This is the one-hundred-ninety-third lesson in author and pastor Mel Lawrenz’ How to Live the Bible series. If you know someone or a group who would like to follow along on this journey through Scripture, they can get more info and sign up to receive these essays via email here.
We need to understand the people in our lives who have gone through significant loss. One of the most purposeful things any of us can do is to show compassion and to be present with those who have suffered loss. We all have different preferred ways of doing that. Whether we prefer sending a card or an email, responding on social media, having a face-to-face conversation, picking up the phone, or sending flowers, that’s fine. We just need to do something. Don’t believe that the best thing is always to give your friend or loved one space.
We cannot ignore loss, and we must not multiply it.
There is nothing generic about grief. Somehow, we have to have empathy. To try to understand. To put ourselves in the shoes of the mourner. At the same time, we have to realize that we’ll never comprehend what this particular loss means to this particular person. It’s a kind of “empathy gap.” It’s no one’s fault. It’s just inevitable. But, knowing we have an empathy gap, we can choose to have compassion that goes beyond our comprehension.
Along the way, if it is indeed true that “faith, hope, and love” are “the things that remain” (1 Cor. 13:13), then we rehearse what we really believe (faith), trust that things will be okay (hope), and cherish, cherish, cherish (love) both those within arm’s reach and those who have slipped beyond. Love has no end.
We have to look straight at our losses, or else comfort will be truncated. This is not to say we should obsess about our losses. Focusing only on our losses hour after hour, day after day, is a skewing of reality. The real world includes that loss, which is that ugly gaping hole, but it also includes all the things that remain and the people that remain and the qualities that remain like faith, hope, and love. Even in our losses, we have to lean into the good, otherwise we contradict the good blessings we enjoyed.
A few weeks after my wife and I lost our 30-year-old daughter, I found myself getting caught up in all life’s normal responsibilities and concerns and forgetting in the middle of the day what had happened to us. Usually, this happened in the early afternoon. When reality hit, when I remembered, the pain was like a knife thrust into my gut. This happened every day. I decided that I needed to keep the loss in a part of my mind in my peripheral vision. This is hard to describe. It was like holding something in your hand, your arm stretched out and to the side. I wanted to remember the loss, because then it wouldn’t slip into a hidden place and come jumping out at me. I couldn’t keep hearing the news in my head as if it were happening again and again.
No wonder grief is draining.
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I have known many people over the years who’ve lost one of their kids. But only after our loss did I know that I had no idea what their pain was like. I was trying to be empathetic. When I did funerals for young people, I tried so hard to comprehend their devastation. But I could not fully understand until it happened to us.
That leaves us with a dilemma. When a friend goes through the worst, whatever that is for them, we’re never going to be able to fully understand if it’s not something we’ve been through. When a friend is plunged into the worst, we can—and should—try to imagine what it would be like if the same happened to us. But we’re just not able to fully comprehend it if we ourselves have not experienced that particular kind of loss.
So, what do we do? Obviously, it would be wrong to not even try to empathize. But we know we can’t honestly say, “I understand,” if we have not walked that same path.
What we can and must do is spend a little mental and emotional energy to try to comprehend the friend’s loss, remembering that we cannot fully understand, that there is an empathy gap. It’s no one’s fault. There’s no way to close the gap. We have to acknowledge the gap and try to extend our love out over it.
So, we shouldn’t say, “I understand,” if we haven’t been through the same thing. We might say “I have no words,” or “I can’t imagine,” or “I’m so, so sorry,” or “I am here. I am thinking of you today.” That’s honest, and it’s helpful.
If we can do that for others, we’re not filling the hole but standing around it with them, showing that while something or someone good is gone, not everything is gone.
And remember, Scripture says that living in “the house of mourning” is where any of us may live for a while. “It is better to go to a house of mourning than to go to a house of feasting” (Ecclesiastes 7:2).
(Adapted from A Chronicle of Grief: Finding Life After Traumatic Loss by Mel Lawrenz, IVP 2020, used by permission.)
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Mel Lawrenz (@MelLawrenz) trains an international network of Christian leaders, ministry pioneers, and thought-leaders. He served as senior pastor of Elmbrook Church in Brookfield, Wisconsin, for ten years and now serves as Elmbrook’s teaching pastor. He has a PhD in the history of Christian thought and is on the adjunct faculty of Trinity International University. Mel’s many books include Spiritual Leadership Today: Having Deep Influence in Every Walk of Life (Zondervan, 2016). See more of Mel’s writing at WordWay.
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