When I posted the sermon “Suspicion, Trust and Good News” on my internet blog (October 16, 2006), an anonymous comment on it quickly challenged me to address “trust on the next level”: “Trust as it concerns the lives of your spouse, your children, your parents. . . . I too feel like I can [trust] when it involves just me,” the person wrote. But “When it involves my wife [or] child, placing my trust in God is harder to do and living with a bad result even harder to bear. How does the trust in God you just spoke about apply as it extends beyond just me?” I resonated immediately with the comment and with the question, and I thought first of a friend who has been through hell and back (and some days still only barely back) after the sudden death of her husband and the tragic death of her daughter. The particulars of her personal life are no one’s business but her own, but those are only two of the icebergs that have struck the Titanic of her life, and somehow still she floats.
Her struggle to trust God, which she has shared with me, has been nothing less than a Sisyphean challenge—after the character in Greek mythology named Sisyphus who was fated forever to roll a rock up a steep hill, only to have it roll back down to the bottom to begin all over again. For years now, about the time she reaches the top of the hill, a demoralizing development intervenes and down rolls her rock. Another time, her foot may slip or her determination may weaken, or the wind blows or the ground trembles, and down rolls the rock and with it her trust in God. At least some others of us understand that challenge, even if the shape and content—the particulars of our struggle—differ from hers. Most of us have at least one rock with which we struggle up the hill, “and living with a bad result” is indeed “even harder to bear” when it involves the life and well-being of someone we love, a spouse, a child, a parent, a longtime friend.
Whatever else it is, “living with a bad result” requires of us grief work: the work that grieving is. One of the great grief passages in all of Scripture is found in 2 Samuel 18, when after the death of Absalom his son, we are told in v 33, David the king “was deeply moved, and went up to the chamber over the gate, and wept; and as he went, he said, “O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! Would that I had died instead of you, O Absalom, my son, my son!” Sometimes grief comes on us as it did on David as a result of the literal death of someone we love. Sometimes the death is not literal but it is no less real, as when we lose someone we love to addiction or to depression, to divorce or to dementia. Grief comes on us every time we experience what the anonymous commenter on my sermon called “the most anxious, terrifying, lack of control: . . . . When you are truly invested in someone else’s life pattern and doing everything in your power to move the results into the realm of acceptability. But other than trying to strike the right chord or provide a different vision you have no control over the result or their actions.” That’s when “living with a bad result is even harder to bear,” whether it is a literal death that grieves us or a death that is not literal but no less real. So when we pray “for those who are grieving,” we are praying especially for those whose loved ones have died, but it turns out that we are praying at the very same time for those who have experienced profound losses in many different ways.
Years later now, I still cannot forget the grief of a mother I know and admire whose teenage son drove one night while intoxicated, lost control of his speeding car and crossed the median of I-385 into the oncoming lane of traffic where his car struck another car head-on, killing its driver. It was his first offense ever, of any kind whatsoever, and it resulted in a felony DUI conviction that put him in prison for 15 years, where every Sunday morning she visits him faithfully. She would have gladly gone to jail for the rest of her life in his place, if the judge would have allowed it. But instead she was left to weep like David, unable to change or control the outcome, forced to “live with a bad result” that was even harder to bear because it was her child who had done an unthinkable thing that brought unthinkable grief to another family, and who in turn was suffering an unthinkable consequence for his actions. I could multiply the examples of which I am aware, and still I couldn’t begin to touch on all the griefs and sorrows that are borne by people I know. But there are several lessons we can learn from David in 2 Samuel 18:33 – 19:8a about “living with a bad result.” Let’s look at the process that David goes through in the aftermath of Absalom’s death.
First, David wept. David wept unashamedly. David poured out the pain and the loss, the anger and the hurt in his tears, no matter who else heard or saw or what they said or thought. He didn’t concern himself with the pretense of keeping up appearances or hiding the pain. He didn’t concern himself with what others would think or say. David did not bottle up his grief and hold it inside where it would corrode his heart and his soul. He embraced his grief, and he turned it loose in his words and in his tears. Grief that goes unembraced can never be turned loose. It gets dragged around like a ball and chain, worn like an albatross around the neck. It becomes a perpetually open wound that never heals. The “bad result that is even harder to bear” becomes incapacitating when we refuse to recognize and accept it for what it is, embrace it and turn it loose by naming it and crying it out. A hit song by country music artist Gary Allan that still gets radio time three years after its release is titled “Tough Little Boys.” In it Allan sings in the refrain, “When tough little boys grow up to be dads, they turn into big babies again.” It’s true, isn’t it, for many of us, at least. It’s true because “living with a bad result” is “even harder to bear” when something hurtful happens to your daughter or your son, your granddaughter or your grandson. When David wept, he named his grief, and he cried it out.
