Aug 29, 2020
Everyday Theology
Applications for Questions of the Faith
By Pastor Phil Lawton
A Christian Response to a Grieving Country
In 1969, a woman by the name of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross wrote a book called On Death and Dying. In the book she talked about what she called the stages of grief. She argued that as a terminally ill patient grows closer to death their grief over that death follows five stages: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance. These stages have become well-known and have been applied to all forms of grief, not just grief over death.
Some of you may be wondering why I am talking about the stages of grief. The stages that I just talked about can be seen all over our country and especially on social media. Our country is grieving. Perhaps that is not a terribly monumental realization for you. Of course,
our country is grieving, you think. People are dying. Businesses are closing forever. People don’t know how they are going to pay rent or buy food. Images of civil unrest are on the news—or right outside our living room window. I don’t bring up the stages of grief to simply point out that our country is grieving. I bring them up because these stages have implications for understanding what we are feeling and for our interactions with others as they grieve.
It’s Normal to Feel
My work as a chaplain puts me in contact with a lot of grieving people. Thinking about their grief in these stages is helpful. I have seen people go through all five stages in a matter of minutes. More often I have seen people cycle through the center three stages ad infinitum. We get stuck. We are angry that our loved one is dying. Why them? Why not someone who deserves to die? We try and bargain with the doctors or God. Isn’t there something else that can be done? What about this treatment? God, can’t you heal them? We get depressed about the future. How am I going to live when they are not around? And then we get angry again that nothing seems to be working.
What I find true about this process in others and even my own life is that we often don’t realize that we are feeling these things. We don’t recognize that we are angry. Or when we do, we think that we shouldn’t and so we explain it away. Maybe we don’t feel like we have a right to be depressed, so we hide it from others. Chaplaincy has taught me two things about this. First, it is normal to have these feelings. Let me say that again. Christian, it is a normal human response to be angry and depressed. Don’t believe me? Take a look
at the book of Lamentations. Read the story of Job. Meditate on Psalm 88. Remember Jesus’ response when He went to the grave of Lazarus (John 11:1-43).
Second, unless we allow ourselves to feel these things, we are never going to move past them to acceptance. I had an Old Testament professor who talked about his first pastorate. He was new to the pastorate and so he wanted to get to know the members of his church. He noticed one day that there was a couple who had stopped coming to church before he got there and hadn’t been there in the months that he was. He went to visit this couple. He soon found out that they had lost an infant child. When they talked about it, they told him that they were angry at God. His response was to ask if they wanted to go out back and shout at God. They were shocked. No one had ever told them that they could do that. They went out back and released their anger at God. When they got back inside, they thanked him. They started coming back to church that weekend.
Advocating for Yourself
When we ignore our feelings of grief, we become volatile and unpredictable. If we are unaware that we have these feelings we can lash out for seemingly no reason. We may not even know why we are mad. If we don’t recognize that it is because of grief we can mischaracterize other people and think that we are justifiably mad at something they did—when the reality is that our anger has little to do with them. This pushes away people and adds to the feelings of isolation we often have when grieving.
We can also isolate ourselves from others if we knowingly ignore our feelings of grief. When we think that we shouldn’t be depressed we often hide it. This won’t make the depression go away, but what it will do is make us feel even more alone. This is what makes support groups so effective. They provide a place where you know people understand your pain. You are able to share your grief with them and in doing so feel less alone. This concept applies to every relationship. If you never express how you feel, you can’t expect others to know what to do. Sometimes when we grieve, we may not know what we need, but even expressing that we are grieving can be enough for others to sit with us in our grief.
Help is Listening not Talking
I started by talking about our own grief because I think that currently we are all dealing with it—and for us to help others, we need to understand first-hand what is going on with them. Often when we encounter others’ grief, we get paralyzed. We don’t know what to do, so we minimize it. We think that we are doing this to help the person, but really, we are trying to make ourselves feel better about their pain. I want to let you in on a secret. It’s not your responsibility to make them feel better. Let me say that again. Christian, you cannot force, coerce, reason, or otherwise cause someone to stop grieving. That’s God’s job not yours. It wasn’t Job’s friends who brought him out of depression, it was an encounter with the Almighty.
Now Job’s friends did do something right. They sat with him. Don’t ever underestimate the power of presence. My job as a chaplain consists mostly of listening. I try not to talk that much. Those of you who know me understand how hard that is for me sometimes. But I continue to do it, because I know what these people need is an ear to listen and a shoulder to cry on. My job is not to solve their problem, it is to point them to the One who will ultimately wipe away every tear (Revelation 21:4).
It’s Not About You
When you spend time with enough grieving people you are inevitably going to get something thrown at you. Most times it’s just insults, but every once in a while, it’s fine china. Don’t take this personally. Its not really about you. Remember how when we grieve, we get angry and sometimes we don’t recognize it? Yeah, that’s why things get thrown at you. That anger is hiding the grief they really feel. If you leave, all you do is reinforce the loneliness they feel inside. I’m not telling you to put yourself in unsafe situations, but I am saying that you often need a tough skin to walk with someone in their grief. That and a whole cross full of grace.
See, here is the hidden truth of this article. Church, we are not doing great in the grace department. At a time when the country needs Jesus the most, we have failed to show Him. I get it. It’s not easy to show grace to people who are constantly angry. And when you add that we are dealing with grief ourselves, it makes the whole situation messy. But here is the beautiful thing. It’s not about us. Their anger may be directed at us, but it’s not about us. Helping them with their grief is not about us either. Its about showing them Jesus. And our own grief doesn’t have to just be our own. We serve a God who understands what it means to be human (Hebrews 4:14-16). Our God was homeless (Matthew 8:18-22), rejected by His friends (Luke 22:54-62), and felt abandoned by the Father (Matthew 27:45-46).
The truth is Jesus understands our grief. What this means is that we can take any and all pain to Him. It also means that the best person to understand someone else’s pain is Jesus. God chooses to use us to point grieving people to Himself. When we encounter grieving people—and there are a lot right now—we need to have the same love, grace, and compassion of Jesus. Because ultimately it is Jesus, and not us, who will bring them through their grief into acceptance.
