24 Words - Grief

This is the seventh of 24 blog 'thoughts' throughout June as part of a challenge to honour my sister Anna Murray who died on 20th October 2019. You can read my reflections on my sister here and watch a film I made about her here. If you want to donate to Pancreatic Cancer UK you can do so here. These posts will be short 'thoughts' rather than detailed blog posts.

This has been a bad week.  Grief comes in waves and a wave hit me this week. Grief is not linear it is circular.  Often we find ourselves as distressed today as we were weeks or months ago and we feel too ashamed to admit it.  

This week I had to make arrangements for my dad's gravestone and chose what letters and words would go on it.  There are many aspects of a loved ones death that are upsetting but trying to summarise a life in 30-40 words is particularly bad.  How do you summarise a man who lived for 85 years who was a pastor, preacher, author, son, brother, uncle, father, husband and grandfather?  You don't, or at least not easily.  It is a deep and distressing reminder of the incredible fragility and swiftness of life.  I thought about all the times my father took funerals in Pennyfuir Cemetery outside Oban and now he is laid to rest there.  As Job said, our lives are like a weavers shuttle or like a breath (Job 7).  Even the greatest and godliest legacy is ultimately summarised in a few words on a gravestone.  

Grief can be crippling and disabling. It can be a distressing and lonely place as we grieve.  We see this in the book of Lamentations which is an outpouring of grief by the people of God.  They had been besieged, then overrun, then brutally treated and then exiled.  Some of the details of Lamentations are gut wrenching.  They had plenty to grieve about.  Why is Lamentations in the bible?  Well surely because God wants to help us to grieve.  In Lamentations 3 we see the effects of grief;

1. We feel a sense of darkness (Lam 3 v 2)

2. We feel trapped (Lam 3 v 7)

3. We feel weighed down (Lam 3 v 7)

4. Fear (Lam 3 v 10)

5. We may feel foolish (Lam 4 v 14)

6. We feel miserable (Lam 3 v 17)

7. Exhaustion (Lam 3 v 18)

That is why we need to give grief words. As Colin Smith says in his excellent book 'For all who Grieve' ‘God has given us an entire book of the Bible in which sorrow is put into words and the grief of what was lost is expressed over and over again.  This tells us something very important about how to grieve: We must give sorrow words.  Telling your story will be part of God’s provision for healing your soul.’  Many of us are not good at talking particularly as we process grief.  We as a church are not great at dealing with grief.  But Lamentations, Job and the Psalms give us a pattern of lament that we should follow.

So where do we go with our grief?  We need other people.  Grief can be a lonely dungeon that many people remain locked in for their whole lives.  Thankfully as Christians we have the greatest counsellor of all - Jesus Christ.  As Colin Smith says: ‘God gave His people a counsellor who wept with them, put the pain of their loss into words, ministered to their guilt and grief, and brought hope and healing from the ashes of their loss.’  Although Lamentations is a difficult book it is also full of rich, rich promises for those of us going through loss.  He does not afflict willingly and he does not cast off for ever.  As it says in Lamentation 3 v 31-33:

For the Lord will not cast off for ever:

32 

but though he cause grief,

yet will he have compassion

according to the multitude of his mercies.

33 

For he doth not afflict willingly

nor grieve the children of men.