Grieve First

The Scriptures, which are our guide in so much of how we live, are our guide here, too, as we attempt to discover a more holy and holistic way to deal with pain and trauma and tragedy and grief in our lives. The men and women of the Bible, God's people, are a people who have handled their pain remarkably and paved the way for those of us who follow.

One of the things you'll never see in the Scriptures when it comes to pain, when it comes to fallenness, when it comes to living a very human existence in God's created world, is the kind of psychological depths of entitlement that come so naturally to us. Nor will you see any calls to "get over it" or "get on with it." God's people have always created beautiful spaces out of broken ones and given their hearts the tenderness necessary to deal with this life. 

The Psalms are a good reflection of this, of course, but so are some of the Old Testament histories. It is in the histories that we see how Israel handled her grief, in particular, and this is a valuable lesson for the rest of us.

We could look at any number of stories that remember how Israel handled the death of her leaders, how she mourned publicly and collectively for days when someone integral to the community died...or even when a close friend or family member died. Think about the sheer number of days that Israel stopped on the border of the Promised Land just to grieve after Moses died, even though milk and honey were finally just a breath away. 

But perhaps no story sets an example quite like the one in 1 Samuel 30, which rests at the intersection of pain, trauma, grief, and vengeance. 

David has been hiding out in the land of the Philistines and has made quite a name for himself there in his self-imposed exile while Saul continues to reign in Israel. He goes out to battle with the foreign forces, but there are some who question his loyalty to this people, so he is sent home with the men who follow him. But when he gets back to Ziklag, where he's been living with his men, they discover that while they were gone, the Amalekites had invaded the city, destroyed it, and carried off all the spoils - including the women - while the city burned. 

Our natural reaction might be to chase after the Amalekites, to catch up with them in the desert and slaughter them all. Then, we'd take back our women and children and all of the property that they'd carried off, we'd return to our city, and we'd rebuild it. Not only would we rebuild it; we would fortify it. We would spend the rest of our lives making sure that we were not vulnerable again to such an attack, and we'd even have raid drills to make sure we knew what to do in case anyone tried. We'd rehearse the trauma, rebuild our walls, and reassert our authority. And, eventually, we might come to sit in the ashes for a little bit and shed maybe a couple of tears over the irreplaceable things. But only after the "important" stuff is taken care of. Only after we've put the pieces back together.

Not David. Not his men. Not the people of God. Look at what happens:

So David and his men came to the city, and, behold.... Then David and the people that were with him lifted up their voice and wept, until they had no power to weep.

While the fire was fresh and the ashes still smoldering, while the footsteps of their captive families were still close enough they could almost hear them, while the Amalekites made their get-away and got further and further from Ziklag, David and his men stopped to grieve. They grieved first, even while their souls were still aching for, and even believing in, reconciliation. Restoration.

They were angry. They felt betrayed. They were devastated. Their very souls were wracked by the trauma of it all. And their first reaction, their first response, was to just let it hurt for a little bit. Until there was nothing else they could do with their pain, until there were no more tears left in their eyes. 

They cried themselves out. And only after that did they start to talk about what to do about it. 

This is an incredible story, a beautiful story, and a powerful example. And what makes it most beautiful is, perhaps, how they did it together. They wept together, they grieved together, they processed the traumatic together and made it okay to weep. It was not one man that wept; it was David and his men that wept. Something about being able to do this in community is both wonderful and necessary; it's vital. 

Then, when the weeping stopped, when they were all cried out, when their hearts came to rest flayed open on the ashes of what was once their life, when they were ready to move once more, they started with prayer and asked God what He would have them do. 

And He blessed them.

On Pain

One of the reasons we struggle with how to handle trauma is that we struggle with how to handle grief. The primary reason that we struggle with both trauma and grief is because we do not know what to do with pain.

Despite all the evidence to the contrary, most of us still believe we are somehow entitled to live in a world that doesn't hurt, and one that doesn't hurt us. We invest a lot of our energies, time, and even money in easing our pain and virtually no time at all either soothing or even accepting it. 

Those who experience trauma are very quickly counseled through the fine art of pain avoidance, very quickly given instructions on how to turn pain into at least indignation, though it ought to more rightly be fodder for grief. We are told that yes, it hurts, but that's because you should never have experienced it. No one - or nothing - should ever have done that to you. That pain you feel? It's really anger. And fear. And shame. And indignation. The first step, we say, is that you have to recognize that you weren't supposed to feel this. Ever.

