What To Do With Grief

Chapters

• 0:00 Series Context And Today’s Focus
• 0:34 A Nurse’s Front Row To Suffering
• 3:45 Why Lament Dominates The Psalms
• 4:55 Bottom Line: What Lament Is
• 6:09 Exchange One: Suppression To Expression
• 9:10 Beacon’s Wound And Psalm 13
• 13:15 Exchange Two: Isolation To Community
• 16:15 David And Jonathan’s Shared Courage
• 18:20 Parenting Grief And Inviting Others In
• 21:08 Exchange Three: Despair To Trust
• 23:05 Griffin’s Hearing Miracle And Memory
• 26:00 Psalm 13’s Turn And Our Practice
• 28:08 Reflection Questions And Next Steps
• 29:07 Closing Prayer And Blessing

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

Well, you guys can have a seat. My name is Josie McCarthy, and I'm part of our teaching team here at Cross Point. It's really great to be here with all of you. I want to welcome you. We are in a sermon series called Honest to God, where we're digging into the Psalms. And we're learning that no matter what we're going through in life, whether that's joy or sorrow, pain, or anxiety or anger, that the psalms give us a template for honest prayer. And today, we are going to be discussing the topic of grief and lament. And I'll be honest with you guys, it's come in a timely week for me. I lost my grandmother this week. She was my last living grandparent. And so Mac and I were up in Minnesota celebrating her life on Monday. But it also, I think I offer a unique perspective because I've been a nurse for 20 years. And of those 20 years, about 18 of them were in an intensive care unit. I saw a lot of hard things. It was a patient of mine. He had come in for some cardiac stuff, and he was actually doing well. He was an older gentleman, had a great sense of humor. And I had gotten to know him and love him. And he was getting ready to go home. He was up in the chair doing well. When all of a sudden, out of nowhere, he went into VTech and died. He was a DNR statist, so we didn't do anything heroic to save him. We let him go. But I remember the shock that was and how hard it was to process that one minute we're laughing and we're talking, and the next minute he's triple alarming and he's gone. I also had a patient that I took care of. He came in for open heart surgery. And while the Omar team was positioning him on the table to induce anesthesia, he coded. So as an ICU nurse, you go into all of those codes and you help resuscitate the patient. So we did. We worked on him for a really long time and to no avail. And that's so hard when you are pouring everything you know into saving someone's life and it doesn't work. And he unfortunately passed away. And I was a member of the team that went in to tell his family what had happened. That before we even can get started, you know, it went wrong. And the screaming and wailing that transpired after that horrific news is something I will never be able to unhear. It was awful. I responded to the Waka Shaw Parade tragedy just down the road. I went in that night to the hospital because it was quite an ordeal. Many victims came in in really rough shape. Some survived. Sadly, a lot of others did not. I took care of countless COVID patients. And I think one of the hardest things as a nurse is watching someone struggle to breathe. It provokes this profound sense of anxiety for the patient, and rightfully so. And it is absolutely gut-wrenching to watch. So I've basically had a front row seat to tragedy and trauma and pain for the better part of my career. But here's the thing, you guys pain and suffering are not isolated to a hospital room. No, they're actually something that we all have to deal with this side of heaven. It's part of being a human living in a broken world. And I think the psalms highlight this reality. Cameron shared this a few weeks ago. There are 150 psalms. And of those, over a third of those are psalms of lament. Meaning that lament is the most commonly expressed genre we see in this book. So the question then becomes: what do we do with this? If pain and disappointment and sadness and grief are universal experiences, how do we deal with this? What do we do with our grief? So the question becomes how do we bring this to God? And the Psalms give us that roadmap. It gives us a template for honest prayer. We're gonna make a switch out here. This mic was acting up at the first service, too.

unknown: 4:46

Thank you.

