Managing Grief

I chose the title of this post to be "Managing Grief" to expose the fallacy of this statement and to also share about my experience of believing this fallacy for the past 8 weeks. On this day two months ago, I boarded a plane leaving Mexico for the third time in the prior 12 months, and probably for my last time for the next 6 months at least. It was a truly, deeply difficult and saddening day for me. I couldn't stop crying for the 5 hours leading up to my plane taking off the ground. And I continued to cry for a good hour on the flight in the air.

It was such a difficult experience for me because I kept thinking "It's too soon to say goodbye" - a thought most of us have at the passing of a loved one and a reflection of the emotions we experience in that grief. Confusion at trying to understand a timing that wasn't planned by our own mind and a longing for the future days and memories that would no longer be shared and held with that special loved one.  I didn't recognize it at the time, but I was experiencing grief in a way like I had never experienced before. And because I didn't know how to identify it, I became consumed by it over the following weeks and dealt with more pain than I ever could have imagined on that day leaving Mexico.  

For the past two months my heart has grieved greatly. I have had nights after nights of trying to understand God's timing in calling me back to the States and trying to discover His purpose for me in this new season. I've spent many hours crying and crying, dwelling in the pain I've experienced from leaving my friends and faith family in Mexico to come back to the town I grew up in to start all over again. Just as I began to call that crazy, overly crowded, smelly, loud, uncomfortable city my "home", I was called back to my family's house in this small town at the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains, completely clueless as to what I would do next and how I would MANAGE this new season of my life.

But here is that fallacy again. Believing that I could MANAGE. Manage my grief, my reverse culture shock, my transition into living a completely different lifestyle than what I had been experiencing for the past year.

A couple of weeks ago, however, I had a really sweet night with Jesus after hearing a great sermon at church. It was an intimate encounter with his freeing truth that I desperately needed and longed for. I started to realize that I had been getting caught up in viewing God’s will for me as something he wants me to DO, rather than someone he wants me to BE. I had been so worried about my future and what I will DO, that I had lost sight of letting the Lord teach me about who he wants me to BE in this world. I had been beating myself up, questioning the real value of the life I am living right now, what I am DOING, and comparing it to what I DID in Mexico. I kept telling myself, and letting myself believe, that because I am not “doing” ministry work anymore, my life isn’t as fruitful for the Kingdom as when I was in Mexico. And because I haven’t been “doing” really anything “of value,” I am not finding any fulfillment or joy from this season I am currently in. I had focused so much more on the “doing” rather than the “being”, and this great sadness and deep pain had overwhelmed me as a result.

I think this must be an experience other missionaries experience in seasons of transition, especially if they have stepped away from the mission field for a time. I think the enemy has been very cunning in his scheme to discourage and attempt to bring down God’s people in this simple strategy of convincing us to believe the lie that we aren’t “good enough”. I think I am not alone in this difficult season that I have experienced lately, and so my hope with the rest of this post is that someone else out there might be just as encouraged and freed as I was by this truth that trumps over the enemy’s lies you might be hearing right now.

One of my all-time favorite books that I continue to pick up to read over and over again is “Beautiful Outlaw” by John Eldgredge. If you have never read it, you should stop reading my blog and go purchase this book and start reading it immediately. When I first read this book, I couldn’t put it down. Well, I kept putting it down because I would stop to reflect on what I was reading and would journal my thoughts as I went through the book, but I read this book at any moment I could find for a week straight. I carried it with me everywhere.

This book exposes the personality of Jesus in a way like I had never experienced before. I thought I was in love with Jesus before I opened this book, but those emotions and love I had for him were only the beginning of this rushing fountain that burst forth after seeing and experiencing Jesus in a more intimate way through this book. I could go on for days about how great of a teaching tool this book is and what freedom one can find in hearing these truths about our loving Savior in a language like we haven’t really read before, but I won’t. I’ll just share an excerpt from one of the chapters towards the end of the book that I really believe reflects more eloquently what I was going through the past few weeks in transitioning being back in the States and the truth of the freedom that comes from Jesus to bring us victory over these lies and schemes to which we might have fallen prey. In the final chapter, “Letting His Life Fill Yours” John Eldgredge writes:

But let me tell you, few things can mess you up as badly as trying to do your best. For the tender heart, the earnest heart, it is so discouraging to give all you have trying to do what you think Jesus would have you do, and find yourself falling short, sabotaging your own efforts at every turn. Discouragement and shame settle in like a long Seattle rain.