The same is true about grief, although we've gotten far more formal in this domain. When someone we love dies, it's a profoundly painful experience, particularly the closer the love is to our heart. And researchers have invested a great deal in detailing the "five stages" of grief, all of which come right up against pain but still refuse to acknowledge it, turning it instead into an expression of our entitlement to a life without pain.

Look at it. Denial - the belief that these kinds of things just don't happen to us; we live our lives without pain. Anger - an eruption when we figure out that these kinds of things do happen to us, though we still firmly believe that they shouldn't. Bargaining - our attempt to talk our way out of it because, you know, these sorts of things shouldn't happen to us. Depression - a realization that perhaps these things have happened anyway and there's nothing we can do about it, even though it's still completely unfair. And finally, acceptance - confessing that it happened, although at this point, we often turn our energies toward making sure it doesn't happen again. 

At no stage in this process are we permitted our pain, at no point are we allowed to say that it simply hurts. There's always a shield between us and pain, between our good nature and a fallen world.

But there's simply no real truth to this kind of processing. There's no biblical truth to this view of the world. At no point in the Scriptures does God tell us that life will be easy, that we are immune from pain, or that it's not supposed to hurt to live in a broken world. In fact, it's just the opposite - God promises we will have trouble. God promises this life will be painful. 

The only question we have to ask ourselves is what we're doing to do with that.

Both trauma and grief (and quite honestly, a host of other human experiences) require us to feel their pain. They require us to ache. They require us to lie awake at night with tears streaming down our faces, with chests tight and hearts pounding in our ears. They require us to learn to let it be, to let pain exist, and to not talk ourselves out of it or excuse ourselves from it or twist it and turn it until we're sure again that we're not supposed to feel this way. This is exactly how we're supposed to feel - it's trauma, it's grief. It's pain.

And it's hard. It's hard because it's helpless, because when we finally come to terms with the pain that has been inflicted on our lives, with the depth of the just plain hurt that we are feeling, there is absolutely nothing at all that we can do with it except to ride it like the wave that it is. There is no rushing it, no matter how much we want to. There is no easing it, not in any healthy way. There is no denying it, nor is there any excusing it. There is only letting it be. 

But this...this is the first step. It is to simply hurt, to feel the depth of the pain. This is what lets us grieve. This is what lets us finally start working it through. This is what lets us to live. This is what lets us to heal.

If you want to heal nearly anything in your life, if you want to soothe your wounded soul and salve your aching heart (which is, by the way, what God desires), then as contrary as it may sound, and as difficult, you must first learn simply to hurt.

On Trauma

There's a deep ache in our society, even in our churches - a hurt so deep that you can feel it. It's trauma. And when we talk about trauma, we have to first clarify what we mean when we say the word. 

Trauma means something different than tragedy; it's not merely a thing that causes deep grief, although deep grief is part of trauma. Trauma means something different than inconvenience; it's not just something that delays or defers hope, although a damaged hope is part of trauma. Trauma means something different than 'bad things that happen'; bad things happen every day that are not traumatic. The first thing we have to do when we talk about trauma is to recapture the word itself; trauma is soul-crushing in the most pure and profound sense of it. It changes the very dynamics of the human soul, changes the fundamental nature of who we are. Trauma can only ever be defined by the depths of the soul.

And it's insidious. It creeps into the deepest recesses of our being until our every breath is filtered through it.

The human spirit, which clings desperately to the human soul, reacts desperately to trauma, trying everything that it can to overcome it. But trauma quickly becomes the most real, the most vital, the most undeniable reality of all realities, and the spirit just as quickly determines that trauma cannot be overcome; it can only be mastered.

It's why victims of violent crime are exponentially more likely to become victims of violent crime a second time. And a third. And a fourth. It's why abuse victims go out and find new abusers or keep going back to the same old ones. It's why abuse victims sometimes become abusers themselves. It's why soldiers go back into war.

It's why those who have been confined and degraded find an affinity for prison stories. It's why those who have been sexually assaulted sometimes become sexual role players. It's why those who have been beaten take up fighting. It's why those who lost control of their own lives turn to drugs that make them lose control.

It's why we, as traumatized persons, recreate and replay and rehash our trauma over and over and over again, even when we know it's going to cut deeper and deeper into our soul; we think the only way out of it is to gain mastery over it, and so we keep going back until we feel strong enough to walk out. 

But mastery is never enough; it's not satisfying. We spend the rest of our lives role playing ourselves into a strength that always feels one more experience away from us, one more practice, one more test.

Mastery takes the place of true healing; strength takes the place of tenderness.

