What do you do when you hear bad news?  News from friends of death, illness, and loss seem to come at regular intervals throughout my week.  In those moments, I feel the sadness and the anger, and I pray for my friends — but then in the next moment, I have to move on to a task or responsibility that is calling my name.  It’s like I bookmark it to come back to it later, and later, it’ll pop back into my mind again but still I don’t know what to do with it.  And what I’ve done with it is not what I should’ve done with it.  It’s not that I’ve cursed the air or God, for that matter, when I’ve “bookmarked” the heartbreaking event, but in leaving the anguish truly untouched, I have left a wound inside and not given it the exposure it needs to heal.

The Bible teaches us how to process difficult events.  It’s those psalms of lament and the imprecatory psalms which cause a little embarrassment and confusion on a regular day but give us guidance for moments such as these.  The psalmists knew how to express their honest feelings of sorrow, doubt, confusion and anger towards God and towards the injustices of this world.  They didn’t hold back even their most appalling sentiments of anger (Psalm 137 has a  prime example of sentiments against an enemy, “Happy are those who seize your infants and dash them against the rocks.”).  They knew that God could handle their anger and their pain.  More than that, I learn from them one other very important lesson:  They took the time to reflect on their sorrow, and so should I.  No, not just reflect but to feel the sorrow and loss.  In facing it, I make space for God to speak.  I invite him to show up in that moment. 

I found this in one of my old journal entries:

June 4, 2002
“I prayed, ‘Lord God, I am so tired.  Please help me.’  As I was lying there feeling a dull ache on my insides, I felt him say to me, ‘My daughter, my little girl, I want to heal you.’  And then the words of Malachi, ‘But for you who revere my name, the sun of righteousness will rise with healing in its wings…’ (Mal. 4:2).  That’s not an “if…then” conditional statement.  It’s just a truth — a matter of course.”

I love that –

“My daughter, my little girl, I want to heal you.” 

“Stuck”

In my grief, I often saw myself at the bottom of a pit, all alone, stuck, and wanting to get above ground. 

My greatest breakthrough came when I realized that Jesus wasn’t standing above the pit, waiting for me to climb out, so that I can resume being a part of life.  He was down in the pit with me.  He was with me in my pain.

“Standing in the Pain”

Sometimes the pain can be so fierce, though, I have often chosen to distance myself from my pain.  I put all my pain in a room, close the door, and walk away.  The reality, though, is that even as I walk away, I can never really be free from it — not unless I press into the pain with Jesus.  A wound will not heal with a bandage stuck on it unless the wound has been cleansed.  Cleansing requires exposure.  And exposure takes courage.

As the one who grieves, this seems impossible.

But there is a door.  There is a room.
You don’t want to go in.  There is too much pain. 
But Jesus is there.  He’s already there. 
He will stand in the pain with you.

It really takes courage to walk into that room, but it helps me to remember that Jesus is already in there with arms outstretched to embrace me.  And even better.  He will take my hand and walk with me into that room where the pain has been hidden.

“A Good Friend”

Being a good friend means being the one who will take the other hand of the one grieving and help them to walk into that room and stand with them in their pain.  I have come to realize that, in that standing, I have to face my own pain.  I have to ask, How would I feel if I was experiencing this?  What would really comfort me now?  That reflection will lead me to remember my own pain again.  And in that remembering, I become the best friend I possibly can be.  But this is nothing near easy.  To be honest, I don’t want to face that pain again.  I’d rather pray for someone from a distance than engage so deeply with my heart.  But without engaging, without pressing into my own pain, I know I won’t be the only one who will miss out on what God is doing.

“Remembering”
Sometimes, part of grieving is simply remembering.  I remember you, my dear brother.  I remember how we used to run into each other across campus — Library Walk, Price Center, “Peterson Hill” — and stand and talk about life and God and how far along we were on our TMS verses.  When I pulled out my old verse card holder the other day, I remembered you and our conversations. 

“Cycling”
Remembering always leads me back through DABA.  No one ever told me that grieving goes through cycles.  I thought you just go through the Denial, Anger, Bargaining and end up at Acceptance, and then you move on with your life.  I didn’t realize that after acceptance, you may end up at denial all over again.  And you keep cycling through DABA as you journey along the path around the mountain of grief, going higher and higher.  I may experience denial again but I’m at a higher vantage point from the last time.  There is hope!

In remembering, I always find myself asking the “why” questions.  Eventually, I end up back at acceptance.  Acceptance and faith — faith that though I don’t understand, though I will never get all my whys answered — faith that I believe in a God who is good and loving — yes, absolutely good and absolutely loving, though I do not understand.

