Print Friendly Version

All change involves an element of loss.

Even good changes.

If you’re single and marry the love of your life, you lose some independence. If you begin a new job, you lose the familiarity of where you once worked. If you move to a new place, you lose the comfort that comes from knowing your way around.

Then there are the bad changes. You lose your health. You lose your job. You lose a loved one.

Change = loss. Ponder that a moment. Change is inevitable in life, and by my simple equation, it follows that loss is inevitable.

We grieve when we lose. I grieve when Auburn loses a ball game, but it’s not a crushing grief (well, sometimes it comes close.) I grieve when we’ve lost a pet. That’s family. In all my years of youth ministry, I’ve grieved when I’ve lost a student … when a kid I’ve invested in and loved on gets spiritually shipwrecked, man, that hurts.

I could go on. Certainly we grieve over lost relationships. There are times when people leave our lives, either benignly or by some incident. There may be times to legitimately say “good riddance” and other times when even after multiple attempts to make things right, they’re just – gone. Heartbreaking.

And loss of a loved one? What pure, unadulterated pain. It could be a grandparent, parent, child, or spouse. If you’re a believer, and you know the one you’ve said goodbye to is also a believer, you understand that your “goodbye” is more accurately a “see you later.” You’ve made arrangements to meet again.

Mama lost her fourth bout with cancer. She began with renal cell carcinoma, a kidney cancer that is rarely life-threatening and relatively easy to treat. (I’ve had that one, and I’m fine.)

Some years later she was diagnosed with lung cancer. Surgery, and she had several cancer-free years. Then, lung cancer v.2. Surgery. Done.

Finally, she found herself complaining of rapidly increasing back pain. This time, it was cancer, and it was everywhere, in her bones. She didn’t last long after that. But she died with dignity, just as she’d lived.

I’m an only child, and we’d already buried Daddy some years earlier. So this was it. I was to be an orphan (albeit a middle-aged one.) We had several good conversations as the day approached and she was lucid. It really wasn’t until a couple of days before her death that she slipped into a quiet, sweet darkness and didn’t communicate. And when she passed, it was expected and I was prepared.

It was still hard. But interestingly enough, I’d done most of my grieving before she actually died. There was time for me to prepare, and my comfort during those days had an awful lot to do with grace. I often wondered in earlier years how I’d react after both my parents were gone, and I think I’ve done fine. Of course there are times when I’d love to visit with them today, but that’s just going to have to stay on hold for a while longer.

So, we have this: Change = loss = grief.

How does one grieve appropriately? More succinctly, how do we grieve as one who has hope?

1. You have to identify your source of hope. This is an immutable, unchanging factor in your life. If your hope is based on how you feel at any given point in time, you are not going to handle loss well. Feelings are the great betrayers. They are ever-changing. They are often based on circumstances. So your hope has to be based not on how you feel, but what (and who) your security is in.

2. You look to those who have hope in that similar source. This is where you look for living testimonies. You know scores of people who’ve dealt with a loss, and I’m not restricting that to the loss of a loved one. It could be some of the other losses I’ve mentioned. And they’ve managed fine. It may have taken a while for them to adjust to their new normal, but often they’ve flourished. (I could riff on “failure” here, but the bottom line is that failure, which is also a loss, can and should lead to a fresh start and eventual success.) Be encouraged by them.

3. Don’t let others drag you down. We all know those people who darken a room by their very presence. They are negative and cynical. You aren’t allowed not to love them, but you are allowed to avoid them, or at least not get trapped in their negativity.

4. Realize your loss can be someone else’s gain. This is a companion thought to that last point. Everything – and I mean everything – happens for at least two reasons. One is to teach you something about yourself and give you inspiration to do something about it if you aren’t happy with what you’ve learned. Second, you can lead and comfort someone going through the same thing you did. It goes from saying “I understand” (which you may or may not) to “I identify,” because you’ve been there. In the ultimate manifestation of empathy, you may be able to honestly say, “I feel (or have felt) what you feel.” Tell me that won’t impact someone else’s life.

5. Accept the fact that you can’t go back. I could say a lot about regrets here, but that’s fodder for another day. What I can say is that you don’t get do-overs. You do get second chances, but that’s not the same. There are moments in our collective past that are forever fixed in time, and they can’t be undone. Sometimes grief grows out of “I should have’s.” Do what you can to internalize this thought: Whatever it was, you can’t take it back. You can learn from it, grow from it, but it won’t change what was, or wasn’t, done. It’s called moving forward.

6. Finally, you can’t place your hope in something that can change. If your total source of hope is found in a person, realize that people change, leave, die. Where’s your hope then? And surely you know better than to place your hope in a paycheck, or modern medicine, or the government. Those can all change, too. From where I sit, that hope is found in a personal relationship with God.

Ancient script says “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change.”* Change is inevitable, but it should never lead to hopelessness. Hopelessness is not an option. Be encouraged.

*James 1:17