The Cross of Grief
Elizabeth Elliot, the widow of the martyred missionary, Jim Elliot, defined suffering as Having what you don't want and not having what you do. That nicely sums up the sorrows of the grieving: We want our loved one back; we don't want the pain. Except you would have to add a lot of exclamation points to capture the mood. Deep grief knocks the bottom out. Many of us never thought it possible to feel such pain. Wouldn't our faith in the resurrection protect us?
I remember a conversation from those early days with a woman who had recently lost her husband after many years of marriage. They had both been life-long, devoted Christians, and knew where they were going when they died. Because of their faith, she told me she never thought that the grief of separation would be so hard to bear. It shocked her to see how devastated she felt. I understood only too well.
Ordinary grief sustains us through most of the deaths we experience as family members or friends slip away. We feel the sorrow, but the comforts of faith are close at hand. So, is the on-going support of those who matter most, who hold the highest places in our need or affection. At least we still have them! Losing one of them, experiencing a great grief over the loss of a great love, plunges us into uncharted water. To make matters worse, our emotions storm though us with dizzying force. It's no wonder we feel like we're drowning we are truly out of our depth.
The Other Cross
There is one thing that can sustain us. It's the same thing that rescues us, though it comes to us in a form that makes it hard to recognize: the cross. I'm not referring here to the cross of Christ which gives us our undying hope for the two resurrections we will need to believe in (theirs and ours). We will need that cross, of course, and a rugged faith in all that God sends our way because of it. But we will also need the disciple's cross, or rather we will need to learn how to carry it since we can't get rid of it. We freely chose to believe in Jesus cross, but no one gets to choose the disciple's cross. That decision was made for us when our loved one died. Their death shackled us to that cross. Will it kill us, or bring us to life?
Our first question then is this: Just what is the disciple's cross? Perhaps, you've never heard much about it. That would be typical of our church age which seems to have neglected teaching the whole counsel of God where suffering, sacrifice, and death to self are concerned. We want a fully resurrected life in this life! Isn't that what faith is supposed to do for us? Don't God and Jesus want that for us, too? Yes, They do. The trouble is that we can't resurrect without dying first! Jesus didn't, and neither will we. Clearly, we won't get to heaven without dying first. Less clearly, but equally true, we won't enter the fullness of a heavenly life down here without dying to self, time and time again.
Jesus never neglected teaching about the disciples cross. His words on the subject can be found in all four gospels, but my favorite is Luke 9:23: If anyone desires to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow Me. I love it for that little word, daily. It tells me that our experience of death and resurrection isn't intended by our Lord to be an occasional hard chew, but our daily bread. It was Derek Prince who pointed out the significance and power of that one word in a cassette teaching I heard at the beginning of my Christian life, the start of my own attempt to grow as a disciple of Jesus. In the same message, Derek also gave the best definition of the disciples cross that I've ever heard: This cross is where your will and Gods will cross.
The Cross of Grief and Pain
That perfectly describes what happened to me when June died. It's not that God wanted her dead. I was convinced He didn't (see What the Lord Asked). The Father and Jesus don't kill people. Satan does. They don't want anyone to die before their time and have gone on record stating that the desired span for everyones life is seventy years, or more (Psalm 90:10). Nevertheless, as we know (or should know), God allows freedom of choice for both human and supernatural beings. God allows us to not allow Him to have His way. That God allowed June to die didn't mean He wanted it to happen or needed it to happen. The same sinful happenings that crossed God's will out of that equation also brought the cross of suffering into my life through her untimely death.
If you have lost a great love, then this same cross has come crashing down upon you. What can you do? Jesus told us that the entry point is narrow, and the way is hard that leads to life, and few find it (Matthew 7:14). This cross has now become that entry point. Learning to deny self, take up the cross, and follow Jesus is the difficult way that lies ahead. If you follow Jesus doing what He would want you to do each day and handling the grief in ways that please Him then you will come out on the other side. Your life will begin resurrecting from the ashes and no one will be more surprised than you at how the Lord pulled that one off.
A Costly Grace
We are talking about what Dietrich Bonhoeffer in The Cost of Discipleship called costly grace as opposed to the cheap grace being dished out from many modern pulpits. Costly grace means that I will make the hard choice to find a way to bear this cross (with Gods help) and walk by faith as fully as I can beneath it even while it is crushing me. Cheap grace says just let it crush you, let God and others carry you. And in the end, you'll eventually come out at a better place. You will not be whole or complete, but in time you will accept that it's not your fault. You are a victim of grief and of the inscrutable ways of God so just resign yourself to living with it. The best you can do is just hang on and hope you manage to survive it. I utterly rejected that approach!
Go for the costly grace of learning how to bear with even intolerable burdens and still live faithfully beneath them. It's hard. Of course, it is! If it were easy it would be on that wider path Jesus warned us against taking, the one that leads to destruction. Ordinary crosses like ordinary griefs are relatively easy to bear. It hardly seems to matter how we handle them. A great grief is different. This disciples cross is impossible to escape, ignore, or reject. Like its Roman progenitor, it is an instrument of agony, leading to death. We are tortured to death to self by the suffering we endure! There is only one way out from under this cross of suffering. Many times, we will have to follow the way that Jesus showed us on the night He was contemplating the agony the morrows cross would bring Him:
Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me. Nevertheless, not my will, but yours, be done. Luke 22:42
Accept it as fully as you can and bear it as bravely as you can. It is NOT true that this loss is destroying you. Jesus says that the cross of loss (as with all crosses) will bring you into greater life, resurrection life, His life. He wants to resurrect us out of the ashes of death and loss from the inside out. We can choose to believe for that resurrection and take the steps to get us there. All that is needed is to trust in Him and surrender to Him, then be willing to follow in whatever way He may lead us.
A Grace-filled Invitation
Cross-bearing is not a requirement for all believers, only for those who want to walk closely with Him. It is an invitation to give a free-will response. Will you accept His invitation to walk with God as a disciple of Jesus even during grief? Will you choose to live by the costly grace of learning to bear this cross out of self-denying love for Him? By doing so, we are not denying the pain or other emotions. Rather, by denying self-will, we become willing to do with the pain and the accompanying emotions all that God asks us to do with them, rather than what our wounded heart desires. It is a genuine commitment not to let the grief be contaminated by anything that would get between us and our God.
We do not have to abandon the high calling just because the pain is so intense or the loss so seemingly unbearable. We can echo the sentiments of Paul in the midst of our hardest trial, saying of our self, I am struck down but not destroyed, devastated but not left desolate, bereft of my great earthly love but not forsaken by my divine, eternal Friend (2 Corinthians 4:9).
Prayer
Dear Jesus, I may never have thought that the disciples cross could hurt so much or be so hard to bear. Or, that You would ask me to carry such a painful thing. This grief truly feels like it is killing me at times. And yet Your own cross has shown us that resurrection can follow the cross of death and pain. It will, but only for those who embrace the way of faith. Right now, that means learning to embrace this unwanted cross! Jesus, You heroically stayed faithful under the crushing pain of Your cross. Help me deny myself, take up this cross, and carry it faithfully following Your example.
Scripture
And he said to all, If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it. Luke 9:23-24
The years of our life are seventy, or even by reason of strength eighty; yet their span is but toil and trouble; they are soon gone, and we fly away. Psalm 90:10
Enter by the narrow gate. For the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many. For the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few. Matthew 7:13-14
We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our bodies. For we who live are always being given over to death for Jesus' sake, so that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our mortal flesh. 2 Corinthians 4:8-11
All scripture citations are from the English Standard Version (ESV) unless otherwise noted.