Driving away from church yesterday, Sam and I found ourselves discussing again how much we love our church.  Sometimes it’s something in the sermon, sometimes it’s a song during the time of worship, sometimes it’s a thought that God gives while we’re engaged with him there, sometimes it’s a testimony that somebody has shared… it happens because there’s a Presence there, and the space is conducive to an encounter with the living God.  We have been worshiping at Coast Vineyard for about a year and a half now, and though developing friendships there has been sadly slower than molasses, the work of regeneration in me has not.

Looking back now, it’s hard really to know how many years of wandering and woundedness I had been wallowing in.  For a long time, I was so tangled up by fears and hurt that I was incapable and undesirous of doing anything productive in the Kingdom.  Not even making and keeping friends.  But Abigail Van Buren once said, “A church should be a hospital for sinners, not a museum for saints,” and that is exactly how I would describe my experience at Coast.  It’s like I walked into a hospital two years ago and have been steadily healing and recovering ever since. 

I’m not sure how it happened — just that my heart has been in my hands, poised with an open invitation to God to, “Breakthrough in my life, breakthrough, like only You can do.”  “Sing over me, Jesus…sing your songs of healing over me.”  “Chains be broken, lives be healed…” (Please break the chains that hold me and heal my wounded heart.)  After making these songs my constant prayer over the course of these many months, God really did come to me — he really did break through into my life and bring about a significant amount of healing. 

And he continues to do so.  For as my friend, a therapist, often reminds me, “Grief is like a moving river.”  It really doesn’t ever end but ebbs and flows and moves in different directions at differing paces.  I’m thankful that as the river continues to move, so does the Spirit.  And healing does and can come.  There is a balm in Gilead!  There is a Physician there!  And he came to me.

In regard to my desire to live in faith and in freedom in 2010:  Fear and pain are intertwined for me, because I’ve allowed both to keep me from pursuing the things of God.  I need to leave as much of both behind as possible as we leave 2009, so I can move forward in faith and freedom in 2010.

Some notable pains have been ministry burnout in the past (which left the lingering fear that I will experience the searing pain of being burned again if I make commitments to serve), a best friend’s death (which left me reluctant to love and invest in lives for fear of losing again), another death of another good friend…

Healing from pain is a continual process, and the reality is that there’s never really an end to certain kinds of pains.  Those pains are the falling-on-my-knees, flat on my face with hands open, desperate to receive from God kind — the kind where there are rivers of tears and pages of journaling.  But even so, after miles of rivers have passed, you do arrive at a point where you have received from God sufficient enough for you to move on.  As CS Lewis observed, it’s like the warming of a room or the coming of daylight.  You don’t really recognize the progress of your healing, the light or the warmth until it’s already been going on for awhile.  There’s still much giving over to God that needs to be done, of which I want to give over as much as possible before the close of this year; but, with the end of this year, I want to sing, “it’s time I started dancing over all these graves “.  It’s time I turn in my resignation for my career of being a wounded victim, a paralytic, and an invalid.  It’s time to walk, leap and dance.  In freedom.

“He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds.”  Psalm 147:3  Won’t He heal my wounds?  v. 8, “…He supplies the earth with rain and makes grass grow on the hills.”  It strikes me as I read this that without rain, there’d be no grass.  Most people dread the dreariness of rain — but without it, new life would not be able to leap forth.  And so I cry out to God:  when will there be new life that will leap forth from my wounds?  There is an aching and an agony – my wounds feel open and exposed.  Will they ever be bound up?  Is there no balm in Gilead?  Is there no physician there?  (Jer 8:22)  Why has my Physician not yet come?  I cry out to God in sheer desperation.  I can only have healing if He comes — if His Spirit falls on me.

In response to a comment to my entry “Unresolved Disappointments“

Commenter wrote:  “mary ann – i’ve been dwelling on the same thing and have wondered how
to “get over this,” esp. during lent.  anyway, if you have more
thoughts on this, please share!!!”  –llai

Hi llai, I don’t know really, but I think the only way to ‘get over this’ is to press into it –
actively, pro-actively, unrelentingly — to consciously choose over and
over again to pursue God and to pursue the unresolved things that are painful –
to ask, “Lord, please show me the things in my life that are keeping me
from you” and to wait for an answer, and once you hear the answer, to
press into the pain of it and to ask God’s perspective in it so that
all the “Why, God!!”s are answered, so that He can bind up your wounds
and you can move forward in faith and trust in Him (which you are able to
do because He has given you His perspective in those matters).

