Author: melissamagdsick

Music as a Ministry

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Two years ago, one of the places I was eagerly serving in our church was our music ministry. I had been involved for almost eight years. While some call music ministry worship, I will use the term “worship” more broadly, as worship entails more than singing. I played keys, sang occasionally, and was learning guitar. I loved it. Whether on stage or in a pew, I would eagerly sing the songs in our repertoire. My heart agreed with the words. Music has been a part of me as long as I can remember, and my kids will attest that I believe life is a musical.

Then my mom got sick. Diagnosed with stage 4 cancer, and after a traumatic five months of treatment with me as her primary caregiver, she was dead. And my life as I knew it shattered.

During that time, I experienced a jarring shift. All of a sudden, everything in my life was different. With music ministry in particular, I could not sing anymore. My voice was physically capable; my heart was not. At church, the music became shallow. I had listened to Christian radio before. I could not do it anymore. My heart was ruptured. Emotionally, physically, spiritually I was bleeding out. And none of the songs I heard on Sundays or in the car echoed my agonized cries for God.

“Where are you? Why did you let Mom suffer so much? We obeyed you and you crushed our family. I’m crying every hour, every day. I can’t sleep. The trauma wakes me up, or sometimes the grief. My body feels it, and is wasting away. I don’t want to eat. If you love me, why did you give me this? If you love me and can give us so much suffering, what else are you going to give me? I’m left alone. No one understands. I am surrounded by miserable comforters. If life is full of this much sorrow and ugliness, I don’t know that I want to keep living it. I am so angry! How could you take her away when there was so much more life to live? We need her here, God. How much longer are you going to beat us down? This isn’t getting better. The burden is still so heavy. How much longer do we have to struggle?”

These are just a few of the honest heart cries I was aching to express. But since these cries were not present in Christian music, circles, teachings, or relationships, I thought they were wrong. They must mean I have weak faith. Since I was so rocked by the season, I must be doing something wrong. Strong faith in God means being able to sing with confidence about God’s goodness, and being able to rejoice during my loss. Right?

Wrong. I was dead wrong. And thank God he didn’t leave me there. He gave me guides: grieving friends & authors, grieving artists, and most of all, his Word. God used all of these guides to right my incomplete theology I had picked up from Christian culture about grief. I learned how God also feels incredibly strong emotions. He laments and grieves. He also understand the condition of the fallen human heart and invites our cries, our theologically incorrect anguish, our anger, our broken hearts. Unlike so much of our culture, he wants it. He wants the ugly. He wants us to bring him all of it. He draws near to the brokenhearted. That is where transformation begins. That is how faith deepens. The darkest parts of our lives is where God’s greatest work happens.

In the book of Psalms, I heard my cries. I remember the first time reading Psalm 6 after Mom died, and bursting into tears in the first few verses. The writer’s cries were my cries. I wasn’t alone. I wasn’t crazy. The relief was profound, and the comfort in those tears was real. God saw me. He heard. And he knew I needed to cry my cries to him.

Seeing God lament to Jeremiah was another profound moment to me. God hurts. He hurts deeply. More deeply than I was ever aware before. So if God hurts, and expresses it, and he is without sin, so may I hurt and express it, though I will certainly not be without sin until my remaking is complete. I could also mention Habakkuk, Job, David, Ezekiel, Jesus in the New Testament, and others. Our Bible is filled with suffering and the human response to it. Should not our music also be?

Tim Keller preached multiple sermons that freed me up to be raw and unfiltered in my cries to God. “Praying Our Anger,” “Praying Our Doubts”, “Praying our Tears” and “Praying Our Fears” gave me more Scriptural evidence that God wants all of me. Here are just a few of the honest cries from the Bible that echoed my bleeding heart and moved me toward God in my grief:

  • “He has walled me about so that I cannot escape; he has made my chains heavy; though I call and cry for help, he shuts out my prayer; he has blocked my ways with blocks of stones; he has made my paths crooked.” Lamentations 3:7-9
  • “I did not sit in the company of revelers, nor did I rejoice; I sat alone, because your hand was upon me, for you had filled me with indignation. Why is my pain unceasing, my wound incurable, refusing to be healed? Will you be to me like a deceitful brook, like waters that fail?” Jeremiah 15:17-18.
  • “I am weary with my moaning; every night I flood my bed with tears; I drench my couch with my weeping. My eye wastes away because of grief; it grows weak because of all my foes.” Psalm 6: 6-7
  • “In the day of my trouble I seek the Lord; in the night my hand is stretched out without wearying; my soul refuses to be comforted. When I remember God, I moan; when I meditate, my spirit faints. You hold my eyelids open; I am so troubled that I cannot speak. I consider the days of old, the years long ago. I said, “let me remember my song in the night, let me meditate in my heart.” Then my spirit made a diligent search: “Will the Lord spurn forever, and never again be favorable? Has his steadfast love forever ceased? Are his promises at an end for all time? Has God forgotten to be gracious? Has he in anger shut up his compassion?” Psalm 77:4-9

There are many more, but just to give you an idea of what my soul was and still is crying. These aren’t what we tend to hear on Sundays or put on our wall hangings, are they? Yet they are and should be a precious and vital part of our diet as Christians.

One pastor I knew noted the importance of music ministry. He said that people don’t leave a Sunday service reciting the sermon; they leave singing the worship songs. This is why music ministry is crucial to theological formation. Much of what we believe is caught, not taught. Unfortunately, the vast majority of Christian music unintentionally teaches an incomplete, shallow theology. It teaches a praise-heavy response to God, which feels like a diet of cotton candy to a deeply grieving person. It’s shallow. From my new perspective, these primarily positive songs are true of God. For example, yes, God is a way-maker and miracle worker, a promise-keeper and light in the darkness. Yes, he is our living hope. But if that is all we sing, we give no direction or example to the bleeding heart of how they should approach God in their sorrow. We imply instead that they should be able to sing these types of songs in their pain, and if they can’t, the problem is with them. Positive praise without the devastating sorrow is unbalanced, and unrealistic. Music ministry in churches must include lament in the same language as the Bible does. It is striking that so much of Israel’s songbook was made up of laments. Cries to God in their anguish, in the injustice, in their deserved punishment, in their undeserved sorrow. We need songs that also say things like, “How long? Why have you crushed me? Where is your hand, because I don’t see it?”

It is not only the songs. It is the leaders. Worship leaders need to not only know how to praise but how to mourn. If not, they will continually put Christian bows on painful realities that instead need the grace of lament. Even if a church begins to introduce lament into their liturgies, if the worship leaders do not know the sacredness and importance of lament, they will naturally lighten what needs to be weighty, or cheer those who need to be sad. This brings unintentional harm to the already wounded. If worship leaders don’t lament, they must first and most importantly admit they don’t know how to lament. I firmly believe one can learn how to do so. They must humble themselves to listen to those who have wrestled with God in their unbearable pain. They must study what God says about lament, perhaps starting with Lamentations and Psalms. They must begin to ask the hard questions and be willing to be uncomfortable. They must learn to wrestle with God. They must be okay with the process of grief, and the undone nature of struggle. They must listen to the lessons and the deepness of faith God gives them through their own wrestling. In short, they must be willing to grow more like Christ. As the end of Romans 8:17 says, “…provided we suffer with him in order that we may also be glorified with him.”

Once I began to learn this language of lament, life started showing up. I could see God at work. Most importantly, I knew his presence with me. He drew near when others shied away. He let me be messy without slapping a theologically correct answer on my aching heart. It’s not a science. God does not operate based on a formula. My experience will be different from another’s experience with God due to the uniqueness of who we are as people. Yet I believe the constancy that is true for all of us is that when we open the door to grief and pain, and learn to direct it to God, he meets us and does the miracle of bringing life from death. I’m still grieving. I still can’t sing on Sunday mornings. I still ask “why”. I still wrestle with God. I will probably never be done this side of eternity. I don’t have all the answers. But I have him. Lament to God in my life-shattering sorrow has brought me more of God. More presence. Deeper faith. More intentionality with life. More empathy and compassion for the hurting. More anger with the sin and brokenness around me. More pain, yes. And praise Jesus, more glory.

