May 7, 2020
I feel drained. And it’s not just me. Many suffer from this pandemic malaise. But why? There are more hours of sleep and rest than ever before. This should be a time of bountiful energy! Though there seems to be a hole in our bucket of vitality. And it’s quite difficult to identify the reason for this drainage. At least with Superman, any weakness could obviously be ascribed to kryptonite. But what is this kryptonite confronting us? It can very well be grief.
I was surprised by this insight as I completed yet another chapter of J. Alasdair Groves and Winston T. Smith’s book, Untangling Emotions. Grief is not merely sadness. It is a complex emotion like a paint bucket swirling with multiple colors. Grief can be composed of not only sadness but anxiety, anger and even relief. And it results from an experience of loss. Oh, now things start to make sense. Since the onset of the pandemic, we have lost many choices. The delight to meet up with friends at a restaurant. The fun of playing a pickup game of basketball at the gym. The wonder of travelling to an overseas destination. The lockdown restrictions have ripped away many choices right from our grasp. We are at a loss and possibly grief stricken.
The very complexity of grief having multiple emotions can take a toll on the heart. Listen to David’s lament in Psalm 31:9-10, “9 Be gracious to me, O Lord, for I am in distress; my eye is wasted from grief; my soul and my body also. 10 For my life is spent with sorrow, and my years with sighing; my strength fails because of my iniquity, and my bones waste away.”
How can we endure the terrible onslaught of grief? First, let us pour our hearts to the Lord in our grief. What a blessing David displays to us in his prayer! He can express his pain of loss to the Lord. Moreover, in the fullness of the gospel, we understand what Paul means when he explains in 1 Thessalonians 4:13 that Christians do not grieve as others who have no hope. We express our pain to our loving heavenly Father who brought us near by means of grace of the gospel in Jesus Christ. Second, let us look to Jesus, our Hope. Let’s listen to the authors:
“In short, our hope is this: Jesus was raised from the dead and so conquered death. Think about the implications of that for your grief. It’s more than the promise of life after death or your own resurrection. It actually means that Jesus has conquered all losses and will ultimately heal and restore them. Think of death as the ultimate loss that represents all other losses. Think of every smaller loss as a daily reminder that everything is moving toward dissolution, decay, and death. Death is the inevitable end for everything in a fallen world; it all perishes, spoils, and fades (see 1 Pet. 1:4) until it is gone and “its place knows it no more” (Ps. 103:16). We tend to avoid thinking about loss in those terms because doing so seems depressing. But unless we make the connection, we won’t appreciate the scope of Jesus’s salvation. Yes, Jesus’s resurrection gives us hope so that we don’t have to fear our own death, but we are meant to experience the power of his resurrection in the here and now as well.”
What a wonderful promise the Father gives to His children! In a fallen world of so much loss, there is hope not only in the future restoration, but in all the little deaths we experience daily. May this gospel promise energize us as we wade through this pandemic malaise. All for His glory!