The Gifts of Grief
By Becky Rische
In meetings of our Spirit in the Hills’ Mental Health Ministry committee, we speak often of how we might help those grieving among our community. Grief groups, counseling resource listings, Stephen Ministers can be made available to offer healthy coping skills amid the great sea of loss that comes with being human.
I’ve seen grief as one of the many emotions swirling as we have adjusted to the unknowns of the COVID virus. Holy Week had new meaning in its reminder of how Jesus lived out His grief as He was separated from His friends, and the brief moment He felt the pain of separation from His Father as He was dying.
Anger, denial, bargaining, depression, and acceptance are common stages humans loop and spiral through, and Jesus was no different in his full experience of being human.
Grief can be tender to discuss in its fresh stages, and awkward to revisit at later points. It’s so highly personal—whether it’s loss of a job, good health, a way of life, or a loved one we grieve. But I want to remember losses have gifts, because life is full of loss and gift, and I need to recall Jesus’ promise of the blessings that accompany those who mourn.
I also want to advocate for doing the healthy “work of grief.”
- To stay connected with those we love
- To accept the sometimes slow, zig-zag process
- To notice the unexpected “God moments”
- To make peace with unresolved issues
- To embrace gratitude when possible
- To forgive ourselves and others for clumsy attempts to remove the pain
- To remain hopeful and open about the future.
And I want church families to be a healthy part of all that.
“Grief is piercingly particular,” poet and pastor Jan Richardson says in The Cure for Sorrow. “It fits itself to our habits and routines, our relationships, our priorities, what we have organized our lives around—all that makes us who we are in this world. Because of this, no one will know our grief as we do.
“There is something beautiful about this. Our particular grief reflects the particular wonder of what we had—a grace that visited our life in a way designed especially for us. Yet this very quality can compound our grief because it leaves us feeling so alone. One of grief’s most insidious aspects lies in how isolating it can become. This aspect of grief calls for intentionality from us: that we resist grief’s capacity to cut us off from those around us at the time we need them most.
“For all its particularity, (one) heartrending and hopeful reality of grief is that it is universal. It hardly needs saying that in our living, each of us will know loss. Though we will never know how it feels to live in someone else’s loss, grief has the capacity to connect us even across deep divides.”
Comforting God,
Whatever the cause of our grief, may we feel Your grace that already travels with us, and may we accept that we do not go alone. Amen.
Let’s connect.
If you’re interested in sharing stories of what God is doing in your life and in the world, we’d love to hear from you.
You have the skills and gifts we need to be a more complete version of the Christ-centered, Spirit-inspired, love-sharing community God is forming us to be. Let’s connect.