Grief - where did god go? 

            Everyone alive grieves.

            Children grieve: 

·                    their lost pet

·                    not being picked for the team or getting that choice part in the school play

·                    the friend’s birthday party they weren’t invited to or the family outing that got rained out. 

Teenagers grieve: 

·                    the boyfriend or girlfriend they just broke up with

·                    being made fun of at school

·                    not having a date for the big dance. 

And adults grieve: 

·                    lost jobs

·                    broken dreams

·                    wayward children

·                    the death of loved ones

·                    the loss of their youth

·                    the fact that they don’t stand a chance of living the life they dreamed of having when they were  young. 

Grief tells us many things.

It tells us that we were not created to live in this kind of world. We were created for a far better kind of life. Grief tells us that life hurts and tragedies are not the way things are supposed to be.

Since we grieve all losses, big (e.g., a diagnosis of terminal illness) or small (e.g., the family picnic we had planned for weeks that gets rained out), we know that our hearts will settle for nothing short of perfection. Grief tells us that our rightful place is in Paradise.

Grief tells us that this world is not our home. Jesus said (John 16:33): “In this world you will have trouble.” We hear that, and we want to shout, “No! If that’s all there is, I may as well check out now!” Why do our hearts respond like that? Because they’re telling us that this is not a place in which to settle down. We need to search for a better place.

So grief leads us to hope. It leads us to a deep desire and longing for a better place. A place where there is “no more death or mourning or crying or pain” (Revelation 21:4).

But grief is also a dangerous thing, especially for Christians. As our hearts break and cry out that we were made for better than this and that what we are enduring is not right and not fair and certainly not what a good God would want for us, we find ourselves in a crisis of faith. If God is good, and if He is our Father, why doesn’t He do something to end our suffering?

A young wife is diagnosed with terminal cancer well before she has lived the 70 years that the Bible promises (Psalm 90:10).[1] Prayers are offered to the God who calls Himself the God who heals us. She is not healed. Prayers are then offered that God would comfort the family and give them the peace “which transcends all understanding” (Philippians 4:7).[2] They remain uncomforted, angry and despairing.

Ever so quietly, a question surfaces in hearts that few Christians dare to express. What good is God? He promises but doesn’t deliver. How can He say He loves me when He refuses to do what I know any of my loved ones would do for me if they could? I’m told that I should trust God and love Him with all my heart. But how can I love Him when I don’t much like Him right now, when I can’t for the life of me figure Him out, and when He seems to have turned His back on me. What kind of Father treats His children the way God is treating me?

For those Christians who grieve, their fellow Christians are not always a help. In fact, the Christian community can be a dangerous place where your world unravels.

Initially, there is loads of love and good deeds on your behalf. But then, two attitudes can surface.

The first is that you’re taking too long to heal. If you were really trusting God, you wouldn’t still be hurting this badly one month, two months, a year later. People disappear. When they pray for you, they pray that you’ll feel better soon, and they believe that God should have no problem accomplishing this in your life because, after all, you should be over it by now. So, with a little extra push from God, you should be free of grief in no time.

The second attitude is that there is a proper way to mourn. No one at church, when they ask how you are doing, wants to hear: “Since our daughter died, my husband and I fight constantly. We don’t know why we do that, but we do. I can’t pray because every time I think of our daughter, I just want to grab God by the throat and demand why He stood by and watched her die without doing a #!%-& thing. I’m angry and scared and hurt, and if one person tells me that all things are working for good, I’ll throttle them!”

And so church can become a place where the mourner has to pretend that things are better than they are. In this way, loneliness and rejection are added to the mountain of pain.

It’s easy to see that this is a dangerous crossroads. We know that it is at this point that some people abandon their faith. Oh, they may still go through the motions, but their hearts never rise in worship again. Others are more open in their abandonment of hope in God and are never seen in church again.

But there are also people who emerge from deep pain with a faith in God and a relationship with Him that others see and envy. What makes the difference at the crossroads of grief?