SPEAKER_00: 4:47

All right, much better. I don't know, it just doesn't like me today, I guess. So I want to give you our bottom line. Um, and it is this lament is about bringing our real pain into the presence of a real God. What we're gonna learn today is that God invites us to be completely honest with our pain, completely honest with our hurt. He wants to know it, he wants to meet us in it. But we're also gonna have to wrestle with the fact that this is not exactly as easy as it sounds. Because the truth is, sitting in pain and hurt and hard is uncomfortable. It's dark. I know lots of us have been there, it's daunting, it's overwhelming, and we'd rather just not do it. And because of that, we adopt a lot of unhelpful things when we're facing grief. And so, what I want to do today, here's where we're headed. I want to highlight three of the most common temptations that we fall into when we're facing grief, and then I want to show you how the Psalms model for us and invite us into something different. So we're gonna take something unhelpful and exchange it for a much better way. So the first is this we're being invited to exchange suppression with honest expression. This is at the heart of lament, giving voice to our pain, giving voice to our hurt. And yet, the number one temptation that most of us face when we're in this place is to avoid it, to ignore it, to push it down. Suppression is refusing to admit our hurt. And I think suppression can take on a lot of forms, it can look a lot of different ways. So I've just kind of come up with a little list of a few of those. The first is distraction. I think a lot of us use distraction to suppress our pain. We throw ourselves into a home project or a work project, anything to kind of busy our minds so we don't even have time to attend to what's going on in us. Another one is medicating. A lot of us do this, right? We do this with substances, drugs, alcohol, anything to take the edge off just a little bit. Another one, I do this a lot, is I like to perform. I like to fake it till I make it. I can trick myself into thinking that if I can just function in my everyday life, if I can be a good mom and a good nurse, right, then I must be fine. Like there's nothing else deeper going on, nothing to see here. But no matter what we do to suppress our pain, the through line is this avoiding our pain and ignoring our pain does not make it go away. I wish it did, but it doesn't. It often actually makes it worse. We have a dog named Beacon, he's a fluffy fellow. And Beacon recently got a hot spot on his neck. I didn't notice it right away. I was bending down and adjusting his collar one morning, and I felt something kind of wet. And so I took a deeper look and then I started to smell something. So I peeled back his fur and it revealed this wound. And I'm really glad I caught it because if this thing would have gone left untreated, it definitely would have led to like a deeper infection in his body. And so I went into all-out nurse mode on my dog. I shaved the fur around the site, I cleaned it up with hydrogen peroxide and antibiotic ointment, and I sort of treated him like one of my patients. You know, every couple hours I would reapply. And then I left his collar off so that it could get some air, so that all the gross stuff could come out and the healing process could take over. And I think this is a really good metaphor for what expression through lament is all about. It's exposing or bringing to light the things that are going on underneath the surface. These things that if left untreated are gonna fester and they're gonna lead to a deeper wound, deeper pain, deeper hurt. And this is where the Psalms come in. I want to read to you guys from Psalm 13. This is obviously a Psalm of Lament. This is David speaking. And in verse 1 and 2 it says this How long, Lord, will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? How long must I wrestle with my thoughts and day after day have sorrow in my heart? How long will my enemy triumph over me? So a little background to this, David is in distress. He's in turmoil because his enemies are winning. But his lament isn't about him venting into a void. No, his lament has a purpose. And he is expressing himself in two directions. So I want to take a look at this. The first thing we see is that David has this inward expression. He's telling himself the truth about where he really is. He's not trying to avoid his pain, he's not trying to ignore it. No, he's giving voice to it. This is what's really going on inside of me. He's reckoning with that. But then we see this second expression, it's an upward expression. David is addressing God directly, he's naming his pain to God. And in this way, David is inviting God into that pain. And see, these two ways of expression are important because when we take this courageous step of giving voice to our pain, we not only realize where we really are, we're giving voice to what's going on inside of us, but we realize that God is waiting to meet us there, in the center of our pain, in the center of our brokenness, and that this is in fact the very place where God's healing and restoration begin, the center of our pain, where we really are. So we're being invited to exchange our suppression with honest expression. That then leads to our second exchange, which is this. We're being invited to exchange isolation with community. Now, I don't know about you, when I'm going through something hard in life, I have this strong tendency to want to pull away, pull away from community, isolate myself, hibernate, hide. I sort of begin this thought process like, oh, I see all that they're dealing with. Like they don't want to deal with what I'm going through too. They have enough to deal with. Or I even get into like the self-protective mode where uh I just think, man, I don't really want people to see me in that light. It's kind of an unattractive place to be when you're in the throes of grief and pain. I don't really want to have people see me like that. So I don't want to make that vulnerable choice. But this can do a lot of harm for us. When we isolate, it can result in deeper pain because the loneliness sets in, depression sets in, fear can mount, and then we lose our perspective altogether. But you see, the psalms invite us into something different. They're inviting us to replace our isolation with community. And I did a little deep dive into Psalms of Lament. There are 73 Psalms of Lament, 59 of them are individual laments, and then 14 of them are