faith

What Do We Do With the “No”?

/ melissamagdsick / Leave a comment

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

/ melissamagdsick / Leave a comment

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.