Tonight I am up because I realized that there is a tear in my PJ
bottoms.  I’ve worn it so many times that it’s worn down to a nice
hole.  These pants are actually a pair of Adidas active-wear pants –
Navy blue — from my friend Julie.  She had thrown them in the dryer
one too many times and they had shrunken and gotten to be too small for
her, so she had given them to me.  I’ve worn them ever since because
they are so comfortable — and after she passed away, they have been a
nice reminder to me of her.  But when I realized there was a tear in my
pants, I started thinking that maybe I would have to replace them
soon… and realizing that I didn’t want to replace them, because then what will
I have to remind me of her? And then I thought of how silly she would
think me to keep a pair of worn Adidas pants to remind me of her.  And
then I started wondering if I could ask her family for something else
of hers so that I could remember her by and thought how awkward and
difficult that would be.  And I started thinking how much I really
missed her… and began to wonder if I have ever gotten over the fact
that God took her away so suddenly because suddenly my heart aches so
much and my stomach feels like it’s been punched and a headache has
come out of nowhere.  And then I wonder if I am angry with God?  And if
not, then have I chosen to hold all my friends at arm’s length so as
not to feel this kind of loss again?  And I wonder if I keep God at a
distance in the same way.  And these thoughts cause me to run to Him
with my arms outstretched and my heart in my hands… Lord,
I know only you know what to do with this ache and only you can bind my
wounds.  I don’t know why you took her.  It’s not fair, Lord.  Didn’t
you give her so many wonderful dreams?  There were so many things you
could’ve used her for.  And then I realize that He had already
used her for so many wonderful things, and by His sovereign scope of things, she
was done.  Her work here was done…. and so He took her away from this
world of trouble and pain — and that was His gift to
her!  And I am now standing there in front of His throne realizing that I
will never understand Him — never, never, never — understand or grasp
Him fully.  He is God.  His ways are just and right.  And I am just
me.  But I am just me — closer to Him now because I am daring to press into the pain to gain His perspective so that I can walk with Him again…

Sometimes grief just grips you so badly.  Feels like a rush of wind with the weight of the world behind it.  Feels like an Amtrak barreling down the track at unstoppable speed.  Feels like bricks falling on my lungs.  And rivers running from my eyes. 

This is the TRIBUTE I shared with everyone at Julie’s Memorial Service:

I met Julie my junior year of college.  Someone from Harvest fellowship introduced us after class.  I think I just knew right from the start that we were meant to be life-long friends because a week later when I saw her reading a Richard Foster book at the Price Center in the middle of UCSD campus, I just plopped myself down next to her and began to talk to her.  There was just something about her.  We clicked right away.

My memories of college consist of going over to her apartment almost every afternoon after classes were over.  We’d spend hours reading books together.  We would lay on opposite sides of the bed reading our own books and come up for air every once in awhile to share with each other what we were reading.  We called it our ROTB time:  Reading On the Bed time.  I can’t even tell you how many times she read Anne of Green Gables.  But come to think of it, that was the perfect book.  She was dreamy and idealistic, and just like Anne Shirley, her entrance into someone’s life was like sunshine on an overcast day, she brought light to gloom and warmth to cold.  Every person’s life became richer for having met her.    

Other memories I had with Julie:

- Running together and finding that we both ran exactly the way we lived life.  She would lag behind at times but then there’d be these sudden bursts of energy and passion.  Meanwhile, I would keep on going at a steady pace.

- Jumping into the car at times not knowing where we were going but knowing that we’d have an adventure doing it.

- …which always inevitably led to us getting lost together.

- Rollarblading together around her college apartment complex and whooping with so many shouts of exhilaration that the management put up signs the next week that “rollarblading and skateboarding was prohibited on these premises”  oops.

- Playing guitar and worshiping God at the top of our lungs with all of our hearts even though neither of us knew how to play guitar and, well, we were a little off key. 

In this last year, my favorite memories with Julie have to do with spending a whole afternoon at Starbucks or Barnes & Noble – I loved this.  We would go in, sit down, take out all our books, our journals and our Bible, look down for five seconds at our separate book or journal and then look up at each other and talk.  We’d talk for hours about everything.  Conversations with Julie felt like walking into a room and finding another door to another room and then another room and another room.  It would just get deeper and deeper and by the time we got to the end we didn’t know where we had started from.  But it was always so satisfying because we would cover all our worries and fears, our dreams and our wishes, our questions and our doubts and everything else in between.  We’d argue about things, hashing through things, looking at different issues from every angle and come to no conclusion.  But God was always at the center of it all.  And that’s what made it so deeply satisfying.  Because no matter what, no matter what, we both believed that it’s only in Him, it’s only in Jesus, that we have true life.  We may not understand everything, we may not have all the answers right now, but if we could just place our lives into His hands, then He will take care of it all.  That was the Reality with which Julie staked her life on.