            And this is what most Christians experience as the Christian life: Try harder, feel worse.

            I spoke of cunning traps that replace the simple priority of loving Jesus. Here is a very surprising one- the trap of integrity. What I mean by this is when our attention turns to maintaining personal righteousness. This seems noble and right. Jesus told us to keep his commands. But this can be a trap because most Christians interpret this as “Try harder; do your best.”

            I find myself slipping back into this weekly. A handful of symptoms tip me off. Exhaustion, for one. I’ll just find myself wrung out again. Or an unnamed internal distress; my insides all twisted up. Discouragement, that old nagging cloud of “I’m totally blowing it” back over me. Irritation with needy people. These symptoms- and a host of others- are the collateral damage that results from trying my best. They let me know I’ve fallen back to thinking that to love Jesus is to give my very best in living for him. And this is a sticky business. Because on the one hand, that’s true- to love him is to obey. But out of what resources? From what fountain of inner strength?

            I thought it was my faithfulness. My integrity. A willingness to sacrifice, to fight well. And of course we are involved; of course our choices matter. But didn’t Jesus warn, “Apart from me you can do nothing” (John 15:5)? The good news is this- you were never meant to imitate Christ. Not if by that you mean doing your best to live as he did. It ought to come as a great relief. Something inside me says, Well- that’s certainly been my experience. But without understanding that I was never meant to do my best, I feel awful about it.

            In a biography of Christ which is good in many aspects, I ran across this terrible snare. The author describes the mission of Jesus as,

a spiritual revolution, the replacement of the unreformed law of Moses by a New Testament based on love and neighborliness, which could be embraced by all classes and all peoples… Life on earth was to be devoted to a self-transformation in which each human soul strove to become as like God as possible, a process made easier by the existence of his son made man, thus facilitating imitation.

           

            It is an evil and crippling distortion. Jesus didn’t start the Peace Corps. The secret to Christianity is something else altogether- the life of Christ in you. Allowing his life to become your life. His revolution is not self-transformation, but his transformation of us, from the inside out, as we receive his life and allow him to live through us. Vine, branch. Anything else is madness…….

           

God knew what he was doing from the very beginning. He decided from the outset to shape the lives of those who love him along the same lines as the life of his Son. The Son stands first in the line of humanity he restored. We see the original and intended shape of our lives there in him. After God made that decision of what his children should be like, he followed it up by calling people by name. After he called them by name, he set them on a solid basis with himself. And then, after getting them established, he stayed with them to the end, gloriously completing what he had begun. (Romans 8:29-30, The Message)

            Jesus stands first in the line of humanity that God is restoring. He is not merely a model- that would be unreachable, crushing. He is the means by which God is restoring our humanity. That is what Christianity is supposed to do to a person. This happens as his life invades ours.

BUT HOW?

Love Jesus. Let him be himself with you. Allow his life to fill yours.

            Every day, give him your life to be filled with his. This is part of what I now pray, every morning:

           

                        Lord Jesus, I give my life to you today, to live your life.

            Of course, this assumes that you are willing to surrender your self-determination. You’ll find it hard to receive his life in any great measure if you as the branch keep running off on your own, leaving the Vine behind in order to do life as you please. Honestly, I think this is why we accept such a bland Jesus, or a distant Jesus- he doesn’t intrude on our plans. I said earlier that one of the most bizarre realities of the religious church is how loving Jesus is considered optional, extra credit. The same sort of madness has crept in with the idea that you can be a Christian and hold on to your self-determination.

            And how is that going, by the way?

            If you are not drawing your life from Jesus, it means you are trying to draw it from some other source. I’ll guarantee you that it’s not working.

            Jesus was simply stating a fact of nature when he said, “Whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will find it” (Matthew 16:25). Grab for life and it falls through your fingers like sand; give your life away to God, and you will be a person his life can fill. If you want the real deal, if you want to experience the lush, generous, unquenchable, unstoppable life of Jesus in you and through you, then surrender your self-determination.

                        Lord Jesus, I give my life to you today, to live your life.

            The more you give the parts of your life over to Jesus, the more his life is able to invade yours. The relief alone is worth the price.