In my personal experience, our family came to a point of deep grief when a series of losses fell in quick succession. My husband fell into a very painful and disabling condition following a lightning strike. A close family member, who had struggled with depression for a number of years, attempted suicide. I became aware that I suffered with dissociative identity disorder as the condition unraveled and my mind began to shift among the various fractured pieces of itself. My Dad died, leaving us a grieving mother who now lives on her own and at a distance. Our daughter was diagnosed with a lump on her pancreas.

Into some of these things, the Lord brought healing. Our loved one is now free of depression. After months of ministry, the Lord finally and fully healed me of DID. Into others, he still hasn’t. My husband remains disabled. My mother still hates being alone. At the time of writing, the lump on the pancreas remained undiagnosed even after a CT scan.

I believe our journey into pain and grief is the normal journey of many Christians. We, too, struggled with God and with faith, and we found ourselves at the crossroads where we wondered if it was worth going on with God or not. But we successfully navigated the dark paths and the crossroads. This is our story. It contains some principles that will hopefully help another pilgrim on their journey through grief and beyond.

As trauma after trauma crashed in on our family, I began to feel like I was drowning in pain. I was sinking ever deeper and running out of energy to keep afloat. When you’re in that level of difficulty, you come to realize who your friends and supporters really are. We were deeply disappointed in the lack of contact by some whom we thought would surely be there for us if we never needed them. Others whom we wouldn’t have thought would care all that much suddenly appeared and shared our burden. So we struggled with disappointment and hope in our Christian brothers and sisters.

We struggled with God as well. We begged Him for relief, but none came. Instead, things got worse. We were angry. We had no quality of life as long as God would not answer our prayers. We badgered. We listened to sermons on how Jesus will heal everyone who comes in faith, and we beat God over the head with His own word, but still He did not budge. We called Him to account. How could He call Himself our Father and expect us to trust Him when He wouldn’t give us what the average sinner would give us if they could. If our kids were suffering like this, we would move heaven and earth to try to help them. He wasn’t even as good a parent as we were. Besides, what we were asking – healing and relief from the onslaught of evil – would cost Him nothing. That was easy for Him. So what was the big deal with coming through for us? My husband couldn’t even read the Bible and pray because his disability severely affected his thinking. We could not fathom a God who expected my husband to be a good Christian but wouldn’t heal Him enough to be able to do the kinds of things Christians do to stay good Christians.

After a while, church became an unsafe place to be. There were still a few compassionate souls who stuck with us. But they were very few. Our church was strongly teaching faith in physical healing at this time, and we heard words from the pulpit like: “If you’re not healed, maybe you don’t have enough faith, or maybe you have some hidden sin that needs to be dealt with first.” We also heard: “Who are you to be depressed? You have no right to be depressed.” Also: “If you’re in a desert place in your life, just praise God”. That last one is very hard to do when everything in you just wants to throttle God. Besides, I don’t see Jesus praising God just before the cross. He was crying and pleading and sweating blood. We weren’t yet sweating blood, but that agonized crying and pleading we knew very well.

My husband and I were infuriated at an “explanation” for our lack of healing that made us responsible for our misery and at the fact that these words were teaching a God who stubbornly refused to reveal our faith problems and our sin issues so we could deal with them and be healed. We disliked that God more than the one who simply refused for (we hoped) good reasons but wouldn’t explain Himself in any way that relieved our agony and confusion. To add to our problems, people at church couldn’t understand why my husband could not be a regular attender at meetings he was supposed to attend, and I was once taken to task for answering rather regularly for this man who many times couldn’t follow a simple conversation but was expected to speak without help to any question put to him.

For all that some people drew alongside us (and we are deeply thankful to God for them), the fact was that life kept throwing new traumas our way, and these few people could not keep us afloat. Then one day, it became apparent that my husband had lost hope. He was ready to pitch everything and die.

That was the last straw. I could not handle this one on top of everything else. I urged him to make an appointment with the doctor who had seen him through the worst portion of his disability. This man listened to us both, then said: “I am concerned about your quality of life. Some things are not about to change. Why don’t we work on the things that can be changed, like your loss of hope, focus on what makes your life worth living, and let what can’t be changed go?”

He was a brave man. He had told a suffering human being to learn to suffer and find his joy in other things. Find joy while your body hurts all over and your mind is in confusion. Sounds like telling a drowning man to enjoy the sunset while he flails around treading water. But something about it made sense. We just didn’t know what.

