Enlarging your soul through grief and loss

Merelyme has opened a topic on her blog about suffering. This is a topic I also like to talk about, because I've suffered a lot of pain due to my bipolar disorder, and yet I know I've grown much through this pain as well. I don't like the suffering and do everything I can to not go through it, and yet I know that each time I do I come out richer at the end.

Yes, I did want to talk about this growth I've experienced through my suffering. And yet, I think I'm going to do an about face here and talk instead about the pain I've been feeling as a result of the loss of my mother-in-law and knowing that I'll be without my friend for two months. This is probably a different kind of pain than the pain we experience from illness. Yet grief can lead to depression, even more so for people who suffer from mood disorders already. It can be a trigger for a mood swing.

I, along with others in my church, have been studying a book by Peter Scazzero, called Emotionally Healthy Spirituality. This book teaches how it's impossible to be spiritually mature, while remaining emotionally immature. Part of being emotionally mature is that when we go through the pain of grief and loss (as we all do) we should not try to cover it up. We need to feel it; we need to go through the process of dealing with it. Many try to numb the pain by denial, minimizing, blaming others or themselves, rationalizing, addictions and avoidance. (I don't want to go into the details of each of these. You'll need to read the book.) The thing is, we need to embrace the pain when it comes.

Scazzero says, "Loss marks the place where self-knowledge and powerful transformation happen - if we have the courage to participate fully in the process." He illustrates this, using the story of Job.

I think the loss of my friend for two months has actually hit me harder than the loss of my mother-in-law. I'm much too attached to this friend. I tell her everything; she is a soul-mate. So having her far away for so long will be painful. She has done this before and it put me into a deep depression. The difference that time, though, was that I felt shame for feeling so badly about her leaving; I felt guilty for missing her so much. I felt there was something wrong with me. This time, I've told her that I'm not going to feel ashamed of my feelings. I have every right to feel badly when someone I love so much is gone for so long. This time I faced the pain; I embraced the pain. And I was on the edge of depression once more.

But, as Scazzero's book and my pastor Don have pointed out, feeling broken does not mean I'm emotionally immature. Wholeness can be found, not by eradicating the brokenness but by finding wholeness in the middle of brokenness. As I've shown in a previous post, I've actually come to understand God's love more as a result of the pain of the past two weeks. I've come to understand the great pain he feels over us. To love much means to hurt much. And God loves us more than we could ever understand. Over the past couple of weeks I've come to feel more secure within the love of God. My soul has been enlarged. On Sunday Pastor Don said, "We are transformed by surrendering to God's love." And I did; and I was. And I am pretty sure I've now escaped the threat of depression.

I am now drawing most of my comfort from being there for friends who are in trouble. Eugene Peterson's version of 2 Corintians 1:4 in the Message says, " He (God) comes alongside us when we go through hard times, and before you know it, he brings us alongside someone else who is going through hard times so that we can be there for that person just as God was there for us." Coming alongside others is healing. It leads to wholeness.

Getting rid of junk

Pastor Don started his sermon today in a way that was so apropos to what I am going through right now. He talked about the junk we all tend to collect. He talked about almost being at the point of checking the lane to make sure no one is coming before opening the garage door, so embarrassed was he about the mess in there. My husband and I feel the same way. Things have gotten so out of hand that we bought a pickup truck a couple of weeks ago, partly because we need an extra vehicle, and partly because we need to haul away a lot of junk...and not only from the garage. We have three rooms in the house where walking through the room and finding things is a challenge. Embarrassing!

Yesterday my 35-year-old son spent a couple of hours trying to get rid of some of the junk he's been storing at our house. I need the space for my studio. Unbelievable the stuff he has hung onto all these years: notebooks from elementary school, a pirate ship he made out of popsicle sticks when he was in grade five, an incomplete set of dominos in a broken wooden box - something he played with every time he went to Grandma's house when he was a toddler. Then there's the toy box Grandpa made for him for his first Christmas, lego, a collection of Mad magazines, a favourite tshirt from when he was nine, and a drawer of socks and underwear from his teen days. Unbelievable!

The preamble to Pastor Don's sermon led to a talk about the emotional junk we have in our life and how we need to deal with that if we are to be spiritually mature. In his notes he wrote, "God wants to transform your whole life - that is really what growth to spiritual maturity is all about - but for that to happen you will have to allow him into the junk rooms of your life and cooperate with His Spirit to clean up and clear out the junk that has accumulated over the course of your life." I hope my emotional junk rooms are not as bad as the junk rooms in my home!

One friend I spoke to after the service didn't know if she could go through with the series we'll be doing at our small group - studying the book Emotionally Healthy Spirituality and accompanying workbook by Peter Scazzero. She didn't think she'd be able to summon the honesty that was going to require from her. But as Romans 8:38-39 states: Nothing will separate us from the love of God, "neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation..."
Knowing that should allow us to be honest with ourselves and with others. God will love us no matter what is revealed.

In the words of Scazzero: "Emotional health powerfully anchors me in the love of God by affirming that I am worthy of feeling, worthy of being alive, and lovable even when I am brutally honest about the good, the bad, and the ugly deep beneath the surface..."