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God’s Comfort in our Grief
While every person’s experience of grief is unique and the process of healing is seldom neat or straightforward, I felt the steps that I had heard that day were ones I wanted to hold onto and seek God for the strength to take when my turn eventually comes.
I had a friend whose prayers made me uncomfortable. Listening to them praying often made me feel like I had walked in on an argument between two close friends. They’d say things like, “I’m pretty mad at you right now, Lord,” and, “I get so frustrated wondering what on earth you’re doing!” The emotions were raw and unfiltered. There was anger, impatience, sadness and pain. And when there was joy and gratefulness, you knew it was coming from the heart. Their prayers made mine feel very polite and superficial, in comparison. They made me question the depth of my prayers and the freedom I felt in my relationship with God. While this kind of prayer has a time and a place, if we never learn to talk to God honestly about the depths of what we think and feel, then we’ve probably never really learned to pray. There are several reasons that God seems to prefer honest prayers to polite ones.
More and more people are choosing direct cremation without any kind of ceremony to mark the passing from life to death. It’s like we want to maintain the illusion of invincibility and don’t want anything to ruin the dream. Even when we do have funerals, the goal seems be all about celebration without any recognition that death is our “enemy” (1 Corinthians 15:26) and that the passing of our loved one is a painful separation. By failing to mourn, the pain of grief remains unresolved and can lead to deeper issues down the road. A funeral doesn’t bring closure to a mourner’s grief, but it does create what Dr. Wolfelt call a “meaningful beginning” where healing can begin. To do that, he says that funerals should seek to accomplish six things. Let me explain them.
When it comes to helping a grieving friend, nobody wants to say the wrong thing. Nobody wants to make it worse. And the fact is that almost nobody feels confident in navigating such delicate issues. I want to share some of the things I learned from Roslyn Crichton’s booklet, “How to Help Grieving People.”
You can’t short-circuit the process of grief and mourning. To get to the other side, you have to go through it. Otherwise, grief has a way of following you.
With one of our church members in palliative care right now, I’ve spent a lot of time there in recent days. The view of life from the palliative care wing changes you. It reorients you to what life is really all about. Stephen Covey became famous for telling people to “begin with the end in mind.” We’re so isolated from opportunities to consider the end of our lives, though, that we seldom let it deeply affect us. It’s a perspective I don’t want to lose, and yet if I don’t pause to reflect on it, I know that I probably will. Let me share a few of the lessons.
When David Bowie passed away, according to his wishes he had a “direct cremation” without any funeral service. He was just gone without an opportunity even for family to mourn his loss. Are funerals outdated traditions? Should we replace them with happier substitutes? Or maybe just do away with them altogether?