Trauma requires tenderness, as much as we don't want to hear it. As much as it hurts to think that the only way out of trauma is to feel it, it's the truth. You will never be strong enough to recover your wounded soul, but you can be tender enough to soothe it. There is a better way, but it's hard. It's so hard.

As people of God - as fallen, wounded people of God - we must be speaking out on this. We must be creating spaces in our communities for trauma to speak and for it to heal. We must be the ones leading the way, holding hands, praying over one another and demonstrating the kind of tenderness that trauma requires. We must be the ones getting into the pits with the traumatized and assure them, with the confident assurance of our God, that they are already strong. They are.

They are right now strong enough to do this, strong enough to stand up, strong enough to move on, strong enough to heal. You are right now strong enough for this.

By the grace of God, wounded souls will be healed. By the grace of God, they are being healed right now.

Just Stories

In a generation that no longer keeps God's stories intimately close to the heart, that cannot tell them but instead tells versions of them in which God is not the main character, nor the main emphasis, that has lost the revelation of Him for the knowledge of Him, it's only natural to ask ourselves what happened. Or rather, what's happening.

And the sad truth is that what's happening is that persons today no longer believe God's stories are real. In other words, we talk about what happened, but we don't really think it happened. At least, not like the Bible says that it did. 

We have decided there is an exaggeration and a symbolism in everything and that these stories have been crafted in the way that they've been crafted in order to teach us something about God or about ourselves or to stand for something else. 

In other words, there might have been a Jonah, but there never was a whale. Not a real one. 

Those forty years that Israel supposedly wandered? Not a real forty years; it's just that forty is some kind of perfect holy number representative of "an entire generation" or otherwise meaningful to the story we tell about our God. 

Jesus was a wise teacher, and a good man. He died, but we're not sure He really lived, and we're not sure that it even matters. The whole resurrection thing, it's not really important to the point of the story, which is that God wants us to be nice to one another and live as generally decent people. 

Paul had a passion for the church because he was interested in social clubs. Look at his leadership! His poise! His authority! He really was an incredible orator, a brilliant apologist, and an influential guy. He didn't need to be blinded by Jesus and healed by the Lord to be any of that; it's just who Paul was. 

At every turn, we take out the parts we're not sure of, the things that make us seem "weird" if we actually believe them, and we stick to the basic human facts about what was once a beautifully holy story. And in doing so, we've lost the essence of the whole thing. 

It's just so hard to believe the unbelievable. It's so hard to go against what we know of the world. Most, if not all of us, have never seen a worldwide flood. We haven't seen a giant boat with two of every kind of animal on it. (How did Noah catch all the bugs?) We've never seen a whale eat a man and spit him back out. We've never seen the dead rise. 

We've never seen the blind see, the deaf hear, or the lame talk, except in the rare cases where our technology has been successful, and even then, it's most often only effective on specific types of these afflictions - a man, say, who has lost his sight due to an illness that we understand or a mute man with a tongue defect that's surgically correctable. We've never seen a swarm of locusts devour an entire nation's harvest, thousands upon thousands of frogs come ashore all in the same place, or a cloud of smoke fill a holy temple (at least, where no candles are burning). 

We haven't seen these things, and we can't explain them, so rather than look foolish in the eyes of the world, which is so attached to its science and facts, we just edit them out of the story and determine that they're not important. God...He's still God without all of these things. If not a single one of them happened in the way that the Bible claims, that doesn't change anything about God at all. 

Does it?

It does. It changes God and it changes us. Because no longer is God the God of all Creation, the imaginative and wonderful Maker who can do all things and is doing all things and has revealed Himself through all the things that He's doing. Rather, He's become merely an idea, a concept, a figment of our own imaginations to whom we are willing to give only what our tempered dreams can fathom. He's no longer bigger than us; He's all of a sudden just the right size for our small stories and meager dreams. 

And then we, as His people, are nothing more than believers. We are not disciples, not friends, not sons and daughters. How could we be? We cannot be the offspring of an idea, particularly not one that is so thoroughly human-shaped. We worship God. We pray to Him. We live our lives to appease Him. We know about Him and perhaps even trust in that knowledge, but we no longer believe in Him. And how could we? We have not seen Him. 

Worst of all, we no longer expect anything of Him. Our God, this wonderful God who has painstakingly revealed Himself to us from the very foundations of the world, is no longer present in our lives. He won't step in, won't comfort or rescue or even love us; He can't. No longer would we expect that He even could, although, ironically, that doesn't keep us from being disappointed that He doesn't. We live double-faced lives, always hoping this God whose miracles we no longer believe in and whose presence we don't find essential or compelling will come to us and work miracles in our lives. And when He doesn't, we're offended. 

