselor. Sharing each loss with a
trusted person enables you to honor the relationship, experience, dream,
and have another human validate your experience. This makes it a shared
encounter, not one done in isolation.
11. Have a ceremony as a part of releasing that thing that you need
to get rid of. This will honor the loss and empower you to move forward.
12. Connect with the pain of the loss, which will pave the way to
connecting to the care available to you.
13. Talk about the past, your losses, crushed dreams, and poor
reactions to those hurts. Be willing to be embarrassed, vulnerable,
broken, and needy.
Truths to Remember
found these truths to remember, which I wanted to share.
• The past can’t really impact us, but our present feelings about the past
can.
– If we don’t expose the things of the past to the light of God’s
truth and love through the grieving process, they remain in the darkness
and are essentially alive today, creating fruits of darkness in us.
Disconnected from the transformative power of God’s love and light, they
take on a life of their own and impact present relationships.
– Confession of the past brings experiences to light and opens us up
to transformation. Eph. 5:11, 13 reminds us to “Have nothing to do with
the fruitful deeds of darkness, but rather expose them…everything
exposed by the light becomes visible.”
– We must know what happened to us, name the sin, be honest about
what we have done, what others have done to us, and name the guilty
parties for us to know who and how to fully forgive. Looking at our past
opens (often re-opens) our souls and memories so that we can accurately
see what we have lost, who was not enough, and how we are trying to make
up for those broken losses in our lives today.
– These truths don’t change the past, but they do redeem it.
– Instructing people to forgive and forget creates great disregard
for the brokenhearted, abused, neglected, and tormented. God highly values
his broken, hurting individuals and commands us to come alongside them to
offer them love, compassion, and healing from their families.
– If our heart is frozen in grief (or we refuse to lean into the
grieving process), we cannot experience the feelings and emotions God
designed us to feel. Many individuals experience “frozen grief” as
depression. Sadness and anger (major components of grief) need somewhere
to go. If we express them and let go of them, we have made room for fresh
experiences and increased joy.
The Skills Needed
Just “moving on” is not enough. Leaders especially need to pay attention
to their losses, to recover and learn from them. In my reading I found a
list of skills that have to occur before we can move on from grief.
1. Connect in a vulnerable way: As much as possible, bring your
losses to relationship. The more you relegate grief to your alone time,
the longer it will take. The more “people time” you allow, the less time
it will take. My therapist told me to make sure I was around people more
often.
2. Value what is no more: don’t dismiss or devalue what you lost it
is easy to say that person was toxic so good riddance. However if that is
our attitude we will never full work through it. Instead, and I know how
hard this is but put some value on the good parts. So that person was
toxic, but they were nice to puppies 🤣.
3. Be sad and say goodbye: Allow yourself to feel the sadness of
losing someone or something. Say goodbye and mean it.
4. Extend forgiveness. Be willing to cancel the debt. What I mean by
this is when someone has wronged you don’t become bitter. You do not have
to forgive them but you must guard your heart and be ready to forgive if
repentance happens. Be ready to cancel the debt.
5. Replace: Don’t make an idol of the lost person or thing. Find
those people who will help you replace whatever contribution it brought to
you.
6. Learn: Losses teach us something about the future. Write down what
you have learned that will help your life moving forward. Then you can use
that memory bank in the future.
7. Adapt: Loss is a reality. Don’t argue with reality, adapt to it
and learn to live well.