• Grief,  More Stories,  Stories and Songs,  Uncategorized

    Your Redeemer Will Keep You—Part 2

    June 17, 2019

    This post is the second part of a presentation I had the opportunity to give on Ruth 1 at a women’s Bible study at my church. If you’d like to catch up, this link will take you to Part 1. The last post left Naomi destitute and alone, after her husband and two sons had died in Moab, far away from her home, Bethlehem. Finally, after famine and loss, she has reached a breaking point. The section below covers Ruth 1:6–13, from Naomi’s breaking point to where we see the Redeemer break through.

    The Breaking Point (1:6–13)

    It’s surprising, actually, that her breaking point didn’t come sooner, considering her plight. Being a single woman, abandoned, in a way, through the death of her husband and sons, she decides to return to the land which seems to have been abandoned by the God who had promised much and, in Naomi’s mind, failed to follow through. Her womb was empty, and she had no hope of producing an heir who would be able to provide for her physical needs and be a sign of the continuing covenant with God.

    The narrator slows the story down here so that this point really soaks into the readers—we can just feel the tension rising in the story, can’t we? If you look at the passage, you can see that he pulls out a different literary tool in this section than he’s used to this point, and describes the whole conversation between Naomi and her daughters-in-law in detail.

    So perhaps this is her biggest problem—she has no heir. Her line will end with her death. In scripture, this problem was not unique to Naomi. Sarah, Abraham’s wife, an old woman like Naomi, laughed at the prophecy that she would become pregnant and have a son. In this section, Naomi is acting a lot like Sarah! It was true that her body was too old to bear another son, and it was true that her daughters-in-law would not be able to give her an heir even if she did have another son. And so, like Sarah, she took matters into her own hands. Unlike Sarah, however, her move was not to finagle a way to work things out. Instead, she simply gave up, assuming that God would not continue working when the odds were seemingly stacked against him. 

    She did what she probably believed to be the kindest and reasonable thing, under the circumstances. She sent her daughters-in-law, her only hopes for an heir, back to their Moabite families. 

    This is an incredibly bleak point of the story. Naomi is utterly hopeless; vulnerable at every point. She is a woman, alone in a foreign land, facing the options of staying there, or returning to a home that she has not seen in over ten years with the meagre hope of finding pity among her distant family in a place rife with violence, perhaps especially against women. To be a woman, alone or even a group of women, would have been fraught with risk, and terribly frightening. So here is Naomi, drowning in sorrow and bitterness, empty of hope that the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, who brought them out of slavery through the parted waters of the Red Sea into the Promised Land, might yet have good things—the fulfillment of promises—waiting for her. 

    Can you see yourself here? There are so many circumstances that might lead us to this point. 

    What do you feel when you read that one third of the homeless population in Minneapolis are children? What happens when see or experience abuse? We lose loved ones to death. We fail at our jobs and people look down at us. Spouses leave us, and children reject us and everything we have tried to teach them to love. Sometimes even things as simple as reading the headlines in our newsfeeds or momentary rejection from someone we respect can cause us to despair. Can any of us read about the abuse in some of the Sovereign Grace, Southern Baptist, or Catholic churches and not feel a little twinge of despair? Can we read about the murder of babies in the womb, or terrorist groups, or the persecuted church, or injustice in our streets without wondering what God could possibly have in mind?  Do these cause you to spiral into despair and doubt? 

    Naomi felt not only grief, but physical deprivation, and hunger. She felt displacement and loneliness. She felt grief and loss, and the disappointment of shattered hopes and dreams. Has your faith ever faltered or failed in the face of your own suffering?

    Mine has. I remember several times in my life where I could, at least in some ways, relate to Naomi. I remember the last week of March during my freshman year of college, when I spent the week jumping at every phone call, waiting to hear who had died. I lost five peers in four years of high school, two of my classmates just two months before graduation, and all but one in the last week of March. I was jumpy the next March, scared to believe that another loss wasn’t just around the corner. I would imagine Naomi felt like this too. I also remember a few years ago, after my second miscarriage (the first of which occurred in the last week of March), I felt utterly betrayed by my body and even by God. I remember opening my Bible and just looking at it—letting my eyes skim the pages. I don’t say read, because I wasn’t really reading—I was just looking, devoid of feeling or understanding. To use Naomi’s word, I felt utterly, completely “empty”—when I read, when I prayed… My vision of the good things in my life was crowded out by hurt, and loss, and grief. I knew I was blind, and hoped my vision would return, but despite my desire for hope and joy, I was just simply…numb, empty. Can you relate?

