Spiritual Life APRIL PAW PRINT Bill Delvaux, Chaplain & Bible Dept. Chair The Goodness of Grief
I want to thank those of you who have stopped me in the halls of school or church and encouraged me about these Paw Print articles this year. I am writing out of my own experience: my own pain, loss, grief, addiction, and repentance. And as I gain clarity in my own heart, I am just “passing the goods” along to you (and to my students). It helps me to put words to it, and my hope is that it helps others too.
For these last couple of articles for this school year, I want to focus back on the way out for the cynic and the addict in terms of the heart. For this month, I want to make a few comments about resisting and repenting of the cynical hardness and anger that we can easily choose. It is the route of the older son in the parable of the Prodigal Son. The route out of this is not the route we would think of, much less choose, but then again most of the Lord’s ways are not our ways! When we are wounded, sinned against, assaulted, or simply ignored in all the various stages of our lives, it is just so easy to tighten and then harden the heart to shut out the pain. In fact, it does not feel like a choice at all; it seems like a necessity. But it really is a choice, and one that slowly begins to kill us. What is the route out? Grief.
Yes, Charlie Brown was correct: “Good Grief” is not a contradiction. Grief is good! Grief is all throughout the Bible, from the lament psalms that express sadness, to Jesus, man of sorrows, who weeps over Lazarus. In a fallen world, grief is not an enemy, but a friend; it is God’s exit door from a life of increasing hardness and insensitivity over sin. In the process of grief over loss of any kind, we usually move through the emotions of denial, then anger, then sadness, and finally acceptance. The problem comes when we get stuck either in denial or anger. This is the life of the cynic, who squelches the rawer emotions of grief with in icy coating of subtle mockery and hidden anger. The heart cannot then see things clearly, cannot even see God clearly, because it is so covered over with hardness. In fact, the places where we shut down our hearts to avoid the pain are the very places we also shut out God, for He desires above all else to live in our hearts and make them come alive.
The last ten or so years of my life has been a process of grieving over things lost in my adolescence and finding, to my surprise, that I recover something deep and precious in my own heart. The loss of my first love, the loss of my connection to other people, the loss of my emotional life to depression — these and other losses were places that I shut off just to cope and move on. It caught up with me years later when I knew I had to change, and I knew that the route out was grief. The Lord has really been a Father to me, guiding me, encouraging me, comforting me, and urging me onward even when the way seemed dark and foreboding. I can tell you from experience that He will walk with us through any valley, and that on the other side is the discovery of His deep Father love in our hearts. He is not punishing us in grief; I think He is trying to guide us to Himself.