And that’s what drove her.  For as long as I have known her, we have always talked about God and missions.  That’s because we both knew that you can’t talk about God without talking about missions, because the truth is, God loves the WHOLE world.  He loves every single person in the world – me and YOU, the richest person in the world and the poorest.  Julie had a heart for the poor, the truly lost and the totally broken.  She was passionate about helping people who were really hurting – those who had been beaten, cheated or abused.  I think it was because she understood brokenness in a way that most of us do not.  She knew what it was like to be broken AND she also knew what it was like to be made whole by Jesus.  And that’s what she wanted the whole world to know.

I am inspired by Julie.  I am inspired by how she was able to see everyone the way that God sees them.  And I am inspired by the way that she went out of her way to love them.  On July 16^th, Julie wrote, “If someone can tell me that I’ve encouraged them further on in the Lord, that will be my highest compliment.”  Well, I want to proclaim publicly today that Julie has encouraged me and inspired me on in the Lord in ways that I don’t know how to express.  She ran the race well and finished well, and now I too want to finish my journey just as well as she did. 

I just can’t  handle Julie‘s death alone.  Whenever I think of the memorial service and having to prepare for the “remembrance” sharing, I just want to run away.  My heart still aches from the loss of her and my eyes still sting at the thought of her… Oh Lord, help me bury my heart in you, my pounding fists, my longing for comfort – for you to please wrap your big strong arms around me to tell me everything will be ok – that you’ll quietly hold me, letting me cry rather than telling me to stop because “a believer shouldn’t cry like that as if there were no hope”, but grief must go through its full cycles, and, Lord, you know that.  Will you comfort me?  I’m still hurting.  And everyday, I feel it differently.  Everyday, I remember something different.  How come it hurts so badly, Lord?  Even while knowing she’s with you.  I can rejoice most of the day and yet there are these moments where it still hurts so badly I can hardly breathe.  Time passed hasn’t lessened the pain.  Lord, only you can stand with me in this pain.  Please stand with me.  I need you, Lord, I need you.

When does healing come?  When does comfort come?

Sorrow and grief feels a bit like being cold all the time – as if I was standing on the Golden Gate Bridge in the dead of winter with the icy strong winds slapping me in the face.  I keep longing for a big warm blanket (fresh out of the dryer) to wrap around my heart.  It feels so cold.

Sorrow and grief feels like a heavy sack, filled beyond its capacity.  It’s pulled down, sagging and dragging.  It’s so heavy full of something – I’m not quite sure what it is in words but it seems to me as though it should break soon and let loose a mess that could never be mopped up.

Sorrow and grief feels like pandemonium has broken out, right inside my insides.  There’s wildness, there’s frenzy, there’s a clamor of cacophony.  There’s so much chaos inside, I wonder if things could possibly come to order.

Sorrow and grief feels like a pre-schooler – so fearful of life beyond the safety of what has always been known (the home) that the only response is to curl up in a ball and weep.  Softly, quietly, vulnerably.

Sorrow and grief feels like a sigh – long and slow, exhaled after a deeep breath is taken in.  Deep breaths and yet I never feel like I’m getting enough air.

Sorrow and grief feels like loneliness.  I’m standing on top of some hill in the dark with the bold moon shining down on me and crickets are chirping and there’s not a soul in sight.  I feel so lonely.

Sorrow and grief – what is this thing I’ve never known before that keeps my eyes wet with tears?  It’s sharp and acute… and drives me to the only One who has ever known true grief before.  And You knew it so well, oh Lord, when You lost Your only Son.  Help me live in my grief in light of Your grief that I may truly live again – not in sorrow and grief but in the victory of the empty tomb.  Help me, Lord.  I pray that you would help me.

“I say to God my Rock, ‘Why have you forgotten me?  Why must I go about mourning, oppressed by the enemy?’” 

but… “Why are you so downcast, O my soul?  Why so disturbed within me?  Put your hope in God, for I will yet praise Him, my Savior and my God.”

“Send forth your light and your truth, let them guide me, let them bring me to your holy mountain, to the place where you dwell.  Then will I go to the altar of God, to God, my joy and my delight.  I will praise you with the harp, O God, my God.”  (Psalm 42 and 43)