Pruning

We would like Jack to start easing into the special education preschool, if that is OK with you?

Yes!  That sounds great.

We will have you drop him off in the morning once a week and you can pick him up after.  When he enters preschool, you will have the option of having him ride the bus home.

The bus?

Yes, we have a little bus to bring him back home if you want.

Little bus…..you mean…the short bus…

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No matter how much you try, or how much you think you have worked through grief and all its steps, there will always be phrases and ideas that haunt you.  A simple phrase or idea or scene with no seeming connection, but for some reason it pulls you back…there.

It seems like I have emotional walls that are styled after Swiss cheese.  I think I am strong, and yet suddenly the emotions run out all over in an entirely nonsensical order.

You are doing the dishes and have a breakdown.

You cry during comedies.

You hear a song you listened to back then, and all at once you are there, even if only in your mind.

It is a strange business, this coping with grief.  I can never decide if I am learning from it or just growing old with it.

It can be months, and then something silly and unrelated to the situation comes up and suddenly I find myself giving up my gardening on a perfect sunny day and lying on the grass, wondering why I can’t get back to my pruning of a hedge just yet.  So I sit in the sunlight, but it all feels strangely cloudy.  It is terribly annoying, like driving a car without realizing the E-Brake is on.  You just can’t move like you used to.  Because you know that this was really about that, and it reminds you that you are still fragile pottery – occasionally under a heavy hammer.

The other day, I ran into a friend I had not spoken to in 2 years.  We had made a few lines of small talk when he asked me if we could have coffee sometime and talk religion.  It was one of those requests that, even though I am a pastor of sorts, took me by surprise.  Does anyone really want to talk religion anymore?

I told him that his request sounded interesting, and he proceeded to explain his rationale, namely that he had been actively working out his personal beliefs over the last year.  During this search, he had come to decide on how the universe was and he wanted to probe my beliefs on Christianity to see how closely his correct view of the world aligned with my idea of the world.  He knew the way the world was to be, I would just help him prove it with certain parts of Christianity.  Or something like that.

I promised we would talk soon and left him…and as strange as it may sound, it made me think about how our souls grieve.

We seem to approach grief and loss the same way as many approach religion and the Idea of a God today.  We know grief is real, but only want to go through the parts that we can understand or are comfortable with.  When I am unhappy for too long or flip out over a seemingly unrelated event, it does not make me sad, it seems to deeply disturb me.

I have an idea of what I think it means for me to work out grief and be happy.  When it doesn’t work out that way, I think something is wrong.  I say things like: Why do I have to feel this right now?  I thought I had worked all this out already.

The plain fact is that these flipping out episodes may be the very thing I need to ensure that I don’t grieve forever.  When I feel it is all going wrong, it may actually be going right.

I have heard many people talk about how prayer is confusing.  We pray for patience and the seemingly next moment, we are stuck in a traffic jam.  We ask for God to give us a forgiving spirit and the next day endure a dozen slights by rude people around us.  These things make us say things like, “If I knew that praying for _______ would make it worse, I never would have done it!”

Maybe this pattern happens because God understands far more than we do that in order to build in us the character we want, we have to be confronted with the chance to exercise it.  Sometimes over and over.

Imagine a man that prays to be brave before an enemy and then when the inevitable battle comes, he becomes irate that there is an actual battle.  There is no benefit in praying for strength in things we will never experience.

With grief, that is not an option.  It makes me go there, no matter how hard I fight it.

There is no picking and choosing with it.

You cannot bargain out of it.

It must be given room, day after day, month after month.

The only way to heal a wound is cleaning and time.  It is just how it is.

And so I got off my back in the middle of the yard and picked up the pruning sheers.  Because I am learning that trusting in God sometimes means you actually have to.