So God showed us a Scripture (Hebrews 13:5-6): “[A]nd be content with what you have, because God has said, ‘Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you.’ So we say with confidence, ‘The Lord is my helper; I will not be afraid.’” We were so far from contentment, we could not believe how far we had got until this Scripture reminded us of this simple principle - where you are right now, be content. It’s what my husband’s doctor had said. Focus on quality of life. Give up concentrating on what isn’t changing. Focus on what can be changed and on what gives you joy. In other words, relax.

So we came to God and said: “We haven’t a clue how to be content in the middle of so much pain. So if you want us content, you’ll need to make us content.” And with a glint of challenge in our eyes, we dared him to pick up the ball we’d dropped in His court and begin to play. His rules. But since He had made them, He’d better stick to them. If He wanted us to have contented hearts - in fact, commanded us to have contented hearts - then, since we had proved ourselves quite incapable of achieving that on our own, He had to be the one to make that happen.

And He did. To this day, we can’t tell you how. He just did. Our suffering hadn’t budged in the least. But we were finding a place within ourselves that was peaceful and content. We assumed that place was our spirit, where God lives in a Christian. We came to know where that place was, and began to be able to turn there at will and find God’s peace and contentment.

Then God showed us a bit more about this spiritual place within us. He showed us that His home is within us (John 14:23): “Jesus replied, ‘If anyone loves me, he will obey my teaching. My Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him.’” He also revealed that His temple is within us (1 Corinthians 6:19a): “Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit, who is in you, whom you have received from God?” And that His kingdom is within us (Luke 17:20b-21): “Jesus replied, ‘The kingdom of God does not come with your careful observation, nor will people say, “Here it is,” or “There it is,” because the kingdom of God is within you.’”

Those Scriptures were not new to us. They just fell into our understanding with new meaning. All the time we had been begging and pleading with God, we had been praying to God in heaven and expecting Him to answer from heaven. We had never learned to worship and to pray to God within us. But of all the places where God is (and He is everywhere at once), doesn’t it make sense that He is most accessible to us within our own hearts? So we began to spend more time turning within ourselves. Sometimes we would just sit, focused inside ourselves, trusting that we were in His presence and because of that, He was doing good by us. We talked little. We just were with God. Sort of like you are in those precious moments when you are snuggled together with your spouse or your child, and all is quiet and restful, and you know with every fibre of your being that you love and are loved by this person. That’s what it was like to just sit, turned in to where God was in our spirits. And as we did that, although our issues were still the same, we healed more and more in our emotions. We began to touch joy, but couldn’t tell you why. We were content and restful and at peace with life, with God and with ourselves.

We continued to deal with our inner healing and our faith issues the way we had dealt with our lack of contentment problem. We just tossed them God’s way and refused to worry about them after that. (If you want to see some journaling on one issue, read the entries, at the end of this article, on waking up one day to the fact that even though you’re a Christian, you really can’t get excited about going to heaven.) As we left things with Him, He went to work and changed our hearts in ways we would never have dreamed. To the point that today, with most of our problems as yet unresolved, our spirits are by and large in a good place. We have our days, but they are rare. We are quite content and upbeat, and we really do love and trust God. God did most of that work in secret. We can’t tell you how or what He did to pull us out of our despair and establish us in a place where we have significant quality of life. All we can tell you is what we did. We gave up fighting Him and trying to force out of Him what we wanted and thought we deserved. We decided that since we couldn’t change anything, and He wasn’t changing some things, then since He promises life to the full, He would have to be the One to make that happen. And He did. We also learned to turn to Him within our hearts and just rest in that place, trusting that being in His presence is itself healing and renewing. And that it has proved to be.

