“You need to lead a grief symposium,” she said. “So many people need encouragement.”
That was a new thought, in some ways. And one for which I was unprepared.
I promised to pray about it and give it some thought.
I know so little about grief. It doesn’t seem like too long ago when I was thinking death seemed to have skipped our family altogether. My parents were living into their mid-90s and all my siblings were alive and well, into our 60s and beyond. And then, maybe I spoke too soon….
Our youngest brother Charlie died in ’06, our Dad in ’07, and Mom in ’12. Our brother Glenn went to Heaven after that, followed by my brother Ron’s only grandson Micah, in his mid-20s. And then my wife of 52+ years died in January of this year.
The hits just keep on coming.
As a veteran pastor, I know a great deal about funerals. And, having cared for hurting families over these decades, I thought I knew a lot about grief. I did, but it was all from the outside. I was an observer, a reporter, never a participant.
These days I’m learning about grief from the inside.
So far, the main thing I’ve learned is I don’t much like it. Grief accompanies bad things in our lives. Grief saps the joy out of our days and robs us of sleep at night. It takes away our appetite and dampens our enthusiasm for the activities that used to fill the spaces in our lives.
Grief is an erratic guest in my house. Some days he does not show up at all, and then suddenly with no warning, descends in full force and causes the tears to flow. HIs visitations are triggered by the oddest of prompts, everything from an old photograph to a forgotten note in a file to something written in the margin of the Bible. Sometimes grief’s presence is like a dark cloud over the house and at other times a jab with a pointed stick.
A symposium, says the dictionary, derives from the Greek and originally meant a drinking party (sym meaning ‘together’ and the rest of the word being a cousin to our potion).
“Can you drink of the cup from which I will drink?” our Lord asked His disciples (Mark 10:38). He had in mind suffering, whereas they wanted something less bitter.
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