Self Growth Thoughts
On February 5th, 2020 / by Glen Elliott
Loss
Sunday I watched the Super Bowl. The Chief players and fans celebrated. The 49er fans suffered in their loss. I watched the camera show some of the 49ers players after the game. You could see in their faces and body language how painful the loss was. Loss is a part of life we can’t avoid. […]
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On February 5th, 2020 / by Glen Elliott | Subscribe
Loss
Sunday I watched the Super Bowl. The Chief players and fans celebrated. The 49er fans suffered in their loss. I watched the camera show some of the 49ers players after the game. You could see in their faces and body language how painful the loss was.
Loss is a part of life we can’t avoid. The list of losses is unending. We experience the loss of those we love through death. Divorce is an ugly loss. Friendships and close relationships are lost through conflict, betrayal, and hurt. We can lose the love and respect of those who are important to us. We lose things like a career or a dream. We lose our health or physical and mental abilities. We lose money and possessions that were valuable to us. Losses are non-stop. With each loss there is pain and it is added to the previous pain.
With a loss that brings pain, we face a critical option. Will we engage the pain and grieve the loss, or choose to neglect the grieving process in order to avoid the pain? Some try the John Wayne approach and just push through the loss and pain and focus on other things to avoid grieving. Others find ways to mask the pain. We might do that through drugs, alcohol, porn, cutting, eating, spending, video games, workaholism, and more. These hide the pain for a while, but they can never remove the underlying cause of the pain, so it keeps coming back.
Eventually, if we don’t face the pain and grieve our losses, the fruit of dysfunction will cause even more damage to us and those we love. Our unresolved grief can manifest itself in so many ways: addictions, worry, fear, anger, depression, chronic complaining, relational isolation, or excessive control, as well as a host of emotional, health, and physical symptoms of ungrieved losses.
I’m learning from my own experience that our ungrieved losses are silent killers. Ungrieved losses continue to have a powerfully negative effect on us. We have to find a way to grieve our losses.
Jesus openly grieved in a garden called Gethsemane (see Mark 14:32-42; Luke 22:39-44). When you read the story you see that he is clearly in pain and sweat like drops of blood. Because he had foreknowledge, he could feel all the physical, emotional, and spiritual pain before it happened. So, what did he do? Ignore it? Hide it? Medicate it? Fight it? No, he cried out with deep emotion, begging God to take the current and impending pain away. Jesus was grieving! He faced and brought out what he was feeling inside. He faced his pain and brought it directly to God.
Jesus modeled how we grieve. We face the pain that’s inside and bring it to our outside world. We express the pain of loss in words. We express the emotion of the loss. We share the pain with God and with safe people who can listen and not judge or try to fix us. We join a group like GriefShare. We talk to a counselor (call our church office for a referral). The point? Don’t let ungrieved losses rob you of life. Don’t face the pain alone.
Glen Elliott
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