Why we should learn to grieve our losses
By / Sep 30

We have all lost something due to the worldwide pandemic: our health, our sense of safety, the freedom to travel, gathering with family, a job, or a loved one. While we are grieving these losses, we are also trying to maintain a sense of normalcy. As someone who grew up in a family riddled with abuse, addiction, abandonment, and general dysfunction, I am used to dealing with pain and loss. I learned how to grieve what was lost and the importance of moving forward at a young age, and now I help others do the same. 

While I often help women who grew up in a dysfunctional family and want the encouragement and equipping to create a healthy, Christ-centered family of their own, the principle of grieving the past and moving forward into a healthier, more functional future that I share applies to all of us in this present time of uncertainty, tragedy, trauma, and loss. 

Learning to grieve from a movie 

One of my favorite movies when I was growing up was “My Girl,” the coming-of-age story about an 11-year-old girl, Vada Sultenfuss, who is raised in a funeral home by her single dad. Vada is best friends with Thomas J., a bookish boy. Together they ride bikes, climb trees, and try to understand life. Vada also avoids the reality that her widower father is falling in love.

In a tragic accident, Thomas J. dies, leaving Vada to grieve the loss of her only friend. I remember watching the scene where Vada crashes Thomas J.’s funeral. I cried as if I were attending the funeral myself — as if Thomas J. were my own lifelong friend. 

“Come back, Thomas J.! Come back!” Vada cried over the casket. Oh my stars, I can hardly take it, even today. Our deep-feeling heroine turns to poetry to process her feelings, and young Vada writes a poem about the weeping willow she and Thomas J. spent so much time climbing. The funeral, the tears, the poem — all were a part of the grieving process for Vada.

Just as in “My Girl,” there are many reasons to embrace grief and pursue our own journey from denial to acceptance. Pain and loss were never a part of God’s original plan. Just as childhood death was never God’s design, neither was the dysfunction you experienced as a child. God grieves the pain in your past, and he wants you to grieve as well. 

Vada lost her mother and her best friend, and the audience watches a young girl process deep grief. We wonder how God can ever work such grief out for good. Eventually, however, he does. He can take a sad, broken little girl, and teach her that it’s OK to feel. It’s OK to love. It’s OK to open your heart to possibility.

3 things to remember about pain 

It might not seem so in the moment, but just like Vada, we can always look back on our lives and realize that even in the darkest situations, God always works out painful events for our good (Rom. 8:28). If we ever forget this truth, we need only remember Jesus’ suffering and death on the cross as a case in point. 

Another thing to remember as you grieve your past is that pain is a universal experience. You are not alone in your anguish; everyone experiences disappointment, pain, suffering, and loss at some point in their lives — even Jesus felt it. He was despised and forsaken by men, this man of suffering, grief’s patient friend. As if he was a person to avoid, we looked the other way . . . and we took no notice of him (Isa. 53:3). 

Finally, God sanctifies us through our grief. In pain and suffering, we can run from Jesus or we can try to respond like him and in the end look more like him. King Solomon wrote about this principle: “It is better to go to a house of mourning than to go to a house of feasting, for death is the destiny of everyone; the living should take this to heart” (Eccl. 7:2).

If we accept the truth that our reality will look nothing like the dreams we’ve conjured up, then we can move forward and grieve the pain, suffering, and lost opportunities — all that should have and could have been — even all that might have been ours. But you won’t be alone with your grief — Jesus sent the Holy Spirit to comfort you. 

And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another advocate to help you and be with you forever — the Spirit of truth. The world cannot accept him, because it neither sees him nor knows him. But you know him, for he lives with you and will be in you. I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you. Before long, the world will not see me anymore, but you will see me. Because I live, you also will live. On that day you will realize that I am in my Father, and you are in me, and I am in you (John 14:16-20).

In these times of social distancing, quarantining, isolation, and being separated from loved ones, it’s important to know that you won’t be alone with your grief — Jesus sent the Holy Spirit to comfort you. Take time to process your grief at your own pace. This process is not linear. Rather, it can often feel like a tangled ball of yarn. As you process and grieve your past, you’ll inch your way toward healing in Christ. Then, one day, you’ll find yourself experiencing a hopeful present you never saw coming.