Easter for the Grieving

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It’s almost Easter. Holy Week, as the liturgical calendar calls it. Christmas and Easter: the main two holidays Christians make much of. The Christian church mourns on Friday for the cross, the death of Jesus, and how our sins put him there. Then they rejoice on Sunday because the grave is empty and Jesus is alive. “He is risen!” they will shout tomorrow. “He is risen indeed,” will be the reply.

I firmly believe that. I’ve participated in an Easter service as long as I can remember. But this year is different. No one chooses when God allows the hammer to fall on your life and everything you knew is shattered. The hammer fell for me when Mom got cancer and died. I will never be the same. While I’m still figuring out who I am, I can say with certainty that I see Easter from a new perspective. And I’m writing this down for the hurting. For my friends who have lost their mother, their father, their unborn child, their son, their daughter, their brother, their sister, their aunt, their friend, their spouse. For those who live with grief. For those who have also been changed by it. Perhaps it will help you to know you’re not alone.

If you have tears in your eyes this Easter season, or that ongoing ache in your heart that comes in waves, if you are not the same person you were before and are feeling at odds with everything, if your grief has added an additional burden because now society doesn’t know what to do with your pain and would rather just see you happy than see your real hurt and sit with you in the mess – I’m there, too. A couple aspects of Jesus’ death and resurrection story are hitting home this year, and I want to present them to you in hopes that you see how your tears, your ache and your grief are your Easter worship.

I’ve told a few close friends that this new reality I’m living without Mom often feels like a nightmare. To be frank, though I’ve already tasted some amazing riches from God in this horror, I would trade them again if I could only go back to my old life with Mom. God knows this. We’re talking about it, and I know he doesn’t despise my honest heart but is present with me in it. I know this, too, because the Friday before Easter Sunday, Jesus gives God his honest heart. He says, “I want out. Anything but this, God, please. If there is any other way, I want you to do it. Please just take it away.” His anxiety was so intense, his sweat became blood. It felt like he was dying before he was dying. It was ugly. It was raw. It was honest. And he ended it with total submission to God the Father. “Yet not my will but yours be done.” The hardest, most costly thing Jesus has ever done.

If you are struggling to submit to your new reality, you need to know it’s okay. Jesus did it for you. God knows your struggle. Bring it to him. Be honest with him. Be so honest that your friends at church blush or try to theologically correct you. God doesn’t. He wants that kind of honesty. If you don’t believe me, read the Bible. Perhaps start with Psalm 39 as an example of an honest cry to God out of terrible pain.

Another aspect of the resurrection morning that jumps out to me is Mary’s grief. Only those who have felt it know what she was feeling. To lose all your hope, to lose the person dearest to you, to be completely undone. The ugly cry, the utter mess she was in. I would guess she didn’t sleep Friday and Saturday night, or if she slept, perhaps she too had nightmares of the horror she witnessed. She was in violent, strong grief, coming to anoint Jesus’ dead body as she mourned the loss of her hope and who she thought was going to be her Messiah. Out of all the people Jesus could have chosen to appear to, he waited to show himself first to Mary. To his grief-ridden, foggy-brained, hopeless friend who stayed in the garden after her friends left. Perhaps the angel’s message to her didn’t register through the fog. Perhaps she didn’t yet believe it. We don’t know why she hung back, but we do know Jesus found her in her grief. So too will he find us in ours.

He does not despise our tears; he joins us as we weep them. He does not ask us to put a smile on because it’s resurrection morning. He asks us to be real. He doesn’t theologically correct our cries to him; he sees them as the worship they are. If all you have to offer Jesus this Easter are tears, questions, anger, an aching heart, a struggle to submit, you need to know that is your worship. That is exactly what you should offer.

You have a Savior who suffers. You have a Savior who asked for any other way. You have a Savior who not only died for our sins, but for cancer, for broken relationships, for Alzheimer’s, for Parkinson’s, for miscarriages, for stillborn babies, for depression and suicide, for heart attacks, kidney failures, sepsis, stroke, paralysis, old age, and all the rest. He hates it. He died for the untimely deaths. He died for the senseless murders. He died for the power-hungry, cruel leaders. He died for all of it.

To grieve and mourn the things God hates is part of our worship of him. So if that’s your Easter Sunday, let that be your Easter Sunday. Sit in your grief, be undone like Mary, and let Jesus find you in it. And if a joyful Easter service feels like too much for you this year, that’s okay. Joy and sorrow are intermingled so much more than we tend to allow on Sunday mornings, particularly Easter morning. Pray about how to mark your Easter this year. I know that’s not easy, and I’m doing it with you. Remember: your tears, your ache and your lament to Jesus about them are your Easter worship. It’s only through the darkest trials that true faith and hope and worship actually come.

Thank you, Jesus, for not despising but treasuring our broken hearts and our cries to you.

Continued Lament

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God, here I am. Almost 10 months since Mom died. 15 months since we knew something was wrong. I am still heavy-laden. And I wonder how I am supposed to go on. I’ve learned it’s possible to live without Mom, but there’s a deeper question. My heart is not a virgin anymore. I see the devastation that is possible. Horrific has a shape now. It is no longer abstract. I see what is possible. I see the potential losses. I see the hurt of the world. And my heart is breaking more. How can one endure this?

I see in my pain and my questions how You are so near. This is uglier than I thought it could be, and none of it seems to scare or surprise you as it does me. You know the worst. You know the depths, where I have not even touched. I see the ways you have worked in me through the pain. I see the foolishness in my heart I did not see before. I see the brevity of life. I see the importance of considering death. I see the insignificance of things I used to think mattered more than they do.

Did you have to work that through pain? Isn’t there another way? I don’t understand how you work, God. Why must you use pain? Even while the results are good, I cry out. This rips at my very being. My tears keep coming. How much longer will you have me in the fire?

You count each tear. You are so connected to me and to my grief that you know how many tears I have cried. How can you care that much about me? How can your heart break with mine? When no one else understands, you understand to your core. When I am alone, you are with me. When I can’t take more than one step at a time, you have gone before me and hold me up. You’ve provided for me in countless ways. I tried to keep a list and I know I can’t remember every person, every help, every practical need you’ve supplied in this horror.

None of this feels good. Trying to grieve well in a culture that avoids pain is another burden on top of the burden. Wasn’t the ugliness of her cancer enough? Wasn’t losing Mom enough? Wasn’t seeing the damage being done to our children and being powerless to stop it enough? Yet you thrust me into a place that does not know how to grieve. And it’s loneliness on top of loneliness; pain on top of pain. I need people, yet often they push me away from healing in their attempts to help. They have all meant well, God. Yet often they hurt. Yet sometimes they help. Did C.S. Lewis ever start a grief sanitarium? I would join one if he did. One tends to feel crazy if one attempts to grieve well.

How can life be so beautiful and so ugly at the same time? How can sorrow and joy intermingle so intimately? How will you one day divorce the two? Will every tear really be wiped away forever? To believe in you is to believe in the strongest magic we cannot comprehend. It really is the fairy tale of all fairy tales. If you really are who you say you are. All our greatest desires, all things beautiful, all our deepest hopes and aches are met in you. You truly are who we were made for.

There is so much I don’t understand, and will never understand. You are not waiting for me to understand. You are teaching me to grieve. To cry. To laugh. Help me figure out what life is about. What my life should be about now. Living for myself simply isn’t worth it. You see all the stories we tell. The good ones are the ones that echo self-sacrifice and loving others, because that’s your character. I’m still alive, so you must have a purpose for me. Let’s get on with it. I want to be with you.

What Do We Do With the “No”?

