Grief as Medicine for Deep Disappointment

I’ve been re-reading John Eldredge's book, "Journey of Desire."  It's one of the very few books that I return to year after year.  But I'd been away from it for a longer period of time than usual - couple years - and when I allowed myself to pick it back up again, it was with trepidation.  I was fearful of something.

You could say that the entirety of my existence has been characterized by desire.  Longing.  I've always been a woman who desires deeply and dreams intensely.  But in the depth of those dreams and desires is an immense amount of pain.  And sometimes I try to silence my desires and dreams because of the pain they cause me.

So I picked the book up again with a bit of caution, because I wasn't sure I could handle being faced with the reawakening of my desire; there's something about that book that puts me back in touch with my deep-seated longings, and I'd been trying to avoid them for a while.

Funny thing about avoiding desire, though, is that it can never stay underground for very long.  It comes out in other ways...eating too much, sleeping too much, drinking too much.  Pick your drug, it'll find you.

So what's the pain? If we're all truly honest with ourselves, if we look beneath the striving and arranging and achieving and planning, there's a lot of pain. Pain from rarely-fulfilled desires.  Pain from what Larry Crabb and others have named, "the inconsolable longing:" the desire to know and be known fully and intimately and then fully accepted.   Pain from living in a world that will never truly satisfy, yet always trying to believe that it will.

So Eldredge writes that the antidote to the pain of desire is, among other things, grief. 

Grief?

At first blush, one might dismiss this strange elixir as a cruel joke.  "Embrace grief, when I'm already in the thick of pain?" But listen closer to your soul, because it might just be saying, "Yes, this is the path."

John Piper said, "Occasionally, weep deeply over the life you hoped would be.  Grieve the losses. Then wash your face.  Trust God.  And embrace the life you have."

But do grieve.  Can you envision yourself stepping, willingly, into grief?  Elizabeth Kubler Ross's 5 stages of grief tell us we often deal initially with denial, and the four stages that follow are anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. 

I think it's pretty safe to say that every single person on the planet lives in a somewhat steady state of denial.  We numb ourselves to the pain and we tell ourselves that if we don't think about it, it won't bother us and we can go on with our normal, blandly pleasant life.

But when the anger sets in, that's when we really know something's up.  It simmers below the surface at first.  We can put on a good face most of the time, but every so often we snap at our loved ones, or take out our frustrations on a friend or coworker.  Something's amiss, but we don't always stop to take a second look.  We talk to a friend, and venting seems to alleviate the immediate pain.  We continue on.

Once we pass our own litmus test for anger by talking with a friend or counselor, we ever-so-slowly move into bargaining.  "God, give me the life I dreamed of!"  We cry.  "If you were any good at all, things would be different!"  We lament.  We try our very best to manipulate God into doing what we want him to do.  We demand and wail from our beds, we moan and weep.  There is much anguish and unrest.  We don't see God doing anything to move us onward toward our dreams of fulfilment and satisfaction.

Until depression sets in, and we quit trying to talk to God at all.  It is in these times when God often seems farthest away; a cruel task-master who sets about his duties from a threatening distance, asking more from us than what we can give.  In these times, we can feel a mixture of denial, anger, AND bargaining.  This time the bargaining usually has something to do with making the depression go away.  It is the season where I believe God does the most work, almost entirely behind-the-scenes.  We often don't see or hear from him for days that quickly turn into weeks, then sometimes months.  Our souls are parched and dry.  We no longer want for anything but for relief.  Our anger can come back to haunt us in new and uglier ways.  We are tempted to shake our fist at heaven, and sometimes we do.  This is the stage at which counsel with spiritual advisors, pastors or counselors, is of utmost importance.  And the interesting thing about it, is that it will look like very little is happening. 

But, one day, somewhere from under the recesses of our tears and anger, something new starts to arise.  God allows us to see his face once again, just for a moment, and we have glimpses of hope.  The hope stirs in us, small and feeble, yet very much real.  We begin to be able to pray again.  How did we survive this dark night of the soul?  Maybe it was because another soul has held space for us to just be where we are.  Maybe the prayers of friends and family.  Mostly, it's because an undying love for Jesus has held on for dear life in the midst of the darkness. 

The hope grows a bit. It waxes and wanes, and some days we must be reminded of why we push onward.  But one day we emerge from the depths of depression much the same way a monarch escapes its cocoon, a new, beautiful, and incredibly delicate creature, never to be the same again.  The resurrection begets a creature both beautiful and scarred for the remainder of life this side of Heaven. The strength comes slowly, but it does come, and the soul thirsts for God in small, new ways. This strength isn’t our own. The thirst, a gift.

Acceptance.  Grief means saying, "I thought it'd all be different. And I don't really like what's staring me in the face right now."  And Hope, the wings of the new fragile creature emerging from the depression, says, "But no matter what, God is here, and He is mine, and I am His, and nothing can change that."

CS Lewis stated this phenomenon clearly when he said, "Aim for heaven, and you'll get earth thrown in. Aim for earth, and you'll get neither."

Grief?  Yes.  Hope?  Yes.  For Christians, they go together, in a beautiful, painful, metamorphosis of growth.