We have discovered some teachers who have assured us that this is a long-standing way of meeting with God and receiving blessing from Him. Some people from the 1600s understood the process very well. Gene Edwards has published a collection of their writings, which taught us more about how to live in the presence of the God within us. It is called “100 Days in the Secret Place”. Dr. Larry Crabb has an easy-to-read book called “Shattered Dreams”, which explains how suffering is for many, like us, the pathway into God’s presence, and what the journey into pain, and through it to God, looks like. Henri J.M. Nouwen has a wonderful collection of journal entries about a black time in his life that led him to a deeper spiritual life; it is called “The Inner Voice of Love”. And John Eldridge has several books that will guide you on a wonderful but sometimes painful journey into your own heart and into God’s heart: “Wild at Heart”, “The Journey of Desire” and “The Sacred Romance”. We were grateful to know that what we had discovered communing with God within us was something that Christians have always known and what godly, knowledgeable people are still teaching. We were not alone in our journey. Our church may not have understood, but we had the encouragement of respected Christians, through their books, that we were on a good path.

Then God gave us a wonderful opportunity - someone in deep pain who was willing to listen to what we had to say about meeting God within her own heart and give it a try. She is healing and drawing closer to God, just as we are.

Is our life perfect? No. Are we always on top of the world? No. Are we drowning in life’s difficulties? Far from it. We finally understand what Paul meant when he said (2 Corinthians 6): 

4  Rather, as servants of God we commend ourselves in every way: in great endurance; in troubles, hardships and distresses;
5  in beatings, imprisonments and riots; in hard work, sleepless nights and hunger;
6  in purity, understanding, patience and kindness; in the Holy Spirit and in sincere love;
7  in truthful speech and in the power of God; with weapons of righteousness in the right hand and in the left;
8  through glory and dishonor, bad report and good report; genuine, yet regarded as impostors;
9  known, yet regarded as unknown; dying, and yet we live on; beaten, and yet not killed;
10  sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; poor, yet making many rich; having nothing, and yet possessing everything. 

None of what Paul wrote, and none of what we are experiencing, makes any natural sense. When we are sad, we should be sad through and through. When we have nothing, we should feel destitute. When we are shunned, we should be angry or rejected. But Paul says that we can rejoice when we are sad, we can feel ourselves to be the richest people in the world when we are destitute, and we can know our glory when other people reject us. Why? Because God is in us, and as we connect with Him there in our spirit, we are connected with all His life, His hope, His endurance, His glory, His love. In this place, we experience what the Bible teaches (Ephesians 1:3): “Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in the heavenly realms with every spiritual blessing in Christ.” As Christians, we already have every spiritual blessing. It’s just that no one had told us where to go find them. Now my husband and I know. Now you know, too. And hopefully some of the reading material we have suggested will help if you have no one to guide you on your personal journey with the God within you.   

[Because of the deeply personal detail included in this paper, and at the author’s request, the author’s name has been withheld.] 

JOURNAL ENTRIES 

Day 1 

I was sitting quietly with God this morning, when Paradise came to mind – heaven. I was shocked to discover that I was not at all excited at the prospect. At first, I thought that the reason for my apathy was that I had to go for some fasting blood work and hadn’t had any coffee or breakfast. So I tried extra hard to push my brain to imagine all that heaven would be like. Still nothing. Not even a spark of interest.  

Now I was frustrated. I don’t want to be showing up at the best place in the universe, rolling my eyes and muttering “Whee-hah”. Nor do I want to spend eternity bored out of my mind. I mean, what is there about heaven that could possibly keep us interested for a billion years, let alone billions upon billions of years? 

I was baffled. So I turned to God and asked: “God, would You show me about heaven?” 

Day 2 

God hadn’t yet answered my question about heaven. So I started my time with Him in the way I tend to start these days when I’m wrestling with my own heart. I invited God into the problem. That’s actually a good Biblical prayer. The Bible says it this way (Psalm 139:23-24): “Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.” The way everlasting – that way ends up in heaven! Lord, You went away to prepare a place for me there (John 14:2-3),[3] and one day, You’ll come and take me there where You are. But I am reluctant to go. Why is that? Once again, I lobbed the ball into His court, wondering how He was going to play it. 

Day 3 

As I sat with God, a song we used to teach kids in Sunday School came to mind. It goes like this: 

I’m too young to march in the infantry,
Ride in the cavalry, shoot the artillery,
I’m too young to fly o’er the enemy,
But I’m in the Lord’s army. Yes, Sir! 