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One night, a previous pastor of mine texted a group of friends from our church. His wife was in the emergency room. It wasn’t looking good. He reached out for prayer. Of course we all prayed for healing, for strength, for God’s will to be done. The husband reached out with updates, saying her health was improving. “It looks like God is answering our prayers,” he typed.

I love and respect this man. I understand what he was saying. What he was really saying was, “It looks like God is saying yes to what we are asking.” His choice of words is a common one in Christian circles. “It looks like God is answering our prayers” is a typical response when God works according to our will, or more bluntly, when we get what we want. However, it reinforces a damaging and warped theology of God, prayer and suffering. What if her health didn’t improve? What if this was the end of her life? Would it look like God was answering our prayers then? What do we do?

Over a year ago, our family was reeling from my mom’s exploding health issues. It was cancer. It was advanced. Later we were to find it was stage 4. The Sunday before her surgery, we asked for prayer from our pastors at church. We, too, prayed for healing. Over the next months of surgery, treatment and decline, we prayed. She wasn’t healed. Six months after diagnosis, we held her hands and sat by her bedside, watching her spirit exit her cancer-ravaged body. What about her? What about the prayers that went up on her behalf for her healing and restoration? Did God answer our prayers?

I firmly believe he did answer. He always answers. He told us, “No.” He declined our request for this cancer to be removed. In my mom’s words in her final days, “Cancer has owned me.” God answered. It was not the answer we wanted.

You may argue with me that God does not cause evil. He did not give my mom cancer. I agree with you. But the nuance here, which we find in the Psalms of lament, is the understanding of God’s ultimate responsibility of our tragedies. He could have intervened. He was certainly able to heal her. But He did not. At the end of the day, God is responsible.

This creates a most serious conundrum. This is a problem. One of the most important, vital issues human beings have with God today. Many people call it “the problem of pain and suffering”. You most likely have heard it (or like me, have said it) something like this: “If God is good, why would he allow such a terrible thing to happen?” This can be a lively issue to debate. Until it happens to you. Or someone you love. Then it hits home. We can’t understand it. When suffering hits us, the theological arguments turn into this problem. We can’t think of a possible good reason for such devastation. We struggle to reconcile a good God with our tragedy.

(By the way, this post isn’t the proper place to really dive into the philosophical legwork needed with such a question, but if you’re interested in it, the best work I’ve read and listened to up to this point in my life is by Timothy Keller. One option is “Walking with God Through Pain and Suffering”, but he has also preached multiple sermons on the topic, available through Gospel in Life. I am forever grateful to him for his work on suffering.)

This discord we feel when pain and loss hit our lives is not new, and is part of being human. The questions, doubts, anger, fear and distress the deeply suffering feel are not a sign of weakness. For the Christian, nor are they inherently sinful or a sign of weak faith. Perhaps they may be, but to jump there first is evidence of an ill-formed theology of sin and suffering. If anything, these questions and strong emotions when sorrow hits are first and foremost a sign of being alive in a broken world.

When God answers opposed to our will, we feel a gap between God’s goodness and our painful reality. “If God is good, why did He allow ________?” So what do we do with the “no”? Especially my Christian family: what do we do when God gives us or someone around us exactly what we don’t want?

Sadly, the common Christian response to pain is unlike our Savior’s. With some exceptions, my experience and the experiences of others has confirmed this. In this gap, we don’t know what to do. We know how to rejoice with those who rejoice. We don’t know how to weep with those who weep. Christian funerals are now “celebrations of life”, with the expectation of joy while excluding sorrow. Many Christians show great discomfort with strong feelings, filling the gap with Bible verses, “at least” statements, or platitudes like, “God did heal them, just not in the way we wanted.” “God works everything for good.” Our worship avoids sorrow. There is an overwhelming “toxic positivity” in the church.

I too believed this toxic positivity, until deep grief found me. Then I began seeing everything with new eyes. We bring meals to help the struggling but don’t know how to bring presence. When tears, emotions, accusations and questions for God arise, we don’t know how to direct that to God: corporately or individually. We are so very uncomfortable with pain, that we attempt to minimize it, downplay it, normalize it, distract from it, or put a bow on it. And since there are few examples of biblical lament in our churches, it’s easy to believe our strong feelings and questions for God are wrong. The twisted theology given through these positive attempts to cheer the sorrowful is that God does not grieve the pain of people and his creation gone wrong. And since he doesn’t, we shouldn’t either. The damaging theology says the godly response is a smile in the face of tragedy.

And the ensuing carnage is great. This is one the reasons many grieving, hurting people don’t feel like they belong at church. Once Mom’s cancer came on the scene, I began meeting more people who loved Jesus and had left the church because they felt out of place with their grief. Christian authors like J. Todd Billings, Randy Alcorn and Clarissa Moll also shared similar experiences.

Unlike the religious response of avoiding or downplaying pain, God shows us a different way to deal with this gap. There are enough examples of this to fill a book, but one of the many places to start discovering this better path is the lamenting Psalms. It doesn’t take long to understand that David and Asaph, to name two of the writers of Scripture, loved God very much. These men felt severe doubt, violent anger, and horrendous pain. They questioned God’s goodness. They accused him of inactivity. They demand that God work. They cried so much that they lost sleep. Enough tears fall down their faces that they say “tears have been my food”. They know significant pain, suffering, and injustice. They ask God all the questions. “Why? How long? Where are you? What are you doing? How could you allow this? Aren’t you righteous? I don’t get it!”

And that’s just naming two writers of Scripture. I haven’t even started with the prophets.

These men were human, and dealt with the same pain, questions, doubts, fears, anger that we do. But they choose to deal with them quite differently than I have, or our culture has, or the church has. What do they do with their emotions, their problems, their fierce anger, their demands for justice, their agonized cries of pain?

These songwriters not only acknowledge these feelings, but direct their anger, questions and pain to God. They cry out to the one who could have stepped in, but for reasons beyond our understanding, did not. In doing so, they do two very helpful things for us fellow suffering humans.

  1. They acknowledge the problem we feel. God could have stepped in to stop it. He did not. And we won’t understand why. Nowhere in Scripture does God spell out his reasons for allowing them. It is as if knowing why is not what we need. And while it hurts me a bit to say this, it’s true and I need to hear it: If God operated according to my understanding, he would be a very small god indeed. It is nothing short of pompous arrogance to think that if I can’t come up with a good reason for _______ to happen, then there must not be a good reason for it at all (more of what I’ve learned from Tim Keller).
  2. They give us a model to follow. In a culture that either represses our strong feelings & questions or simply expresses or vents them, these songwriters show us that A. feeling them is human, and B. we need to pray our strong feelings and questions to God.

As Mark Vroegop says in “Dark Clouds, Deep Mercy”, “To cry is human. To lament is Christian.”

As the psalms of lament illustrate, grief and loss take us on a journey. A very long journey. It is the nature of lament. Psalm 6 became one of my immediate cries after Mom died. I could relate to it and cry out those words, while I still cannot sing the rejoicing praise songs at church.

“Have compassion on me, LORD, for I am weak. Heal me, LORD, for my bones are in agony. I am sick at heart. How Long, O LORD, until you restore me?

“I am worn out from sobbing. All night I flood my bed with weeping, drenching it with my tears. My vision is blurred by grief; my eyes are worn out because of all my enemies.” (NLT, verses 2-3, 6-7).

Most of the lamenting psalms show a pattern: cry out to God with all your feelings and questions, remember what is true of Him, and trust. The trouble is, our own process is not as simple as this initially sounds. We don’t cry out once and arrive at trust. As much as we’d like it in our pain-averse culture, lament is not quick, linear, smooth, one-time-fix-all. Our hearts are more complicated than that. Grief is more complicated than that. Some psalms do not even follow that pattern: like Psalm 39 and 88. They end in a way that shock us. I would not be surprised if Christians today would approach David and the sons of Korah and chide them for their “lack of faith” or for not being more positive. Through these Psalms, I began to learn this about lament. While others may rush me, God is patient with my heart and does not hold me to a timeline.

