Journey through the Wall. Walls, or as the ancients called it “the dark night of the soul” are times in our spiritual journey God stops us through crisis or circumstances beyond our control. These are times when God deeply transforms us and our understanding of Him. The Wall closely relates to our theme for today – Grief and Loss.
Our culture routinely interprets losses as alien invasions that interrupt our “normal” lives. Jonathan Edwards, in a famous sermon on the book of Job, noted that the story of Job is the story of us all. Job lost everything in one day—his 10 children die suddenly in a natural disaster. He loses all his wealth – even though he is one of the richest people in the world, and he loses his health to such an extent that he is physically unrecognizable. That happens to some of us.
But most of us experience our losses more slowly, over the span of a lifetime, until we find ourselves on the door of death, leaving everything behind – all our relationships, all our possessions, all our health. We lose our youthfulness. No amount of plastic surgery, cosmetics, good diet or exercise routine can stop the process of growing older. We lose our dreams. Who has not lost dreams, dreams of a career or marriage or children for which we hoped?
We experience loss in transitions of life. Each time we change jobs, or move is a loss. Our children grow more independent as they move through their life transitions. Our influence and power decreases as we grow older.
Most of us, in one or more moments of our lives, experience catastrophic loss. Unexpectedly, a family member dies. A friend or son commits suicide. A spouse has an affair. We find ourselves single again after a painful divorce or breakup. We are diagnosed with cancer. Our company suddenly downsizes and we find ourselves unemployed after 25 years. Our child is born severely handicapped. A loyal friend betrays us. We experience infertility, miscarriages, broken friendships, mental illness, abuse in our childhoods. They are all losses.
We grieve the many things we can’t do, our limits. Some people, like me, “lost a leg in that war” in their family of origin growing up and now walk with a limp. We even lose our wrong ideas of God and the church. We find out that certain ideas we had about Jesus and what it meant to follow Him are inadequate, foolish—maybe even wrong. We feel betrayed by a church tradition, a leader, or even God himself. We lose our illusions about the church. We discover it is not the perfect family with perfect people as we expected. In fact, people disappoint us. At times, we are bewildered and shocked. Every person who lives in community with other believers, sooner or later, experiences this disillusionment and the grief that accompanies it.
We all face many deaths within our lives. The choice is whether these deaths will be terminal (crushing our spirit and life) or open us up to new possibilities and depths of transformation in Christ.~http://www.emotionallyhealthy.org/w...-Enlarge-Your-Soul-through-Grief-and-Loss.pdf