Now, why was I thinking about that when the question I had was: “Why don’t I want to go to heaven? It sure isn’t because the alternative is so attractive!” 

Then the light went on. God was giving me a revelation. And the revelation was this: “I’m in the Lord’s army. Yes, Sir!” 

God had exposed some deep place in my heart where I believe that heaven will be an eternity of being told what to do and hopping to it. Christians would describe it as “doing the Lord’s will”. Either way, it’s an eternity of always being on call. With no vacations. And since there’s no night in heaven (Revelation 21:25),[4] maybe even without breaks to sleep. With a boss who is everywhere, sees everything and knows everything – so no pretending to be busy while sneaking off to read a good book. 

Never-ending obedience. Whee-hah. Somehow that answer was very unsatisfying. Now I not only knew I wasn’t too fond of heaven, I also knew I wasn’t too fond of obedience either. God, what is wrong with me? 

Day 4 

The interesting thing about inviting God into a life problem is that He tends to want the whole thing. He’s not much into Band-aid solutions. He settles in for the long haul and doesn’t stop til the whole problem is in hand. 

First a realization. This was not a frivolous problem I had given over to God. Not believing in heaven as a wonderful place is a serious matter. Without a sure hope that you’re headed for something better, life becomes unbearable. I know. I used to be an existentialist – an honest one. An existentialist believes that there is no God and, since there is no God, life has no meaning – it is completely absurd. I say I was an honest existentialist because many people say they don’t believe in God, but they live something completely different. If there is no God – if what the evolutionists say is true, that life is just a freak accident of mutation – then I have no more ultimate value than anything else in creation. Killing me is of no more consequence than chopping down a tree or swatting a fly. I ended up in the only place where a person who honestly believes such things can end up – depressed. Life is hard enough without doing it depressed. Depressed people are amazing. Everything in them wants to give up, yet they keep on going. Often the people around them don’t even know they have run out of hope. Or have they? 

Maybe, just maybe, God has placed something in a deeper place in their hearts than depression goes, something that keeps them going. If so, what might that something be? 

Might it be this (Ecclesiastes 3:11): “He [God] has also set eternity in the hearts of men”. Might it be that, deep in the heart of even the most depressed person or the most honest existentialist is a knowledge of eternity that keeps us hoping and reaching for something better? 

Dang! I’m back to heaven. How on earth did I get through all those rambling thoughts back here? And why do I think God is chuckling to Himself at this point. 

Day 5 

I was back to that part of my heart that shrugs its shoulders in indifference at the thought of heaven because non-stop obedience sounds like one big bore. So I once more sat with God in my morning time and held my heart open to Him, knowing that heaven has got to be pretty impressive and I had to be missing something somewhere.  

What God next showed me really rocked my boat. I suddenly realized that in this same part of my heart that reacts badly to heaven, I feel the same way about being a Christian now – “non-stop obedience – Whee-hah”. I’m not sure if what follows is a back and forth between me and God, or the meanderings of my own mind, or divinely guided meanderings. But here is what followed. 

Is Christianity some kind of diving slavery where God spends His days saying “Jump”, and we say “how high”? 

But Jesus said (John 8:36): “So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed.” 

But the Bible also says to Christians (1 Corinthians 6:19-20): “You are not your own; you were bought at a price.” (Translation: God owns me lock, stock and barrel.) 

On the other hand, the Bible also says (2 Corinthians 9:7): “Each man should give what he has decided in his heart to give, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver.” (Translation: I don’t gotta do what I don’t wanna do.) 

But Jesus told a parable about Christians that went like this (Luke 17:7-10): “Suppose one of you had a servant plowing or looking after the sheep. Would he say to the servant when he comes in from the field, ‘Come along now and sit down to eat’? Would he not rather say, ‘Prepare my supper, get yourself ready and wait on me while I eat and drink; after that you may eat and drink’? Would he thank the servant because he did what he was told to do? So you also, when you have done everything you were told to do, should say, ‘We are unworthy servants; we have only done our duty.’” (Sounds like slavery to me.) 

Yet Jesus also said (John 15:15): “I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you.” 