We have completely edited God out of His own story, and then we wonder why He's not more powerful in ours.

Maybe at our cores, we know there's more to it all than we're willing to hold onto. Maybe we know there has to be more. Maybe we know that it has to be real, that it can't be just a story. Because if it's just a story, He's not a God. 

And we are a people who truly need a God.

What God Has Done

Read the Scriptures, and one of the things that stands out rather quickly is how deeply and thoroughly the people of God have always known His story. Every time Israel gets into trouble, they repent and restore their  hearts by recounting what God has done - from the beginning of time through Egypt and even into the wilderness. The Psalmists retell His story, reminding the people through praise of His wondrous works. Even in the New Testament, we see this kind of thing happening, even as the emphasis turns from God-at-large to Jesus the Christ. God's people tell His story.

Not only do they tell His story, but they know His story. Not in an academic way, not in a way that allows them to quote it when necessary to prove their point, but in an intimate way. When Israel talks about the God who plagued Egypt, they are so close to the story that they can almost hear the flies buzzing in their ears, smell the blood of the firstborns. When Paul talks about the blinding light on the road to Damascus, his eyes instinctively close. When the psalmist recounts the way that God fed His people manna in the wilderness, the people become aware of how their stomachs growl. 

These are a people who know God's story because they have kept it close to them, because it is as real to them today as it was in the days that it was happening. Because these are not just things that God has done; they are revelations of who God is. 

One of the challenges of the church today is that we've lost this kind of connection to God's story. In a couple of ways. 

First, we don't know the stories as intimately as Israel and the early church knew them. We just don't keep them as close to our heart. We've settled for knowing some of the big names, some of the grander schemes, some of the broad, sweeping strokes of God's involvement in history, but we just don't know, off-hand or in-heart, the full revelation of God as He has given it to us. 

We've picked and chosen what's important for us to know. In the beginning, check. Giant flood, cool. Mass exodus, of course. Kings David and Solomon, sure, the former of which wrote most of the Psalms and the latter of which, the Proverbs. Jonah and the whale, duh. Jesus and the disciples, Paul, Revelation. In these scant details, we claim that we know what God has done, where He has been, what's going on. Vaguely, of course. Enough to get by, maybe even pass the test.

Extra credit if you also happen to know about Esther.

But second, we've shifted the emphasis of a lot of these stories, to the point that when we tell them, they aren't even about God any more. He's just a small character...in His own stories! 

Think about the way that we talk about it. God created the world; we can't away from that one. But then, there was a flood and Noah built a boat, Israel wandered in the wilderness for forty years, David and Solomon wrote songs and wisdom, Jonah got swallowed (and spit out) by a whale, Jesus came and lived and died, which led to Paul's missionary journeys, and finally, heaven or hell, and even here we talk about them as places that don't necessarily depend upon God. 

This is far different from the way that God's people have told His story from the very beginning of it. We've left out God; they never would. Take the narrative of Noah. We talk about a flood and a boat; God's people historically have talked about how God sent a flood on the earth, and why, and that it was God who helped Noah build the boat. They talk about God's mighty hand leading Israel out of Egypt and providing for them in the wilderness, not an emphasis on the human wandering. They refer to David not only as a man after God's own heart, but as God's chosen, and Solomon as God's chosen heir. Jonah was a prophet of the Lord, who not only sent the man to Nineveh but brought the whale to him. Jesus lived redemptively as part of God's incredible plan for all of creation, which led to Paul, who never failed to mention that he got his entire start when the Lord blinded him and restored his sight. The same Lord, we must say, who rules the heavens and mourns hell. 

It's such a subtle shift, but it's an important one. When we tell God's stories without God in them, without explicitly naming Him or revealing Him, we create just a little distance. And then a little more. And then a little more. And all of a sudden, the only thing we know about God was that He "did" things; we've lost the revelation of Him because we haven't kept Him close to His own stories and certainly not to our own hearts. All we're left with is a little book learning, no longer an intimate relationship. 

And the truth is that the way we approach God's stories influences the way we approach our own, and we are now living in a world that lacks the powerful testimonies of the Pauls and the Stephens and the disciples and the church. Because we are no longer close to our God; He is no longer an intimate and integral part of our stories. 

The truth is: most of us, especially those who do not give credit to God for the things He's historically done, have no idea what He's doing now. We have no idea what He's doing in us. And when we tell our stories, we no longer tell His. 

Because in losing His history, we've lost His revelation and we don't even know what He's capable of.