The second thing David did that we can learn from was to take the counsel of someone he trusted. When Joab, David’s most trusted advisor, came to him in his grief, David listened to Joab’s counsel. As an aside, I wish I had a month of Sundays just to treat this relationship between David and his general Joab. If you’ve read the book of 2 Samuel recently, you may recall that it was none other than Joab who struck the first blows against Absalom, and it was Joab’s own armor-bearers who killed David’s son (18:14-15), in spite of David’s order to “Deal gently for my sake with the young man Absalom” (v 5) in spite of the fact he had rebelled against his father by leading an attempted coup that if it had succeeded would certainly have resulted in David’s death, among many others. Still, Joab was David’s most trusted advisor, and 2 Samuel 19:5 tells us that Joab came to David to tell him that it was time to move on. It was time to move on from embracing his grief and crying it out. And David listened.
The truth is, most of what well-meaning people say to us when we are grieving is unhelpful at best and downright destructive at worst. When the Old Testament character Job was grieving the loss of his family and his home and everything he had, three friends of his “met together to go and console and comfort him,” Job 2:12 says. According to v 13, “They sat with him on the ground seven days and seven nights, and no one spoke a word to him, for they saw that his suffering was very great.” And his friends were a consolation and comfort to Job—until they made the mistake of opening their mouths. When they broke their silence, the things they said only added to his grief and his suffering. But there are persons whom we can trust to tell us what we need to hear when we need to hear it, and Joab was just that sort of person to David. Joab said, in effect, you have responsibilities to attend to. You have people who are depending on you. It’s time to let it go, Joab said. On one of my visits with the late Jack Dennis, a long-time member of this congregation, I asked him to tell me, father-to-father, how in the world he had made it through the drowning death of one of his young sons. His answer was simple and direct. “I had other children depending on me,” Jack said. “I had to be a father to my children who were living.” Jack Dennis was broken-hearted and he grieved. And then he saw to it that he didn’t let his grief over his son who died destroy the lives of his children who were still alive. Unfortunately, some people spend so much time and energy lighting candles for the dead that they leave the living in the darkness. There comes a time to let it go and move on. You may indeed be scarred for life, but you don’t keep picking at the scab so that the wound bleeds every day. You rub the scar and you remember the pain, and then you move on because you have responsibilities to attend to, you have living to do.
And that’s the third thing David did. He let it go, and he moved on. He turned to invest himself in the life that he was called by God to live, even though someone he loved, who meant the world to him, was no longer living. 1 Samuel 19: 8 tells us, “Then the king got up and took his seat in the gate.” David reinvested himself in the living. It’s not that he forgot about Absalom; he didn’t. It’s not that he no longer loved the son he had lost; he did. But he embraced his grief by naming it and crying it out. He listened to someone he trusted. And then he let it go and moved on by reinvesting himself in the living. When “a bad result that is even harder to bear” comes on someone you love, whether that bad result is a literal death or a figurative death that is no less real, the first work to be done is grief work.
You will recall that I began with a friend of mine of whom I said that the sudden death of her husband and the tragic death of her daughter are only two of the icebergs that have struck the Titanic of her life—and still she floats. Whenever she must, she returns to the bottom of the hill and begins to push her rock again. What she has been through and still goes through would have broken a stronger person than I into a million pieces. I would have sunk beneath the waves long ago, I am sure. But she still floats because she continues to do her grief work diligently and even daily, when necessary: embracing it by naming it and crying it out, listening to persons she knows she can trust and ignoring all the rest, and letting it go to move on to the living. It’s then and only then, in the words of hymn writer Brian Wren, that hope and sorrow unite and we begin to discover new and solid ground for trusting God, not because things turn out the way we want them to, the way we wish they would, or even the way we prayed for them to be, but because even in our grief and loss we come to hear God calling us to life and to living. And so we listen attentively for God even in our struggle to trust on our journey toward that place where hope and sorrow unite.
(My predecessor at First Baptist Greenville, Dr. Hardy Clemons, has written an excellent book on grief work titled Saying Hello to Your Life After Grief. It is available from your local bookseller or from Smyth & Helwys Publishing at http://www.helwys.com/ and also at http://www.amazon.com/, where unfortunately they have misspelled his name, so search under the title rather than the author!)
This material is Copyrighted © 2006 by Jeffrey S. Rogers. It may be copied or disseminated for non-commercial use, provided this notice is included. The author can be contacted at jeffrogers110@bellsouth.net.
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