I was starting to gain a lot of respect for what Adam and Eve must have gone through, trying to decide if staying with God was the best thing for them or not. Is Paradise really the best case scenario? Or is it just sanctified slavery? 

Except that the Bible says to those who choose God (1 Corinthians 7:12): “Everything is permissible for me.” What on earth does that mean? That’s not anything I’ve ever heard taught in church. 

Oh, God, my head hurts, and I am getting nowhere fast. (No one said resting in God was always a relaxing rest. Sometimes it’s more like two kindred spirits locked in a lover’s quarrel: “But you said . . .”, “But don’t forget that . . .”, “Yes but . . .”. No one is angry, but both sides are passionate to come to some kind of understanding that is satisfactory to them. Except that God and I never did.  

Day 6 

Time with God was quiet this morning. I didn’t bother Him any more about heaven, and He didn’t bother me. It was understood, of course, that my heart was unchanged and the ball was still in His court. 

I am reading a book about a man and a woman who accidentally find themselves together in an adventure. They are on the path of a contract killer. She is one of the targets of the contract. He has been the killer’s pursuer for years, ever since the killer took aim at a member of his family. She is an FBI analyst – extremely ill-prepared for the field, except for a big heart of courage and determination, which carries her far. He is former special ops. And yes, you guessed it, the two fall in love. But as they get close to their target, he has just one rule. She has to do exactly what he says to do – no questions, no arguments. Earlier in the book, that would have ignited this proud, independent lady. But at this point, she knows his heart of love for her as well as his expertise in the field. She buys in on his condition. 

I have lived long enough to know that a God who has no problem speaking to a prophet through a donkey (Number 22:22-34) has no problem speaking to me through anything in my life. Without addressing the issue of whether or not a Christian should be reading about cold-blooding killing for entertainment, I do have to say that God overlooked the moral argument and went straight for my heart. He dropped my burning problem about never-ending obedience to Him into the same context. 

God is also pursuing someone who is bent on stealing, killing and destroying (John 10:10)[5] – Satan. His bride (me) is part of that pursuit. I bring all my good qualities, but, as competent as I am (wink, wink, nod, nod), I don’t quite cut it in the field. But God is expert. So His one condition is that when He says to do something, I do it. If He says “Jump”, it is critical that I jump even if I don’t quite understand. But I do it because I know His heart of love for me, and I know His wisdom. 

That I can live with – lovers together on an adventure.  

Except for one thing. My life is basically go to work, look after my family, eat, sleep – pretty mundane stuff. Where’s the big adventure? 

Day 7 

It’s been quite a journey 

– giving God my broken dreams and unfulfilled desires, not knowing what He would do with them;
– wondering where my passion had gone and if I even wanted it back, given how often my hopes are disappointed;
– discovering fear under all the disappointment and, not knowing what else to do with it, handing it off to God;
– wondering if being an obedient Christian is really all that wonderful a way to live;
– wondering, if I am united to a passionate, exciting God, where the adventure is in my rather mundane life. 

In short, I have been tossing God questions and problems for days, not knowing what He would do with the whole mess. And, by yesterday, it was a mess. I wasn’t that excited about much of anything in my Christian walk. Then God made His move. 

This morning, as I sat down to spend some time with God, I read again about how my heart is the home of God (John 14:23),[6] the temple of God (1 Corinthians 3:16),[7] and the kingdom of God (Luke 17:20-21).[8] As I thought about that, I could feel that place in my heart. It felt like home, the place where I belong, and where I am perfectly content. I could feel God in that place, and it felt so wonderful, I wished I could freeze time forever.  

The closest I could maybe express what God shared with me of Himself is to say that it was the spiritual equivalent of what it feels like after making love with your life partner, the one you cherish above all others. You feel deeply satisfied, as if you have no unmet needs. Your mind is quiet and centred on the moment and the person with you. You are naked and vulnerable, yet supremely safe and warm. There is nothing you want to do and no other place you want to be. 

That’s what it was like to be with God this morning. And suddenly, all my frustrations and fears and questions didn’t matter. I had found what the Christian life is all about. God and me in love with one another. And I was content. Eternity isn’t unending obedience whether I’m in the mood or not. Eternity is unending love and goodness.