Suffering and the Heart of God: How Trauma Destroys and Christ Restores by Langberg Diane

Author:Langberg, Diane [Inconnu(e)]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2015-09-14T01:00:00+00:00

chapter 11

The Many Faces of Grief

How many of us have experienced grief? It is a universal human experience. All of us go through it many times in our lives. Since we cannot escape it, let us consider what it is and how a journey through grief might look. If you are going on a journey, it is better if you know something of the way: Where am I going? What will I experience? Where might I lodge? How long will it take? And what do I need to help me along the way?

Grief is the result of some kind of death. Death is the unwanted guest in human life. We do not want it; we often fear it; we cannot command it; and we hate our helplessness. Some of us work hard to ignore it. We do not want to talk about it. We work hard so we do not have to face its slow destruction of our physical beings. And yet it relentlessly comes into our lives and the lives of those we love. The experience is universal. It cuts across gender lines, racial lines, cultural lines, national lines, economic lines, and age groups. None of us can escape an encounter with this uninvited guest whose name is Death.

Death is not something we only encounter at the end of our lives, is it? We meet it hundreds of times in a lifetime. We meet it in every ending: the death of a dream, the end of a relationship or a job, the loss of a child who leaves home, a chronic illness, a rape, an abuse, and in war. We even meet death in times of joy—a wedding, the birth of a child, a graduation—all times of great joy, yet they carry within them the death of something else, the nature of a relationship or a season of life.

We often cope by distancing ourselves from this uninvited guest. Our own death is far away. We define death as narrowly as possible in efforts to deny its persistent presence. We consider only our physical end as death so all the little deaths that occur between here and there can be called something else. Yet, if the truth is told, you and I are involved in a continuing process of dealing with death while we still live. That means we are often grieving.

Now none of us likes grieving. It hurts. We want to avoid it. We see it as an enemy. However, let us be clear today as we consider this difficult subject: Grief is not our enemy. We are faced with a formidable foe, but that foe is not grief; it is death itself. Grief is not our enemy. It hurts; the pain can be overwhelming. But grief is also a sign of life and healing and mending. Anything that is of life is not an enemy. We must be careful in our thinking to separate out death from grief. If we do not, we will seriously misunderstand what it

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.