It is unloving and wrong to point hurting people to the awesome truths of who God is and expect them to just “get it”. It’s akin to asking a seven-year-old to comprehend calculus without giving them the time they need to wrestle and search and learn the language of mathematics. For example, a well-meaning person sent me some texts a few days after Mom died. They were Bible verses about God’s goodness. I suppose they thought I needed reminding of that. Another kind friend sent me a Christmas card with Proverbs 31 cited, telling me to read that, while I should remember that Mom is with Jesus and all is well. While well-intentioned, these messages told me to fast-forward the grieving process and arrive at trusting God. They didn’t know that I needed to weep. To wrestle. To scream to God, “Why?” To doubt and question God. To enter the grieving process He has set out for me. Tim Keller pointed out in a sermon titled “Praying Our Doubts” that while we tend to brand doubt immediately as “sinful”, doubt also has tremendous positive energy. When we dismiss doubt, or other parts of the lamenting process, we shut the door to growth and depth of faith. Pain compels us to go on a journey with God. We need to enter the reality of our valley of the shadow of death, and with deep trembling, call out to God there.

Instead of crippling silence and isolating those who are holding deep sorrow, we need to learn how to lament. Both as a church and as individuals. It is the bridge from despair to trust when God gives us our “no”, and life as we know it shatters. Lament is the godly response to death and suffering. It is walking in Jesus’ footsteps as he suffered. What if, instead of platitudes or distance, we actually entered our own pain and the pain of others? What if we joined hands with the suffering and cried with them? What if we allowed us space to wrestle with God? What if we welcomed our doubts and questions, anger and fury, guttural cries of agony? What if we remembered “through much suffering we must enter the kingdom of God”?

It is through these kinds of things that we make space for a hurting world to seek God. Unlike our culture, God welcomes our questions, our anger, our outbursts, our honest cries, our doubts and fears, our wailing. He shares in our pain. He grieves along with us, just more deeply, violently and thoroughly than we do. It only took my kids and I a few chapters into studying Jeremiah to see that God is a lamenting God. He meets us in the darkness in a way that words can’t describe. Only one who has been thrust into their pit and cried out to God with much fear and trembling knows what I am talking about. We don’t get our answers to “Why?” in our valley. We get God. We get him with us, because He knows darkness, too. And it is precisely there, when we have nothing left, that we realize we need nothing else but him. And if that is not true worship, I don’t know what is.

True worship comes from the pit. It comes out of darkness, not by avoiding it. It comes from entering our pain and wrestling with God there. Anything less than that tends to be shallow.

You see, the cry of lament is not only ours. There was another who suffered greatly. Someone who didn’t deserve the wretchedness that came his way. Someone who did cry out “Why?” to God in his greatest agony, and received his “no”. In his dark moments, Jesus lamented. Unlike us, he was totally abandoned by God in his suffering. He was abandoned and rejected in order that we would never be alone in our sorrow. His rejection guaranteed our inclusion. It’s a mystery beyond us: God uses pain to save all who would believe in Jesus. Yet we still cringe and shy away from treading the road of suffering in our Christian lives.

We’ve forgotten that the way of Jesus is the way of pain. It is a tear-strewn and bloody path. The more we grow to resemble Jesus, we must remember that we will resemble the Man of Sorrows. As Tim Keller points out in another sermon titled “Praying Our Tears”, the more we become like Jesus, the more pain we will feel. The more we will weep. This “only victorious”, toxic positivity neglects the whole gospel. It keeps people from growing in their faith. It holds back healing. It slams the door for those suffering to begin the all-valuable process of wrestling with God, asking the hard questions, seeking truth amidst all the doubts and conflict and confusion.

What if churches realized that lament itself IS worship? What if we began to learn lament once again? What if we made room on Sunday mornings for weeping and grief? Songs that reflected not just the hope and joy but also the harrowing cries of being a suffering human being? What if we welcomed people wrestling through doubts, anger, frustration, fear, and those hard questions for God? What if we told them they were in great company with writers of Scripture, and Jesus himself? What if we not only held thanksgiving services but lament services as well? Took time to remember the dead who went before us and are still part of the body? Sought to become trained in grief care? Learned about dying, death, loss, and how to walk well through them? Moved toward people in pain? Acknowledged that God’s answers are both what we want and the very thing we don’t? Cried out to God for our own pain and others?

I firmly believe it would open doors that have been barred shut, keeping deeply wounded people out of churches and away from God. People would begin to heal. A deeper, more profound, more precious understanding of the gospel would begin to shine. It would give us a more accurate, biblically rounded view of our Savior, instead of the toxic positivity of only victory, joy, trust and goodness. Making room for lament and sorrow may seem counterintuitive, uncomfortable, perhaps even “wrong”. So did the cross. Yet it is precisely through the pain Jesus didn’t want but to which he submitted that God chose to save us. How could he not also use our sufferings, if we would only enter them? Without suffering, worship remains shallow. Without bringing our unfiltered questions and strong emotions to God, people continue to be shut out from the kingdom of God. It is only in the greatest of depths that the greatest of praise to our suffering Savior rises, and the roots of faith grow deep.

Perhaps, someday, when we get the answer we didn’t want, we may learn to lament like Jesus.

Moving On vs. Moving Forward

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As time passes after Mom’s death, I have become aware of an unwelcome intangible. Somewhere there is an expectation that at some point in this process, I will “be over it”. Or if not “over it”, at least “past it”, where my grief and loss is something not talked about anymore. A friend and I were talking about this a couple days ago. While she was sharing, I began to think about it more. I’m guessing those of you who have experienced a close loss can relate. Where it comes from I don’t know. Perhaps it’s a combination of ourselves and our culture. Maybe it’s a side effect of us pushing death to the perimeter of our lives instead of how it used to live in the forefront. But whatever the source, this expectation of what healing looks like brings more damage than healing. I’d like to do what I do a lot of lately: take the expectation, look at it and examine it, question whether it is logical and true or not, and if it is not, replacing it with what is true. It’s part of how I keep my sanity in a culture where grieving is foreign.

First let’s look at this expectation more closely. It’s most often heard in the silence after a loss. Often there is an onrush of help and support in the first few months following a death, for example. Then, naturally, as people resume their regular rhythms, the help wanes. And so do the questions and conversations for the bereaved about their loved one and their grieving process. I have yet to find an example where this has not been touted as the norm. This wax and wane of people is a natural one. People will offer what they can, and for most of us, the short-term is most feasible. The trouble comes after the dust settles and the bereaved is left with their new reality, grappling with how to do life now. In this comes a lot of silence. You aren’t asked about how you are coping. They don’t bring up your loved one anymore. While their life went back to normal, yours did not and never will. C.S. Lewis compares bereavement to an amputation. And on top of that loss, you live in a culture that avoids your “amputation” after a certain point. One thing that bereaved people hear in this silence is that the broken part of themselves is not a place others want to go. Or they’ll hear that it’s not where others should go.

My personal experience with this happened most recently after Christmas holidays. I reached the eight month mark, and realized I am just dipping my toes into the extent of the damage done from Mom’s cancer journey, death, and subsequent executor role. One thing piled up on top of another, and the load kept increasing with few breaks, and I haven’t stopped since this whole thing started over a year ago. It’s been insane. Eight months in, I am just realizing this. And when that happened, I felt nervous, and a little guilty. It felt like I wasn’t doing enough. I wasn’t processing it fast enough, because the one-year marker was coming up and it feels like I should be farther along than I am. One year means it gets easier, right? And while some aspects are indeed getting easier, others are getting harder. Therapy digs up wounds that need to be healed. The body still knows and feels the effects of grief. Often there is trauma that keeps the bereaved trapped. The griever needs to figure out each day, each season, how to live in their new reality.