    Maybe, when I felt like that I should have spent more time reading Ruth. Because it is here, in verses 16–17, the climax of the chapter, God shows Naomi his faithfulness in the deepest, darkest of places. We, looking back, can see God working where Naomi saw only doom and gloom. One of her daughters-in-laws, Ruth, refuses to go home.

    Instead, she pledges to remain with her, live with her, worship with her, and die with her. In Ruth 1:16–17, we see the part of the story I’ve titled The Redeemer Breaks Through. Ruth’s words here are beautiful, and often quoted. She gives Naomi a strong declaration of love and intent. She says in 1:16–17: “Do not urge me to leave you or to return from following you. For where you go I will go, and where you lodge I will lodge. Your people shall be my people, and your God my God. Where you die I will die, and there will I be buried. May the LORD do so to me and more also if anything but death parts me from you.”

    Right under Naomi’s nose, before her bitter, sorrowful eyes, Ruth was demonstrating the faithfulness and love of God to Naomi. She had not been abandoned, she was not alone. Like a ray of light through a cloud, like a laser beam sent to break up the crusty cataracts on her doubt-clouded eyes, God had provided Ruth to show Naomi his steadfast love for her and his faithful, covenant-keeping intentions. 

    But Naomi doesn’t see clearly just yet. Despite Ruth’s act of immense self-sacrifice and deep love, Naomi remains focused on the bitterness of her circumstances, and, the narrator tells us that she simply “said no more.” She remains chained to her grief and bitterness at the God she believed failed her in every way.

    This, however, is simply not true. The next section, as we will see, will show us how God was continuing to work through Ruth in Naomi’s story, and the story of Israel, and even our stories. We will see the foreshadowing of the coming Messiah.

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  • Death and Dying,  Grief,  My Story

    Days to Remember

    March 25, 2019

    This is it, you guys. This week marks the anniversaries of car accidents, suicide, and my first miscarriage. 

    I sang with the congregation in church yesterday, and tears welled up and overflowed as we sang of death and resurrection. Most of my losses this week are from over a decade ago, but this week still marks most of the darkest days of my life—the loss of four teenage peers and one tiny baby. This week is worth crying over.

    I used to mark it well, taking some time off to sit and contemplate the losses I’ve experienced. To remember the people who have died, and intentionally grieve their loss, pray for their families, and let sorrow lead me to prayers of “Maranatha! Come, Lord Jesus!”

    The last few years have been, simply, busy, and I’ve let that be an excuse to let this practice fall by the wayside. But it’s worthwhile, I think, to take the time to mark loss, and my lack of planning is unfortunate. One reason I want to continue this practice (maybe I’ll have to shift the date to next week this year) is that I don’t want to miss out. I think there’s real gain in grieving.

    2 Corinthians 4:7–16 has been influential in my thinking in this regard. There, Paul speaks of the treasure we have—”the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.” Our bodies, in the metaphor, are jars of clay. As these bodies, these jars, suffer and become cracked, the light of Christ shines out with greater and greater brightness, being “renewed day by day.”

    So I remember, consciously, the times when I have felt the most cracked, the most worn. I remember the cracking so that I remember, too, the strengthening of the light within me and the comfort of the Holy Spirit.

    And I also remember for the sake of what Paul speaks of in 2 Corinthians 1:3–7, a passage I stumbled upon in my reading the morning after I learned of my cousin’s suicide: “For as we share abundantly in the sufferings of Christ we share abundantly in comfort too. If we are afflicted, it is for your comfort and salvation; and if we are comforted, it is for your comfort…Our hope for you is unshaken, for we know that as you share in our sufferings, you will also share in our comfort.” I remember for the sake of my empathy. If I remember my own suffering, and my own comfort, I can more easily enter into the suffering of those around me for the sake of their comfort. Taking time to grieve renews my compassion for those whose grief is fresher than mine, and allows the comfort I have received to flow over into the lives of others.

    So, what does this time look like for me?

    Usually it involves some time spent in quiet remembering—literally just thinking back on those days, and reliving them. I put together the timeline of events, remembering the conversations of the day, and stepping back into the emotions of the day. 

    I like to take some time to journal and pray, too. I try to remember the people who were most affected by loss in those days, and pray for them. Grief for sons and daughters never goes away. The loss of children can have an enormous impact on marriages, jobs, and all of life. Trauma in adolescence is powerful for good or ill. I never want to assume that 12 or more years later friends and family are “over it.” So this is my day to remember to pray for the people that I know who have been impacted the most.

    Usually this takes just an hour, maybe two. It feels like a short time to remember such life-altering events, and mourn lives of sons and daughters, people made in the image of God.

    Life is precious, and death is catastrophic. Two hours of grief a year doesn’t seem like enough. 

