Weep, Pray, Love.

I am heartbroken. I just want to weep before the Lord for all the pain I see around me. I asked for this – I prayed that God would break my heart for what breaks His – and I know this is just a very small taste of the pain He feels for His children. There is so much suffering – in my immediate surrounded there has been terrible tragedy – the death of a young child in an accident, the deterioration of my father with Alzheimer’s, teenagers struggling with depression & self-harm. Cancer, incest, abuse, addiction and racism. I spent last weekend with Indigenous people desperately seeking reconciliation, mourning their murdered and missing sisters. So many broken hearts that need mending.

Casting the circle wider, our whole world is in pain. War and persecution, famine and drought, slavery and sex trafficking. So much evil. So much horror.

There are so many issues to address, wrongs to right, rants to rage, and prayers to cry.  There is the failing of our churches, families, schools, social services, governments, our First World greed, over-consumption, and apathy, our arrogance, our hate, our indifference. There is so much pain.

With all this pain we need hope. With all this pain we seek to understand.

I want to help, to hold on, to lift up, to love.

But do I need to understand?

“You don’t understand” whether spoken out loud or in my heart, was probably one of my top ten phrases as a teenager. We do seek to be understood, and that doesn’t change much as we get older. But what we truly need is to be loved. I truly believe that “Nobody understands me” is the heart’s cry of “nobody loves me.”

In reacting to someone in an emotional crisis, I think we generally fall into two camps – “I understand” or “I don’t understand.” When I am in the first group I feel compelled to explain to you why I understand your pain by sharing my own experience of pain. I essentially offload my own baggage, and don’t really help you carry your own. One day it might be helpful and healing to sit down with me and have a conversation about how I dealt with my particular loss, but as a first response I do not need to prove that have my own pain. I don't need to prove I’ve gone through a trial of my own.

Telling my story of pain does not help to validate your feelings. My advice may not be welcome. Every situation and person is unique.

A brave woman in my community has dealt with this as she comes to terms with the loss of her young son. She contrasts helpful people who lend support with those people who add to her “boulder of grief” with their own story of pain:

“It is very encouraging, like a handful of balloons, to tell me "so-and-so also experienced the loss of [insert person/relationship here], but this is how they got through it." It is the opposite to share details of accidents, deaths, and trauma, even if the intention is trying to be encouraging by comparing my situation with theirs. (Though how it is supposed to help me deal with my own grief by simply knowing others have experienced similar or "more horrific" losses, I am not certain.)” http://www.talenawinters.com/wintersdayin/2015/6/18/boulders-and-balloons-when-sharing-isnt-caring

When I am on the “I don’t understand” side of things, I can’t relate to your experience – I haven’t had cancer, I haven’t lost a child, I am not a widow or a refugee. So I am afraid of saying the wrong thing, afraid of making things worse, so I avoid you. I assume I have nothing to offer and back away from you. I don’t get it, so I must not be qualified to offer up any help in your time of need. What on earth could I say to a woman whose husband cheated on her, or a mother who had a stillborn child? I have more questions than answers. I am afraid that my words would be hollow or inappropriate. I become awkward and distant. I don’t understand.

But my friends, God does not ask us to understand, He asks us to love. We’ve all gone through stuff and we have our own unique joys and pains. If I think I understand your pain, I need to love. One day there will be time for stories, time for questions, but today is the day to love. If I don’t think I understand your pain, I need to love. I may not have a clue about what you are experiencing, but God does, and God loves you. God knows each of us more than we can imagine. He knows the number of hairs on our heads. He knew us before we were formed in our mothers’ wombs. He created our DNA. He gave us our gifts and dreams. We need to celebrate & honour each other by listening to and loving each other.

You don’t have to prove that you understand, or wait until you think you understand. This is a broken world in need of blessing. Listen & love.  

“I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.” John 13.34

Thanksgiving and grieving

This morning I got the message, one of many I have been dreading. The police brought my dad home last night. He left the house at 2 a.m. and wandered the neighbourhood, knocking on doors. He didn’t know where he was or how to get home. Another milestone reached along the terrible path of Alzheimer’s disease. I can’t imagine the worry, and, as a typical caregiver would have, unfounded guilt that my mom must be feeling. Not a great way to start Thanksgiving Day.

As a day set aside to count our blessings, it can also serve to highlight our losses. As families gather and marvel at how the children have grown, we also notice how many of us have aged. Thanksgiving and Christmas were typically large affairs when I was a child, full of extended family. As my great-aunts fussed over how tall I was getting, I noticed how they were beginning to shrink. As we recounted shared memories over much food, I saw how the memories of my elders were fading. Once my Great-Grandad introduced himself to the woman sitting beside him at the table, unable to recognize that it was his daughter. A gentleman to the end. He was a wanderer too – he would somehow get past the nurses at the home, and they would later find him on the streets. Once he returned with two black eyes. When asked I’m sure he was convinced he had been “home” to Saskatchewan – he had left there some fifty years previous to live in B.C.

At least he had the happy form of dementia. I don’t know where my dad goes in his mind, but I am grateful he no longer remembers his own dad’s final years. His dementia was dark – he was selfish, moody, paranoid.  I’ve heard heartbreaking stories of people lashing out in confusion and rage at those who love them the most. And the slipping away of a loved one can happen in so many different ways. My parents tried to shelter me from the illnesses of my older relatives when I was young, but I knew. Great-Uncle Elliot always greeted his three nieces with, “Hi boys!”, and we threw our hands on our hips and protested, “We’re not boys, we’re girls!!” The year he simply said “Hi girls” we knew something was wrong. He died not long after. Great-Uncle Bill, another practical joker, left us in a similar way.

These were the relatives we only saw once or twice a year, and the changes are so much more pronounced that way. Unfortunately that’s how it is with my dad and me now. Living in different provinces, when I do see him the changes are so drastic. Gone is the grandpa who played ball and read books with his grandsons, helped in the garden, and talked politics and sports. I don’t know if my kids remember him that way or not. I must admit I have a harder and harder time seeing him as the hero of my childhood – the man who always put the worm on my hook, and taught me about birds and airplanes. The man who would defend my honour against any unsavoury seeming boy, secure my bedroom against any monster, and could open even the tightest of pickle jars.  There is a broken shell where that man used to be.

I want to throw my hands up in the air and say what on earth is the point of all this pain and suffering? What hope is there is a world where most of us end up dying in pain, and watching our loved ones do the same? Jesus Christ is the hope. He is the only hope for this broken world. He is the only way I can make sense of any of it. I pray for the peace of Christ to work in my dad’s heart and mind. But that part of his mind is long shut. Even before this disease started to overtake his brain, my dad was closed off to the idea of a loving God – he had been hurt by the church, and unfortunately didn’t know that the church sometimes has nothing to do with Jesus. But still I pray, that somewhere in all the deep confusion of dying synapses, God will heal those memories and Dad will find the love of Jesus.

So as I gather with my husband and boys this Thanksgiving, it is with mixed feelings that I remember all the family and friends I have shared this day with throughout the years – those celebrating in other places, and those gone on, as my Papa would say, to the “Happy Hunting Grounds.” And I pray that as you give thanks today, in the middle of your own pain and loss, you find the hope of the love of Jesus Christ. Thanks be to God. 

May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit. 

Romans 15:13(NIV)