When I talk to people who have been bravely facing their unwanted reality for longer than I have, they confirm for me that the expectation to “move on” exists for them as well. The ones where it’s been years past their loss or major change. Grief doesn’t wave goodbye to us after a certain time frame: she travels with us the rest of our lives. We grow around our grief, yes. It’s not an always intense force; it ebbs and flows like waves. But it does not leave us. Our loss and our pain is just as much a part of us as our nose. It changes us, and will be part of our lives until our last day. Sadly, we have not done a good job seeing this part of our fellow humans. We know our neighbor lost their spouse a few years ago, but we’ve stopped asking about it. We don’t want to make them sad, we rationalize. Maybe we don’t want to get our hands dirty. Or maybe we just don’t understand deep grief. In the meantime, our neighbor walks with their grief every single day, trying to figure out how to do another day without their person. And while it may bring tears to their eyes, asking “How are you doing with your grief?” gives a chance for that sacred part of themselves to be seen and heard. Being seen for who you are, all of you, is priceless and healing. No matter how many years it’s been. Treating the loss of a loved one, or any other loss (divorce, for example) as old news, is damaging.

So as I examine this expectation, I see a term that needs to be defined. What is “being stuck in your grief”? Both the wounded and the helper can fear that this is happening. “Am I grieving, or am I stuck?” As I and others have wondered, is being stuck experiencing signs of grief years after the tragedy? Is it rough holidays, or grief triggers, or the need to talk of them long after others have stopped asking how you are doing? Also, what does moving forward look like? Is it feeling like you used to? Being more happy than sad? Feeling as if you have “gotten over it”? Arriving at a point where you never speak of your loss?

It’s safe to say that health includes moving forward in life. It does not mean living controlled by your grief for the rest of your days. Continuously reliving it, letting it define you, lack of healing are some of the signs of getting stuck in your loss. GriefShare talks about moving on versus moving forward, which is a vital distinction to understand. Moving on is a false assumption that we will somehow get past our grief. It ignores the fact that our grief travels with us, as an amputee travels without their limb. Moving forward is learning how to live without our loved one, or without our leg. Moving forward means addressing any trauma experienced. Life will never be the same, but we still have a life to live. So we learn how to live with our grief, not controlled by it. We learn how to move forward.

People who expect you to revert to who you were before, and think that you are stuck because you are not the same or because you continue to walk with grief long after, do not understand loss. They most likely have the definition of being stuck = being affected by your loss, post-loss. Often with a certain time limit (3 months, 1 year, 3 years, 10 years). These people are also quite uncomfortable with pain and are quick to give solutions or advice. They believe that faith in Jesus means mainly happy emotions, bows on top of tragedy, what our culture calls “positive thinking”, just with a religious spin in the Christian realm.

In order to help more hurting people, our culture needs a reset on how we handle pain, tragedy, grief and loss. This “toxic positivity” brings more damage than we realize. The Disney/Pixar movie “Inside Out” illustrated this better than I can do with my words. Remember Sadness and Joy trying to find their way back to Headquarters? Remember when they met Bing Bong? How he was devastated at the loss of his rocket he and Riley used to ride. For him this loss was ultimately an ending of his precious time with Riley. Joy tried to cheer him up, to fix him. It didn’t help. Sadness sat with him and listened. There were tears. It was painful. And it was healing. If you continued watching, you saw the same thing happen with Riley. She needed Sadness in order to experience Joy. The two go hand in hand in this life. They just do. Whether we like it or not. We cannot have one without the other. We should not reject the hard, painful parts of our lives, however much we hate them or don’t understand all the reasons why. If we have the courage to lean into all of life, the good and the horrible, it is there we experience the fullness of being human. It is also there where we draw closest to God. It is there where faith grows.

For my Christian siblings: this is near and dear to God’s heart. I didn’t realize how much so until my heart was utterly broken and I began to know Jesus’ presence in my suffering. I started seeing how linked suffering and salvation are. The seemingly contradictory truths that God hates death and suffering while he also uses it to accomplish his purposes, redemption and ultimate restoration. I started seeing lament & suffering all over the Bible.

Unfortunately, we’ve allowed a poisonous positive spin to infiltrate our churches. In our discomfort or ignorance with pain, we shut the door to hurting people who need to know that God invites our groans. I know it sounds crazy, but He is a suffering God! From Genesis 3, He’s known pain beyond what we can claim. And I’m seeing all over Scripture that He not only wants our anger and pain, he shares our anger and pain. He laments with us. He invites our questions as a loving parent invites their child to share what’s wrong. Aching for his broken creation, He comes so near to his brokenhearted. He invites them into this process, which I’m finding leads to depths and riches of God I have never known before. Hurting people need this good news, and instead are met with shallow messages of God’s goodness apart from their pain. The questions devastated people ask are not found in our churches. Their cries are not welcome on Sundays. Their anger is called sinful instead of part of their process of lamenting to God. Their questions are not tolerated. Their doubts are not acknowledged. The picture of God we portray to people is shallow. We try to fast-forward a grieving person to trust in God, skipping the hard parts. All this is flat-out wrong, un-Scriptural, and harmful. This is not who God is, what He says, how He responds to our suffering, or how Jesus suffered. This is a large part of the book I’m writing in my spare time. We need to do an about-face with regard to suffering, Church.

The “positive gospel” does not tell a suffering world many things it needs to hear. The most lamentable miss in my heart lately is about our suffering Savior. I’ve grown up in church, and I knew Jesus died on the cross for my sins, but I had no concept for Jesus as God’s son living a sorrowful, tear-filled, grief-acquainted life. Some of the things I’m learning are astounding and comforting. For example, in a sermon entitled Praying our Tears by Tim Keller, he pointed out that only one perfect human heart walked this broken earth, and that perfect human heart wept. A lot. Jesus, the Man of Sorrows, close friends with grief. And to the degree Christians grow in their resemblance to Jesus, they will grow in their heartbreak. They will hurt more. They will ache more. They will suffer more.

So we now need to ask the hard questions. Take a look in the mirror and be brave. And I mainly address these questions to my Christian friends. How do we respond to the loss in our lives? How do we process the pain in our lives? Do we feel it and face it with God? Are we doing the hard work of looking at it? Are we learning how to lament? Are we studying what God says about pain and suffering and grief? Do we care most about comfort, or Christ? Are we willing to feel the heartbreak of being alive in a beautiful yet busted up world? Why do we so quickly put a positive, religious spin on it? “But God…..” “At least…..” Ill-timed Scripture aimed at reminders of God’s goodness while ignoring their pain. Trying to clean someone up instead of being present in their mess, because perhaps their mess touches on something unhealed in our own hearts. Or perhaps we really want to be comfortable more than we want Jesus’ road.

While there are so many facets at play here, one thing seems obvious. We need to be willing to face the pain of our own life; only then can we begin to bear the pain of another. Hearing about the horrible way someone’s reality changed permanently is very hard. In some cases, heartbreaking. And that discomfort and heartbreak needs to be felt. For us and for others. God does not ask us to put a silver lining on it. He never puts a silver lining on it. Instead, He invites us to share in his pain, into the depths. Not simply for the sake of feeling it. Not because He’s sadistic and enjoys inflicting pain. Because He’s there with us in it. Because there is so much more of Him to know through it. Because He knows suffering on an intimate level. He both weeps with us and works through the pain. Because His suffering brought redemption. Because through the depths come the greatest of heights and hope.

Suffering and loss do what comfort cannot. It has purpose beyond our understanding. That’s easy to say until you’re in severe pain yourself. While I shy away from it, Jesus did not, and does not. His presence gives me the strength to learn how to live with my grief instead of shoving it down. Dare I say that’s the best part about this horrific season: however horrible it gets, I’m never alone. Someone greater and better than me is in it with me, feeling it with me, drawing close to me. Someone who will never leave me or be taken away. Someone who will finally heal it all. And that makes all the difference in the world.

Balance

/ melissamagdsick / Leave a comment

Hi. I’m blogging less often due to doing more writing and journaling offline. I think there’s a book or two in there somewhere. We’ll see once the dust settles.