    For those of you who have lost friends and family, I’d love to hear from you. Do you take days of remembrance for losses you’ve experienced? How do you enter intentionally into grief as the years progress and the open wound of loss becomes scar tissue?

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  • My Story,  Stories and Songs

    An Introduction

    March 16, 2019

    In the last months of grad school, I got the same question grad students everywhere answer countless times: “What is your thesis about?” 

    Now, what is the least-shocking way to tell people that you’re interested in human death and decay?

    I couldn’t just tell them that I was studying dust in scripture—seriously, is there anything less interesting-sounding than dust? So I would explain it in the context of a larger philosophical/theological question, and the fact that it’s neglected by nearly everyone who will, in fact, return to dust.

    It wasn’t always a comfortable moment to share stories of grief and loss, but the truth is that there’s more to my interest than merely academic curiosity. In fact, I’ve been contemplating death from a young age. 

    I won’t go into too much detail here—partly because some of these stories don’t feel like mine to share, and partly because I’ll probably say more about them some other time. But I want to give you a picture of my experiences so that you can understand a little of why I am the way that I am. 

    It started in high-school. 

    High School

    My family moved to Minnesota in June of 2002—the summer before my freshman year of high-school. I started at a new school that fall, and to be honest, that first semester (okay, the whole year) was pretty rough. It was a small school. The kind of school where you “know” people without even necessarily talking to them—you have most of your classes together, so even if you never have a one-on-one conversation you still have an idea who they are and what they’re like.

    In the spring semester, one of my classmates became ill and missed a lot of school. I remember hearing updates occasionally, and then learning finally that he had cancer. We continued to hear updates, positive and negative, throughout the school year. Sometime mid-summer, he passed away. My grief was different from my classmates. I had only known him for a few months—most of them had known him their whole lives. Even so, close proximity, with or without a relationship, to the death of a peer at 15 is not something to discount.

    The following spring I was a sophomore, a little more secure in my new school, though still in the “new kid” category—something you never quite lose when everyone else has grown up together. In the early morning, before my sister and I went to school, my parents received a phone call. I didn’t hear it, but my sister came downstairs, knocked on my door, and told me that our cousin had committed suicide. He was just a few years older, and we weren’t close. But there’s still something profoundly shaping about losing family, another peer, in an unexpected and violent way. My sister and I went to school anyway, not knowing what else to do with ourselves, and knowing we’d be missing school to travel back home to Montana for the funeral.

    Within days of the one-year anniversary of my cousin’s death, compounding my grief, a school-mate in the grade below me, was killed in a car accident. My junior year was nearly over, and I had yet to have a year of high-school not marked by loss. 

    My senior year rolled around and I think we were as hope-filled as any senior class. You never think catastrophe is coming. But then one day three of our class-mates never made it to school. They were planning to meet before driving to attend, if I remember correctly, the state basketball tournament. After a stress- and rumor-filled morning, our principal confirmed to us that there had been a car accident and two of our classmates, weeks from graduation, had died in an accident just a few miles from school.

    And then we were adults…

    Fast-forward through happy college years—where I began to let go of the expectation that the last week of March would bring unexpected news of loss. And since 2006, it hasn’t, thankfully. 

    This week has been filled with joy for the last nearly-four years—it’s the week of my daughter’s birthday.

    But even her birthday is a reminder. Before my daughter was born, we lost her older sibling in a miscarriage. An unexpected loss in a season that we had reason to expect to be filled with joy—for us and many of our friends.

    My son’s birthday is in March too, a little earlier. He just turned one this week, actually. But even so, I see the age gap between him and my daughter and remember that there is indeed enough space in there to have been filled with the birth of a second child lost through miscarriage.

    Heavy Weights

    Do I make more sense now? The last fifteen years of my life have brought significant sorrows nearly every year. I haven’t even included the stories of my aunt and uncle, and various others from slightly more distant circles whose loss I’ve grieved. Each new grief adds a little weight to the others, an extra dose of empathy for the closest mourners. 

    And do you see why this matters? None of us are above this sort of experience. We don’t think about it often, but we, and everyone we love, are one speeding car, one bad decision, one illness away from a close encounter with grief, death, and decay. No one is exempt—age, health, and habits are no guarantee.

    Are we prepared? Do we have the tools in our belt to deal with loss? Can we answer with confidence that even in our weakest, saddest moments that God is still love, and that he is still kind? I

    I’m not encouraging fear or paranoia. But my own experiences have taught me that we should be ready to undertake the task of grieving and dying well. And it is a task—there is nothing easy about it. But, like muscles grow able to bear heavy weights with practiced motion, I think we can prepare our souls to bear greater weight as well. Great weights never get lighter; great griefs will always be heavy. But we can practice so that just as weight-lifters perfect their form, we know how to bear them when they come.

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