One of the best pieces of wisdom I ever heard was from a New Zealand pastor, Craig Vernall. He said it took his family three full years to overcome their grief when his daughter’s husband died tragically. It got me thinking about my own experience. It takes us much longer than we anticipate, and much longer than is convenient for others, to process our grief.
We want the pain to be dealt with, and we straddle two realities that cannot ever be reconciled: to have life back as it was and/or to have life be free of pain (comfortable) again. Cruel as it is, loss permits neither.
One thing the world does not understand is that we will need support for a lot longer than they are prepared to give it to us. Our grief is still there and just as prominent as ever when their memories of our loss are long gone. Many (though not all) employers are in this position where they just move on. They just want their worker back; they want them back to full productivity, and not assailed by panic attacks, full of brain fog, forever distracted within the burden of grief, and often questioning the purpose of life now.
The person who is grieving will not be themselves for a very long time. And the world needs to understand this.
So what do we do when our world doesn’t understand this, because whether our world needs to understand it or not, the sad reality is, our world more often than not won’t.
If it will take us the notional three years to overcome the situational days of sorrow and paralysis, where we will not be ourselves, and the world is ready to move on in a matter of months, we have a problem.
We will need to anticipate change, because we will experience the tragedy of betrayal. Whether our world sees this as justifiable or not, betrayal is our felt reality.
Our world will move on, and we inevitably will feel that we’ve been left behind. It’s just the way I’ve seen it work on so many occasions. It doesn’t mean all people will get it wrong. In fact, there’s a lot to be learned from those leaders and friends who understand grief to the point where they make the required allowances. These people, no doubt, are Kingdom thinkers, with compassion that joins the purposes of God to transcend worldly paradigms. They don’t have a productivity mindset, but they surpass this in the faith that journeying faithfully with us will produce beautiful results in the long run. Indeed, these faithful friends are procurers of healing for us in God’s holy name. They would rather stick with us through thick and thin than throw the baby out with the bathwater. I couldn’t write this if I hadn’t have experienced it myself.
But many have experienced the opposite, whereby there is no understanding about the grief, what it has cost, what it continues to cost over time, and the complexities borne in simply making life work. Too many people lose patience with those who are grieving, and they leave them behind, rather than graciously and generously carrying them forward with them.
Think about this for a moment. What if you who are not grieving were to commit yourself to carrying one grieving person forward with you who you’re in relationship with? What if you committed before God to never give up on them? What if you gently made allowances for the times they were incapable of producing what they had previously produced? Or are we too utilitarian for that? Would you commit to making extra time to seek to listen to them? Or simply to be with them. What might happen is that God could show you something about the divine nature as you journey with someone who, for no fault of their own, is bearing enormous pain.
Photo by Mateusz Stępień on Unsplash
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