Most often, when I’m with other people, there’s a draw I feel to be “okay” for their sake. Sometimes it’s a helpful draw. My kids, for example, draw me into fun and cuddles and comforting moments. My husband draws me into similar things with an adult twist on life and God and grief. My friends draw me into distractions, enjoyable moments, reminders that not all of life is horrible. I’m thankful for the breaks.

I’m finding, though, that there needs to be a balance in order for this griever to be healthy. Sometimes that draw to the positive is unhealthy. To process the death of my mom and the last months of her life, to heal and move forward, requires time to go back, to remember, to revisit, to consider. There needs to be time to be drawn out of my grief, and time to be drawn in. The lighter moments are a breath, a gift, a refresher. They are given as a respite, in order that I may plunge back into the processing pool once I’ve caught my breath. I need both: breaks and plunges.

What I’m coming to understand about my own story is that the last year of my life, and the last 6-7 months of Mom’s life, were full of trauma and grief. I am just beginning, eight months in from her death, to see the landscape and name the destruction done. Things went from zero to sixty with her health, what I needed to do to take care of her, her decline, her death, and then my executor role heavy in the first three to four months afterwards. I’ve barely been able to come up for air. Neither has my family, in very different ways. We’re now at a place where the ground under our feet seems stable enough to stop and take a look around. Pursue counseling. Give our bodies a chance to come out of fight or flight. That’s a whole other issue: the way our bodies hold grief and trauma, and how it manifests itself with various health problems.

With all that we’re facing, it’s becoming clear that we need both draws. Draws out of our grief and draws in. The trouble in our culture is that the vast majority of people live in a “draw out” kind of manner. I’m starting to see it everywhere. It’s in how we talk to each other. How we do church. It’s even in my journaling prompts for my “Tell Me Your Story, Mom” book. I’m not finding any questions like, “What was the hardest part of childhood?” Or ,”Tell me about your most painful moment as an adult.” It’s all about favorite moments, accessories, school, dating, work, etc. in an upbeat fashion.

Nope. We want to hear what’s good in someone else’s life. We want to hear the positive spin, the silver lining. Perhaps that’s where the “at least” statements come from. I used to use them often. When a child goes into surgery and suffers, “at least it was successful.” The conversation with someone you bump into at the grocery store: “What was your favorite part about your trip?” One one hand I get it: who wants to expose their messy, hurting, broken, anguished parts to a friend in the cereal section of Trader Joe’s? Not me. But when we never ask the other side of the question (ex: What was the hardest part of your trip?), or held the suffering child’s pain along with them (ex: How do you feel about getting surgery and missing basketball season?), we neglect caring for the whole person. We send a message that the only presentable, worthy parts of a person are the happy parts. The good news parts. When the reality is that our whole lives are going to be a blend of both: a mix of happy and horrific, difficult and easy, good and bad, joys and sorrows. This “stay positive” thinking lends itself to ignoring, minimizing or stuffing the harm, leading to long-term damage and unhealed wounds. Which leads to a culture of people who do not know how to help a hurting person because they are an unhealed hurting person.

I’ve struggled lately telling people what I need. My needs aren’t as practical as they were at the beginning. We’re good with meals, groceries, errands. We have two drivers again for kids’ activities. We’re on stable ground with the practicals. Prayer is always our top need, so I do ask for that the most. However, as I’ve thought about it, I discovered another gap. I need people who can draw me INTO my grief. People who aren’t afraid to see my mess, hear my undone anger or fear, and who can sit with that. Someone who will listen, let me cry, and bear it with me for a little while. Not try to change me or quote a proverb or verse or silver lining. Those are draws out. If all I have are draw outs, they won’t help me heal. At times, I need draws in. I need a safe place to be my broken, hurting self. I want to be seen. All of me, especially the anguished parts with which most of us are uncomfortable. Psalm 34:18 tells us God is near to the broken-hearted and saves the crushed in spirit. Jesus also tells the mourners that they are blessed, for theirs is the kingdom of God (Matthew 5:4). When a person is able to sit beside their hurting friend, ache along with them, they make space for this very holy place. For God to be present with them and their broken heart. They allow blessing to come. Platitudes and verses and silver linings rob us of that beautiful process that takes place in our agony. I get it. I hate this. I would never choose to swim in this pool. I wish all of life were positive and happy. But it’s not the world we’re living in. There’s bigger things going on than our personal comfort. There’s war and eternity and salvation at play, to name a few of the intangibles beyond our understanding. There’s meaning and purpose to the pain we feel.

So now I have a new need. I’m praying for people who can bring some balance by drawing me into my grief. Being able to sit there with me. No fixing. No positive spinning. This isn’t an easy ask. It’s painful. It’s the harder road. It’s much easier to avoid. And I could really use someone to join Jesus and me in the pool.

Thank you to my “draw out” crew as well. I need you, too.

Cries

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You are the only one in this with me. You are the steady presence in front of me. Behind. And before me. I can’t see one step ahead, and I can’t see you. It’s dark. It hurts. It always hurts. Even behind my smile, my heart is bleeding. How much blood do I have left to lose? Shouldn’t I have run out by now? Why prolong the pain? What’s the point of all this? Why go on?

So many questions, so few answers. But your steady presence next to me is undeniable. I know you are here. I don’t feel you like I felt you before. I don’t see you like I saw you before. Everything has changed. My life is still chaos. Still trying to learn that I’m not in crisis. Don’t need to worry to fall asleep that I need to save her life. That old fear of her dying on my watch is done. It’s realized. She did die. She did choke. Everything I didn’t want to have happen, happened.

And you were there. You held my hand when I couldn’t stand. You opened my eyes to horrors. You sent me help from every quarter. You never left. And you allowed it. I just don’t understand you. I don’t understand any of it. We’ve talked about this before. You welcome my questions. You answer me, though you don’t give me what I want. You give me what I need. It’s what I tell my kids, but it’s harder on the receiving end. I still need faith, because your ways are beyond me. I can’t grasp them. How can you grieve deeply while working it all for good? That’s not something I can do.

Will joy ever return? Will I ever be able to sing again? To play music again? Will tears continue to be my food until you wipe them away? It’s a long time to wait. To wait for you, to wait for Mom. To wait for the others you have taken and will take before me. Is this what you meant when you said to take up your cross? Tears and groans, aches and pains, sorrow always my companion?

It’s nothing you don’t know. You know this all. More intimately than I ever will. You know abandonment. You know loss. You know death. You know injustice. You know it all. Even if I never understand, I am learning that if I have you, I have what I need. Clinging to you is like skydiving. It’s not safe. You could allow another nightmare at any point. Nothing is safe anymore. But you will never leave me alone. You will cry with me. You will walk with me. You will be with me. You will love me. You will bring me into your kingdom. And I will never want for anything else if I have you. Even if you slay me. Even if you take my husband, my kids, my friends, my house, my health, my sanity. I will trust you. Because I have nothing better. I have no one better. All I have is you. And you are enough.

Don’t Stop My Tears

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It’s been three months, a year, or ten. Some say I should be over this, past it. Done. What do I say when they seek to stop the river running down my face?

Don’t stop my tears.

It may be the millionth time I’ve cried; I’ve lost count. Someone else is counting for me. Someone who invites them. They don’t threaten Him, or remind Him of their worst fear. He has no bubble to burst. His heart has broken to the fullest extent. And in His breaking, the world overturned. Death was dealt its death blow. Irony of ironies. How can healing come through breaking? Beauty from ashes? Diamonds from pressure? Gold from fire? How can life come from death?

I could go on.

Flowers and plants. Forest fires. Seasons. We see the cycle of life from death everywhere. It’s all around us. Yet we close our eyes. Shy away from the painful. Try to make a world where pain is pushed to the sidelines, not a main actor in our hearts. We want nothing to do with it.

