"There are grieving people sitting in every pew."
That sentence jumped off the page and stayed in my head, as I stood in the Christian bookstore, flipping through books a few years ago.
I don't recall the title of the book or even the topic, but the more I live, the more I agree with that statement.
How to help the grieving people in our pew ~ or what to do with our own grief ~ is the question.
Molly Piper has a blog series, "
How to Help Your Grieving Friend," which offers practical ideas for supporting a friend who is grieving a death, specifically the death of an infant or child.
Most of our grief is different from that, stemming from disappointments of life, hurts from others, and even losses we ourselves might not even notice.
Every choice, even the good choices, means we say, "No," to another option, and to varying degrees, we grieve what might have been.
While house-hunting, you decide on the house with more bedrooms, thereby not choosing the house with bay windows. In the grand scheme of things, most people won't actively grieve the loss of bay windows, but sometimes it's helpful to name (and acknowledge) our losses, even those that we think don't matter.
As with all human experiences, when we enter into grief (our own or our friend's), we experience new &/or deeper aspects of God's character.
As I've reflected on loss & grief lately, my "Aha!" moment has been the reminder that it won't always be this way. As Jim's grandfather would say,
"It's better farther on."
Until that day when the Lord Jesus returns, let's encourage one another by being present in one another's grief and by reminding one another of our sure & certain hope as believers, that it
is better farther on!
