How to minister: Learning to grieve

Part Six in a series on “How to minister.” Continued from How to Minister: Touching Jesus the leper

 In our hypersensitive victim culture, we don’t need any more pity parties. But part of the reason we wallow in our loss is that we don’t know how to do the hard work of grieving.

A week ago I was with a friend who had what he thought was a relatively happy life until one day last year, his wife showed up and without any real explanation announced, “I want a divorce.”

Shortly thereafter, my friend lost everything in life that mattered. He didn’t find out until it was too late that she was simultaneously having an affair with her lawyer. Now, he gets to see their two children on Thursday evening and weekends. Though months have passed, he’s still in a state of shock.

My friend Ron Walborn says we all need to write a grief journal. He suggests journaling about our losses and how we feel about them. It’s a biblical concept. The book of Lamentations is a grief journal. Jeremiah has lost everything and pours his tears out on paper, journaling thoughts like this one: “The Lord is like an enemy; he has swallowed up Israel.”

This isn’t blasphemy. This is the kind of healthy grieving more of us need to do. God encourages it – the alternative is to allow our grief to go un-expressed, festering into bitterness and even hate. To be human means to suffer loss. We lose our grandparents, and eventually our parents. All of us lose our youth and with it our taut skin and vigor. Many of us lose our dreams. Our friends fall away. Some of us make wrong choices and lose our integrity. Others suffer catastrophic loss when a child dies.

To be human is to have your source of joy and hope robbed from you. We have a sworn enemy who lives to see that happen and who always looks for a “twofer,” tempting us to live in a prison of bitterness after he’s stolen our joy.

Dear reader, it is not fair that your mother and father treated you as they did. They were probably oblivious to the hurt they caused you – you may never get the apology you deserve. But it is time to move on. It’s time to pick up the “Get out of jail free” card and redeem it. Jesus came to set the captives free and sometimes he uses something as simple as a grief journal to do it.

If there’s a part of you that you’ve walled off from feeling anymore, it may be time to tear down those walls and feel again. Get a journal and take some time to write your own small book of lamentations. Show the truth of your loss and how you feel about it to the light of day. It’s only as we do this that God can turn our mourning into dancing.

Read the beginning of this blog series: How to Minister to Others