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Hello from Sabbatical! God gave me a verse and some thoughts this morning that I just couldn’t keep to myself.
Yesterday, my church held a women’s retreat. The topic was lament—how do we bring our grief and pain to God? It was a great day, and I won’t go into all the details, but one thought that I took away from the day is that God is a safe space to bring all of our grief and our sorrows and our pain and our hurts.
One example the speaker used yesterday was a trash can. So often, we stuff all of our feelings down like trash in a trash can, shoving in more and more and compacting it down so we can put the lid back on it again. What we don’t realize is that over time, that trash that we keep pushing down starts to stink.
The same is true of our feelings of grief and sadness and pain. If we keep stuffing them down, eventually the “smell” starts to become evident in our lives—we keep it all together until we just can’t anymore, and we blow up at the smallest irritant. We start to become unhappy people living unhappy lives, and those around us can see it.
But what if we practice lament? What if we allow ourselves to, instead of packing all those feelings into the deep spaces of our heart and locking them away, bring those hurts to God? He is a safe space that brings light and life into our hearts.
After hearing those words yesterday, this morning I pulled a verse from my Transforming Verse of the Day jar:
1 Samuel 2:6: “The Lord brings death and makes alive;
he brings down to the grave and raises up.”
As I read this verse, the thought struck me, why is death listed first before being alive? Isn’t that backwards? We always think of life, then death. Life, then death. That’s the order.
But what if, in God’s kingdom, death has to come before life? Romans 6:11 says:
In the same way, count yourselves dead to sin but alive to God in Christ Jesus.
In order to be alive in Christ, we have to be dead to sin. The death has to come first.
What naturally comes with the experience of death?
Grief.
When we put to death sin in our life, it’s OK to grieve. That sin gave you something that you wanted, and now, in order to follow Christ, you are putting that to death and losing whatever that benefit was. Yes, that benefit is often not a healthy benefit, but it’s a benefit nonetheless.
What can we do with that grief that we feel? Bring it to God in lament. Hold space for your feelings. Say out loud what you are grieving over. Maybe write it down.
Here are some ideas of things we may need to grieve:
A sin that we want to confess and repent of in order to walk with Christ.
A bad habit that we want to replace with a good habit.
A false belief that we want to replace with the truth.
A personal trauma that we want to let go of and embrace forgiveness.
A burden or stress or worry or fear that we want to give to God.
A story of someone else’s trauma that we have offered to help them carry.
The chaos and discord that we see in society today.
I’ll give you a personal example. I’m currently going through a program to help me deal with my binge eating (if anyone is dealing with this, I’d love to share the name of the program if you ask). One practice we’ve talked about in our group sessions is the idea of holding space for our feelings. We often binge eat to comfort ourselves, to cover up our feelings or to help us through something painful.
The thought that I had this morning, in light of lament and putting old habits to death that are not serving me anymore, is: What do I need to put to death in order to heal my relationship with food and binge eating? What do I need to put to death to truly be able to feel alive and joyful and connected when I think about food?
For some people who struggle with food, it might be putting to death diet or food rules. Maybe it requires putting to death an old belief that was drilled into you as a child. For others, it might require letting go of society’s image of the perfect body. For me, I need to let go of fear that I will never be able to trust myself around food.
As we let go of those things, as we put them to death in our minds, it’s OK to grieve. We can bring those feelings of grief and loss to God. To move into a place where you can heal and be more alive, you have to leave behind habits and beliefs that no longer serve you. You have to leave behind hurts and regrets. In order to do that fully, you have to give yourself the space to grieve, because you are losing a part of yourself that you’ve clung to for so long.
What do you have in your life today that you need to grieve? What lament do you need to bring to God? What do you need to put to death so that you can live fully Alive in Christ? I encourage you to carve out some time in your schedule this week to properly grieve so that you can move forward in the light and life that you find in Christ.