But we cannot pretend forever. It’s coming. When death knocks at your door, stares you in the face, interrupts your comfortable life with its cold presence, you realize you cannot hide anymore. You cannot run. It touches the one you love, and if that weren’t enough, it says, “I’ll be back.”

Who will be next? How can one live with this presence?

I don’t know yet, but I know one thing. Don’t stop my tears.

With death of one you love comes pain. Horrible, wrenching pain. It’s overwhelming at first. Then the waves die down a bit. Things feel like they are settling. The pain may be less acute, but it is also ever present. It’s never going away. Evidence that my world was shaken. Scars. Bullet holes in my heart. I may heal, but I will never be the same. You lose a leg, and your new one doesn’t replace it. What you had is gone. It’s never coming back. And because of this, I cry. I cry for what was lost. I cry for what will never be. I cry for what I could not change. I cry for her pain. So many reasons. Sometimes I have no idea why.

Don’t stop my tears.

Why do I keep saying that? I’m a mother. When my children were babies, their cries told me something was wrong. It told me they needed something. I learned so quickly to listen to their cries and learn what they needed. Was it sleep? Food? Touch? Cleaning? Warmth? Medicine? Isn’t it our job to stop the tears?

Maybe. Sometimes. Tears show us that something is wrong. They are only one of many signs of wrongness. There are others. Since tears come easily for me, I also receive many attempts to stop my tears. “She’s not suffering anymore.” “The hardest part is over.” “You did your best.” “She’s with Jesus now.” “It’s okay.” I get distance, weird looks, plain avoidance. People who are uncomfortable with these levels of pain. Or just lots of words. Trying to put meaning to it. Trying to comfort. I see the attempt to help, and it touches me. But it also hurts me. Please don’t stop my tears.

How does it hurt?

It hurts because the appropriate response to death is sorrow. It hurts because it’s not okay. It hurts me because those words try to snatch me out of a place God has put me. It hurts me because it’s distance: trying to smooth over my pain instead of entering it. I don’t need answers or purpose or lifting from my pain. Remember? Life comes from death? Healing from brokenness? You can’t fix it for me. No one can but One. My healing is through the tears. It’s feeling the pain. And I need others to help me feel it.

Don’t stop my tears. Stopping my tears stops my healing. I need to cry. It’s remembering the moments. It’s going back to the flower gardens for the first time when Mom isn’t with me, and crying through it, remembering. It’s cheering on the Packers, tears flowing, with her empty chair next to me. It’s swimming with sea turtles, weeping as I remember the first time I saw a turtle was with her, and the last time I was snorkeling was with her. It’s tap dancing in her shoes, crying because she isn’t wearing them and tapping next to me.

The best way you can help bring comfort is to let me cry. Be with me. Ask about my mom. Give me chances to feel, to cry, to remember, to show you pictures, share one more piece of her jewelry with you. Give me chances for the pain to come out. To laugh one moment and weep the next. Be willing to listen. You can cry or not cry. I don’t care. Just be with me.

I need so many people. One person can’t do this all. My husband can’t do it all. One or two friends can’t do it all. I need my family to come around me and help me. One moment at a time. I need you.

Don’t stop my tears. There is healing in them. Jesus meets me there. It is only in the depths that I begin to know true comfort, deep praise, and find hope. Thank you to my two dear friends for sitting with me today and making space for my tears. It helped me so much.

Do I Have To Pray the Psalms?

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I’ve been told multiple times in grief that praying the Psalms helps. They give words to every human experience. Did you know that over 1/3 of the Psalms are laments? I didn’t. I must admit, I didn’t know what “praying the Psalms” would look like. It sounded too Christian-ese, too much the “right thing to do”. Sometimes I have a problem trying to be so original, so unique, so unlike others that I don’t want to do what someone tells me to do. It’s a trait of those with my Enneagram number: The Four. We believe we are different from anyone else. However, one of the things Fours need to remember is that every human being is also unique, and we are just as human as the next person.

This week I decided to open up Psalms. I had already started writing a song based on some laments in Scripture, since there seems to be an abundant amount of songs of praise but not nearly enough songs of lament in our church culture. Psalm 77 and Psalm 6 is where I landed. And two minutes in, I was sobbing and incredibly thankful for these honest, brave, real, strong lamenters.

Two and a half months in, the pain is real and the struggle is real. I’ve been single parenting for the last ten days while my husband is out of the country. With lots of help, of course. What this has given me, among other things, is time alone at night. The days have been full, even though we’ve scaled things down to match my reduced capacity. I’ve found moments of laughter, breaks in the ache of grief. Then every night, without fail, as soon as the kids were in bed and I was alone, the tears started flowing. It was as if my companion (we’ll call her Grief) was waiting for me to be alone, tiptoed up to me and said gently, “It’s my turn now.” Every night I hoped she would not call, but she has. She still walks with me every day. I suppose that is growth in me, that I am no longer resisting her presence, even though I’m not throwing her a welcome party. She has things to do in my life, and I know I need her. Yet the continual ache and ongoing pain, sometimes so sharp all I can do is sob, feels like more than I can bear. As C.S. Lewis said in A Grief Observed, I need a drug for the pain. I suppose this is where addictions begin: to sugar, alcohol, drugs, TV social media, porn, relationships, sex, you name it. Anything to help the pain, anything for some relief.

It’s tempting to reach for those things. Very tempting. So as I’m reading the Psalms from this perspective of the amputation of my mom from my life, I found fellow sufferers in these pages. I found confirmation, yet again, that these feelings of anguish and experiences of them are not sinful or signs of weak faith, but human responses. Here are some examples.

“My soul refuses to be comforted” (Psalm 77:2).

This is so true. While I have moments of comfort, nothing actually brings lasting comfort. Nothing “works”. Temporary comforts come in many forms, but the pain comes back without fail. I live with a heart that feels like it bleeds out continuously. So unless I am willing to dive into an addiction of a good thing in order to keep numbing myself (which is always tempting, but which I am also not willing to do), I must agree with this Psalmist and say along with him, “My soul refuses to be comforted.”

“Be gracious to me, O LORD, for I am languishing; heal me, O LORD, for my bones are troubled” (Psalm 6:2).

My flesh is literally weak. I stared death in the face, watched it take away my youthful, active mom, and was reminded of how fleeting health and life is. On top of that, my body is weak. If I don’t take a walk a day, I feel panicky and the stress weighs much too heavily to bear. I cannot keep up with my text messages like I used to. I need more sleep. The brain fog continues. It took me five days to recover from one church picnic last Sunday afternoon. My kids are learning their new mom can’t do what she used to. Energy is low. My immune system is suppressed, and I’m in contact with my doctors to deal with health issues that have come up. When I spoke with another bereaved caregiver recently, she reminded me that it took her months for her body to realize that there wasn’t something urgent or pressing to do. I immediately related. I lived that way for six months, and I still live with this sense of urgency, of crisis, even though nothing in my life is currently on fire. My flesh is weak. So I join the psalmist in crying out to God with my troubled bones.

“I am weary with my moaning, every night I flood my bed with tears” (Psalm 6:6).

Yep. That’s me, too. The last ten days, Grief tended to wait until the kids were in bed and I was alone. She’s not always that considerate. The bathroom stall at the zoo, Sunday mornings in church service, on my walks, taking out the garbage, in a conversation, smelling a rose, hugging my child. These are all moments & places when I’ve felt the tug of grief, saying, “It’s time to mourn again”. So I cry. The tears flow. Tasks can keep the pain at bay for awhile, but they cannot remove the pain. There is nothing else to do sometimes but weep. And yes, it is wearying.

As these Psalms have helped me grieve this loss, know that I am not alone, crazy or sinful for feeling this way, they have also brought comfort. When I read Psalm 6:8-9, a new kind of tears came. These were tears of being heard, of being known, of being in someone’s heart and presence in a way where you know they are with you, they are feeling it with you, they are holding you together while you fall apart, they are strong while you are weak, yet unafraid to break with you.