This article contains an adapted excerpt from Mending Broken Branches: When God Reclaims Your Dysfunctional Family Tree.

Social Issues Sunday bulletin insert
By / Oct 1

Internet safety for children has always been a concern, but increased use of technology and the amount of time spent in front of a screen has elevated the need for intentional measures to protect our children.

Free, downloadable bulletin insert for use by your church on Social Issues Sunday: Internet Safety. 

To see additional SBC event dates, visit sbc.net/calendar.

Safety is not a virtue: Teaching self-sacrificial courage to our children
By / Nov 9

Daniel Kish has been sightless since he was a year old. He was born with an aggressive form of eye cancer and had both eyes removed by the age of one. He is a man of many talents. He likes to hike, mountain bike, make music, cook and write. He enjoys children and loves nature. He has earned two master’s degrees from the University of California Riverside.

Kish is emphatic that there is nothing exceptional about him or his abilities. He uses clicking noises with his tongue to understand his environment. He calls his self-taught method “flash sonar,” but it is technically referred to as echolocation, where he listens to the echoes as they bounce off of surfaces. Daniel says, “I wasn't aware I was doing it, just as sighted people don't consciously teach themselves to see.”

He was a rambunctious child, and everyone assured his mother that the most important thing was to keep her blind child safe by limiting his activities and opportunities to get hurt. Daniel’s grandmother actually told his mom, “You should wrap him in cotton balls, so he will not get hurt when he bounces into things.”

When he would climb trees, neighbors and police officers would knock on his mother’s door and tell her that blind children should not climb trees because it is too dangerous. She was constantly asked, “How can you let him do that?” His mother rejected all of the advice and embraced a “no-limits because of blindness” philosophy in raising her son. According to Daniel Kish, the low expectations for what blind people can do functions to limit what they can actually do.

Daniel Kish concludes the TED talk he gave with an important takeaway, “We get so overwhelmed by challenges—and I do too, but I was raised without fear. There were lots of things to be afraid of, but the emphasis was on facing fear.” His words are reminiscent of those of Theodore Roosevelt, “There were all kinds of things I was afraid of at first, ranging from grizzly bears to ‘mean’ horses and gun-fighters; but by acting as if I was not afraid I gradually ceased to be afraid.” Regarding this courageous and fearless mentality as a blind person, Daniel Kish says, “Running into a pole is a drag but never being allowed to run into a pole is a disaster.”

In the This American Life episode about Daniel Kish, he says, “Often, sighted people will jump in a half a second too soon, and they rob the blind student from that learning moment.” My son, Will, a high school senior, pointed out this podcast about Daniel Kish to me. He said, “This is what you would be like if you were blind, and this is the way you and mom try to raise us.” I doubt that is true about me, but I am thrilled he understands that we are not raising him to believe that his safety is the top priority.

But here is my fear: Many of our children are not blind, but we are still wrapping them in cotton balls.

Daniel Kish’s story causes my mind to race with implications for Christian parenting and discipleship. Merriam-Webster defines courage as, “The ability to do something that you know is difficult or dangerous.” Courage always demands a dose of danger. Our current cultural cult of safety treats willingly pursuing a difficult or dangerous task as foolish, sinful even—not heroic. G.K. Chesterton argues, “Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die. 'He that will lose his life, the same shall save it,' [Matt. 16:25].”

Genuine Christian courage, according to Chesterton, combines “a strong desire for living with a strange carelessness about dying.” Recklessness and self-protecting safety both have the same sinful root: self-centeredness. A culture where everyone values safety-first is a very dangerous place to live. This ought to be self-evident to the followers of a crucified Messiah who are called to “in humility count others more significant than yourselves” (Phil. 2:3). Rather than promoting human flourishing, a self-referential worldview is the root of all sin and human languishing. Taking up our cross and following him is not a call to safety-first (Luke 9:23). Love, biblically understood, is always courageous and sacrificial. Fulfilling the Great Commission demands calculated risk-taking. Biblically, safety is not a virtue, but self-sacrificial courage certainly is. It is difficult to cultivate self-sacrificial courage wrapped in cotton balls.