corporate or communal laments. So the individual laments, they're voiced by a single person crying out to God in their distress and their grief, their personal suffering. And then these corporate or communal laments, well, these are voiced by a community of people struggling with the same thing. So it's often in relation to a national disaster, war, exile, famine, these sorts of things. And what struck me as I discovered this here is that we see a willingness in the Psalms not only to bring our pain into the presence of God, but also into the presence of other people. And we see examples of this throughout scripture. I think of Ruth and Naomi, uh, Moses and Aaron's another example, but one that I wanted to linger on here for a bit is David and Jonathan. So I want to read to you guys from 1 Samuel 23, verse 16 and 17. And it says this, and Saul's son Jonathan went to David at Haresh and helped him find strength in God. Don't be afraid, he said, My father Saul will not lay a hand on you. So, background to this, David is running for his life in this passage. Saul, in his jealousy of David taking over as king, is plotting to kill him. And in this very moment, God sends Jonathan to David. Now, I love this passage because it kind of reveals a couple things. Jonathan responds to David and his pain in a couple of ways. First, he encourages him. Like even his presence in this circumstance is a real gift to David. He also, though, he broadens David's perspective. He points him to God. He's telling David, God's power is greater than that of King Saul's. And then perhaps the biggest thing that he does is he helps David bear this burden of despair that he's carrying. He has Down syndrome. And a little over a year ago, Griffin's team from school called a meeting with Mac and I. And they said, you know, we really don't think Down syndrome captures everything that's going on with Griffin. Like we think there's some more going on. And we would like to add autism to his IEP at school. And this is a team of people that know him well. You know, it's not like they just met him. They've been working with him for years. They're his therapists and learning strategists, people that know and love him. And so, you know, we trust them. And Mac and I started to process this together. And it really didn't come as a shock, because we've known Griffin his whole life, and he definitely has signs of autism as well. You know, he has a strong reactivity to loud noises. That's why fire drills are the worst. He also doesn't like basketball games. Those buzzers are just awful. He also has a lot of stimming behaviors. He taps his head incessantly on hard objects. He twirls beads in many directions and with both hands. Really good at that one. He flaps his hands like a little bird taking off in flight. Many of them are sweet and endearing. But there's also really hard things about this because one of the things that Mac and I have noticed throughout the years is that Griffin has a really hard time in social contexts. You know, he doesn't interact like the other kids do. And it overwhelms him. It causes a lot of anxiety. And that's really hard to deal with. And so we began to let this digest this news. Wow, you know, my son, he not only has one diagnosis, but two. You know, Down syndrome is limiting. It makes his life challenging. Adding autism to that, well, that is just a whole new layer. And one that seems really difficult. And so I began to process this, and a real grief set in. I could feel it. It was a little subtle at first, and then it sort of was like this wet blanket. This grief. And so I brought it before the Lord. I started lamenting this to God. And I felt him encouraging me, like, yes, I want you to bring your pain before me, but I also felt him challenging me to bring this pain and grief into the presence of those around me. And that was harder. It was hard because it was hard to even acknowledge to myself that I was grieving this in my own son's life, my beautiful, perfect little boy. But saying it out loud to other people, well, it made it feel more real. But I did, I took the courageous step, I invited people in, and when I did, a really beautiful thing happened. Although these people in my life they couldn't fix it, they couldn't make it go away, they couldn't save me from my grief. What they did offer me was a different perspective. They pointed me to God. And ultimately, sharing my grief with them lightened my load. It was like bringing this before other people, it made it more bearable. And so I do believe that community is essential for our healing. It allows pain to be named and carried together. And whether it's something that we're going through individually or collectively, God's healing power can be huge in our life. It can allow us that deeper level of healing that He very much wants to bring about. So we're being invited to exchange our isolation with community. And this then leads us to our final exchange. And that is, we are being invited to exchange despair with trust. I think one of the biggest temptations when we're walking through the thick of it in grief is to remain in our state of despair, to just be swallowed by it. And I want to be clear here it is important to voice your pain. That's what we've been talking about. It's a necessity. Natural part of grief. But what becomes problematic is when we let despair get the last word. And it's really interesting because when we look to the Psalms, although these Psalms of Lament they start in despair and in turmoil and in distress, but they don't end there. Going back to Psalm 13, for the first four verses, we see David crying out to God in his grief and despair. But then comes this turning point. We see it in verse 5 and 6, and he says this, but I trust in your unfailing love. My heart rejoices in your salvation. I will sing the Lord's praise, for he has been good to me. Trust becomes this turning point. And this trust for David is anchored in remembering God's past faithfulness. So when Griffin was three years old, he had this thing called an ABR. It stands for Auditory Brain Stem Response Test, kind of a mouthful. But what was happening is Griffin was struggling with his hearing. We were concerned about it, and he wasn't able to take the standard hearing tests. So what happened was we brought him into children's hospital, they put him under general anesthesia, and then they would introduce noise into his ear, and he had an EEG reading on his sweet little head, and they would track his response or his brainwave