“Depart from me, all you workers of evil,
    for the Lord has heard the sound of my weeping.
The Lord has heard my plea;
    the Lord accepts my prayer.”

The Lord has heard me. That made all the difference to me. You know that experience when you’re a child, and you KNOW you are right about something, but you need your authority figure to agree to make it official? You need a witness? You need confirmation? This is my confirmation from God my Father. He has heard every instance of weeping. He was in the zoo bathroom stall with me while I fell apart. He tunes in to every ache. He’s there. He is listening, he is with me, and he is answering. I don’t know a greater comfort in the pain than this. My true comfort is coming when my King shows up on a white horse to finish what he started. I know the aching continues until then. And so does his presence with me through every moment. This is a sure footing that helps me more than sex, food, relationships, another TV show, reading……you name it.

I am a humbled Four who learned that I need the Psalms just like everyone else. Thank you, God.

A Steady Companion

/ melissamagdsick / Leave a comment

I read somewhere that sorrow and suffering are good teachers. They are not the electives we tend to choose, but at some point or another, we are all enrolled in their classes. Eccesiastes 7:4 says, “The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning, but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth.” More evidence that sorrow and suffering bring more with them than pain. While listening to more of C.S. Lewis’ “A Grief Observed,” he quoted Matthew 5:4, where Jesus says, “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.” Like Lewis, I can hear Matthew 5:4 and remember acquiescing to its truth, or even teaching it, before I was plunged into the pool of grief myself. It didn’t hit me then like it hits me now. I certainly read Ecclesiastes before, but I didn’t take it to heart and seek to be in a house of mourning. What is the point of that? I preferred mirth, laughter, and ease.

My childhood was not an easy one for many reasons. Nor has my adult life been easy. It’s very much a mixed bag; joyful and beautiful alongside painful and ugly. Yet as I look back from my current vantage point, I see those twin teachers present. And while I certainly took a few plunges into the shallow end of the pool, I have spent much time and energy running the opposite direction. Ditching class. Believing I know better. Trying to control exactly how much pain I should feel, if pain is unavoidable and I have to feel it.

Mom’s cancer diagnosis, suffering, and finally her death put me in the deep end. Sorrow and suffering didn’t stop to ask me if now was a good time. It just happened. It just was. And now it is, and it isn’t going away. Thanks to a dear friend, and a book called “Beyond the Darkness” by Clarissa Moll, I am now coming to see that the grief I am feeling is one of my new lifelong companions. It’s not an injury I will recover from. It does not have a shelf life. It will not eventually leave. It will morph and change, as I do, of course, but it is with me for life. It’s my new companion. I cannot yet call it my friend, but perhaps I will eventually get there.

You see, I don’t like my new companion. I don’t like her at all. She’s demanding. She takes most of my energy. She cries a lot. At the most inconvenient times. She doesn’t play by our society’s rules. She does not have a regular schedule. She can keep me up at night or make me fall asleep in the middle of the day. She’s taken away my appetite at times, yet she’ll also make me crave unhealthy foods. She changes my relationships, because other people see she’s next to me, and they react accordingly. She’s intrusive, ever present, and someone I never would have invited into my life. I don’t like her at all.

And.

And I’m learning she is a gift. She has a lot to offer. I don’t even know a quarter of it, I’m sure, and I already see this. Because as soon as I stopped running from her and started listening, I heard wisdom. I felt pain, too, searing pain of the chasm separating Mom from me. Strangely enough, I started seeing that pain as a gift in itself. It’s love for Mom that causes me to feel this grief. It’s one side of the double-edged sword of suffering: the side of Genesis 1-2 and the end of Revelation, the side which screams out that life is not supposed to be this way, and it will not always be this way. It’s the aching for Jesus to make it right again, for all eternity. It’s a holy ache, because it’s one that Jesus knows intimately. It’s God’s heart, too. I understand now that sharing in Christ’s sufferings includes holding grief’s hand when it enters your life, as it has entered mine.

So what wisdom have I heard? I’m glad I asked. My brain is still a sieve these days. I still have trouble completing sentences. I am very forgetful now, and need continual reminders of things I used to be able to mentally hold. This is one of the reasons I write. I write to remember. I write to process, and I also write to learn. I often read my writings back, and learn from them.

One thing I have learned is what the writer of Isaiah meant when he said Jesus was a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief (Isaiah 53:3). Clarissa Moll pointed out that it could also be translated that Jesus was a “familiar friend” with grief. Hmm. Familiar friend. They were close. This means I am in good company, as I stop running away with distractions, take a breath, and begin a true acquaintance with grief. I’m learning that welcoming grief instead of running from her is walking in Jesus’ footsteps. It’s an joining in God’s lament against sin and longing for full restoration. It’s the ache that things aren’t as they should be.

I’ve learned how illiterate I am in lament. The churches I have been part of never taught or modeled how to handle grief, or how Jesus did. Funny how we can talk so much about some things but have blinders on in others. Mine were stripped from me this last year. Once in the pool of grief, it didn’t take long to see how the church shies away from following in Jesus’ footsteps in this regard. We see his sufferings as necessary, dwell on them for Good Friday services, perhaps, or when we talk about sin, but do not follow him to the extent of calling grief our familiar friend. We sing positive songs, pray for positive outcomes, and have little to no vocabulary to lament and grieve. One of the ways we need to grow in Jesus’ likeness. However, God has given me fellow lamenters in my current church, who have been a lifeline in this hurricane.

Other lessons I am learning is what truly matters and what doesn’t. Death brings life into focus, sharply and succinctly. I see how unimportant and insignificant things are, things that used to grab my attention. For example: caring what other people think of me, or my fear of trying new things. I’m rethinking how I parent our children, seeing more gaps in what I believe vs. what I actually do. Instead of wanting to be entertained in my free time, I have a burning desire to be useful. To create instead of consume. Life is so fleeting, so short, a drop in a very large bucket. I want to make my drop count. Whether I like grief or not, she is changing me in ways I’ve asked for. I just didn’t want the lessons to come through her.

You see, I have a confession to make. I studied suffering and God’s reasons for it pretty regularly in my 20s and 30s. It was a disturbing thing to try and hold: if God loves me, why does he allow _________? I read books, underlined verses that mentioned suffering and purpose, listened to sermons. I wanted to know the answer to the all-famous question: WHY??

Thanks to grief, I realize now what was going on in my heart. I figured if I could understand even some of the answer of why, if I studied enough about suffering, then when the big storms of life hit, I would be able to meet them with calm and composure. I would be able to say when my loved one dies, “The LORD gives and the LORD takes away. Blessed be the name of the LORD.” I wanted to be like Job, just without the sackcloth and chapters of lament. I didn’t want to feel as if the bottom was dropping out of life. I didn’t want to be rocked to my core with pain. I thought that would show that I did indeed have a strong faith in God.

How wrong I was. I didn’t understand how much strength and faith it takes to 1. feel your pain to the capacity you are able, and 2. to cry out to God honestly with your anger, questions, doubts and terrible pain. The mark of a strong faith during times of difficulty is lament, not stoicism or emotionless acceptance. God keeps leading me to feel my pain, not avoid it. And when I do, it is there where he meets me, helps me and grows me in ways I could never have experienced had I continued to rely on myself or tried to numb the pain away. Trust in him is revealed through hardship. As I have learned, if you do not trust him, you will not cry out to him.

Yes, grief is my new steady companion, whether I like her or not. Though she’s not my favorite, I do like what she’s doing in me. And I am not alone. There is another steady companion with me, who knows grief well and will walk with me until there is no more pain. His words in Matthew 5:4 hit home this week. I’m blessed because I mourn. While I am incapacitated by my grief to sing, teach or lead in the ways I have in the past, God does not see me as useless or wasteful. No, indeed. I am blessed. Comfort is coming, and it will be all the sweeter for those who are strong enough to break. I am sharing in Jesus’ sufferings. God help me.