reactivity to the noises they were introducing in his ears. So after the procedure, the doctor came in, he ushered us into the little family meeting area, and he sat us down and he said, Well, I have some hard news. And, you know, at this point in Griffin's life, he's three, Mac and I are like, Do we get good news? Like, is there any good news to this life of ours? It's kind of hard. But no, once again, bad news. So he sits down, he says, There's two types of hearing loss. There's conductive hearing loss. This involves the outer or middle ear, and it's usually uh something temporary, uh, fluid in the ears, tiny ear canals, all that. It goes away. But see, there's this second type of hearing loss, and this one's permanent. This one's more serious. It's called sensory neural hearing loss. And this one involves the inner ear and even the auditory nerve. And there's really no cure for it, there's just ways to adapt. And so he said, unfortunately, your son has the ladder. He has permanent sensory neural hearing loss. And so we took the next steps. We got connected with an audiologist, and over the next 18 months, we were on this journey. Griffin had these sweet little turquoise hearing aids, he would throw them out of his ears all the time. He adapted terribly, but we tried. We really tried. Um, so one day we went in for a routine visit to his audiologist's office. And she took these sweet little turquoise hearing aids out of his ears and she hooked them up to her little device. And she got this really perplexed look on her face. And then she started ferociously like investigating in his chart and getting a bit intense. And I kind of called a timeout. I was like, Well, what's going on? Like, what are we doing? She was kind of a matter-of-fact person and very scientific. And she just said, Well, this the results of what I just ran are just not consistent with his diagnosis. Like, this just doesn't make any sense. She says, The test I just ran says that Griffin has normal, healthy hearing. And I said, hmm, interesting. And she's like, So we better run it again. I'll run the test again. So she runs it again. Same result. And she looks at me, she said, Josie, in my 30 years of practice, I have never seen anything like this. I can't explain it. Your son doesn't need hearing aids anymore. And in that moment, I knew. I knew that God had healed him. God made Griffin's permanent hearing loss temporary. Praise God. Yes, he touched him with his healing hand, and now Griffin is a walking miracle. And you see, I think God has been bringing this story to my mind a lot lately because I've been processing these two diagnoses that my sweet boy has. And I do, I sometimes get into this state of despair thinking, man, I just wish his life had turned out a little differently when I get Griffin off the half bus from school and I see another little boy sitting across the aisle with Down syndrome, and he's giving me direct eye contact. You know, he's interacting with me in a socially appropriate way, and I start thinking, why does my son have to have two? Why can't he just have the one? I feel like God is gently bringing me back with this story. He's reminding me, Josie, I had my hand in his life then, and I have my hand in his life now. I didn't abandon you then, and I won't abandon you now. Remember my faithfulness. You see, despair grows when we forget our story with God, but trust grows when we remember what God has done for us. He has been good to us. We're being invited to exchange our despair with trust. So here's the good news: our pain, it doesn't need to be avoided. God wants to know about it, he wants to meet us in it, and the way that we do this is by learning how to lament. Lament is about bringing our real pain into the presence of a real God. And I want to close here today by kind of putting it all together. I'm gonna read all of Psalm 13 to you so that we can see how David does this. So, verse 1 and 2, how long, Lord, will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? How long must I wrestle with my thoughts and day after day have sorrow in my heart? How long will my enemy triumph over me? So again, we see David expressing his pain. He's giving voice to his hurt, he's getting it out there. Then verse three and four, look on me and answer, Lord my God. Give light to my eyes, or I will sleep in death, and my enemy will say, I have overcome him, and my foes will rejoice when I fall. So now David is breaking out of his isolation, and he's asking for a response. And in this case, that response comes from God. And then verse five and six, but I trust in your unfailing love, my heart rejoices in your salvation. I will sing the Lord's praise, for he has been good to me. Again, the turning point. So God takes David's lament and he replaces his despair with trust, and he will do the same for us. I want to give you some action steps, some ways to respond to this message today. If God is prompting something in your heart, follow that. If not, I want to just give you a couple reflection questions here to start. Number one, what pain in my life needs to be exposed? Am I suppressing something that needs to be expressed? Second, do I have community in my life that I can share the hard stuff with? I want you to identify who those people are for you. And then three, how has God demonstrated his faithfulness to me? What stories from my past come to mind? And then some practices that we can engage in here. I want you to write a lament. We have a link in our service guide to a lament tool on our website, and this thing has been very helpful for me over the years. It kind of gives you a step-by-step guide on how to kind of lay it all out there for him. It asks some helpful questions and can really help you put that together. Number two, call a friend. Let them know you're struggling. Bringing people into our pain and hurt is a huge component of our healing. And then lastly, journal about God's past faithfulness in your life. I think writing it out even might remind you of stories that you've forgotten, stories that God really wants to bring to your mind so that your healing can begin. Why don't we stand for closing prayer? Father, thank you so much for meeting us in the center of our pain, in the center of our brokenness. God, we just thank you that you can handle our grief. You can handle our honesty. And God, I pray that we would have the courage to do that so that your healing and your restoration can begin in our lives. We ask these things in your name. Amen. Go in peace.