Part 1: Dealing with Life's Inevitable Losses (Episode 10)

Brent and Janis begin a four part series looking at how to recover well from life’s losses. We all face numerous losses: the death of a loved one, normal life transitions or experiencing  the loss of an ideal or a dream.

Transcript:

[Brent]: Well, good morning. Welcome back to Life & Love Nuggets. We're so glad that you're back with us. Today we're going to talk about something really important, because it's what we deal with almost every day with every single person. That there's some kind of loss that they're experiencing, you know? Life seems to come with this. We fight it, we don't-- We don't like it, we don't like the idea that-- Or grieving in some ways. You know, some would suggest in our world that we're all grieving something all the time.

[Janis]: All the time, uh huh.

[Brent]: That life has not worked out exactly the way we wish it would have in certain areas in our life.

[Janis]: And even in positive things there can be loss. I mean, you talk about a child graduating from high school.

[Janis]: Yes, you're glad probably, that they are leaving home and hopefully going on to something good. There's positives in that, but it's the loss of an era, it's the loss of having them in your house all of the time and so, even with positive situations, there's still loss that comes and it's acknowledging that loss occurs.

[Brent]: Yeah, and so, you know, we usually talk about grief. We usually use that word we think of somebody died and certainly, that brings a lot of loss and grief and some of you today may be dealing with that, where you've actually had the literal death of someone. But in our experience, most of the loss that we deal with people is the loss of an ideal. It's a loss of a dream, that I thought life was going to be up here at someplace, you know? And reality is it's down here someplace and so, the difference between our ideal and the real is some kind of death.

[Janis]: I hear over and over again from people, whether it's a huge loss like a death or whether it's small things like, “you know, I was a college athlete and none of my children have any athletic ability at all. It's not supposed to be this way, this is not how I thought things were going to work out”.

[Janis]: So, it is that gap between what I expected and what I wanted and what's actually occurring.

[Brent]: Yes, and gosh, we can give example after example after example of this that, you know, somebody their grades in college aren't what they wish they would be or our kids grades.

[Brent]: Or they didn't get a grade. They went to college for a year and didn't get a grade, you know?

[Janis]: Yeah, that is a point, when kids go to college, we really want them to get some kind of GPA.

[Janis]: Fortunately, we didn't struggle with that with our kids, but--

[Brent]: Yes, yes, and so, it could be that. It could be the loss of a job certainly. We have a lot of people dealing with that right now. It could be the loss of financial security, going through a time of inflation and our money doesn't go as far and there's a sense of loss. It could be a broken relationship, you know? Somebody's dating somebody and they break up or certainly divorce and this isn't what I had hoped would happen and so, again--

[Janis]: And even as a culture, we've been through tremendous loss. By going through the pandemic, we had a period of time where we lost connection with people, we didn't have face-to-face connection, but just the fear. Who would have ever other than, you know, some of the Sci-Fi films, who could have ever imagined we would have a global pandemic that would lock things down? And so, there was loss that came with that, but there's also ongoing loss of “I don't feel safe. I don't feel as safe anymore as I used to” and we see that with the number of shootings as well. I don't feel as comfortable going to certain things.

[Brent]: Yeah, yeah, and then, we have anticipated loss, which is “are things going to get better? Are things going to get worse? Is a war going to accelerate and go into other countries? Is it gonna-- How long is it going to last? Is my job going to last? Or my kid’s going to be okay when they grow up?” and so, anticipated loss is one of the most difficult losses to deal with, because it's an unknown, you know? When we literally have a death, we have a process in our culture where we have a funeral and we put the casket in the ground and we-- We don't live at the cemetery, we go home and there's some finality to that. But a lot of people are dealing with anticipated loss, is “what's going to happen?” and “is it going to get better? Are my kids safe at school?” and all these kinds of things and so, it leaves everybody a little bit undone and the reality is our culture, we just don't know what to do with this. We don't do well with this; we don't seem to leave space for people to really grieve losses. We're supposed to get through it okay, we're supposed to get through it quickly. We don't like uncomfortable feelings in our culture, we want to help people get better quickly.

[Brent]: And you know, we're--

[Janis]: “Five steps to getting over your grief”

[Brent]: Yes. We're in very much as you've mentioned, a Fix-It statement in the culture.

[Brent]: It's a how-- What do I do to help you get better right now? You know, what can I say to you that's going to get you past this? And what steps can we take to get there?

[Janis]: And we've so internalized it, that even when we're the one grieving, we're like “okay, how do I get through this? What's the fastest way through this?”. I have people all the time say something to me like “how can I get through this quicker?” and I'm like “I'm sorry, but with grief, there's just no shortcut. The only thing that you can do with grief is to walk through it”.

[Brent]: And we don't get over it, we get through it.

[Brent]: We can't steroid growth this. Now, a lot of people try to do that and then, we have a lot of people that are dealing with unresolved grief in their life, because they really didn't allow themselves to feel the feelings and move through those feelings. It doesn't mean we want people to just sit in misery longer than they need to, of course.

[Brent]: But there's this thing that needs to happen in us, where we're allowing ourselves and allowing each other to feel the real emotions of grief and make progress through that and ultimately, to resolve it, come to a place of acceptance. Acceptance will never mean “oh, it really wasn't that bad in the first place”.

[Brent]: It will always be bad, it will always be a loss, but we're “okay. I'm gonna be okay, we're gonna get through this” and--

[Janis]: One of the scriptures that I use a lot with my clients is “weeping endures for the night, but joy comes in the morning”. The problem is we're too eager to jump to the joy in the morning and so, we tend to minimize or try to push away the weeping that endures for the night and for those of you who have grieved, nights can be really, really long. A season of grief can take longer than you want it to, so we can't just jump out of it.

[Brent]: Yeah, and so, everybody's grief is going to look a little bit different, of course. A couple can be grieving the same loss and experience it differently. It's not exactly the same for everybody and we've got to allow people to have their individual journey, because nobody wants to be there longer than they need to. I mean, if there was literally a button we could push that would move us past it, we'd all be kind of pushing that button if that actually could happen in a healthy way. But for some reason, we've been designed as humans to go through these Dark Night of the Soul experiences, through these difficult places and scripture talks about “in this life, we will have trouble”. We don't want to have trouble! You know, and if we have trouble--

[Janis]: I want my perfect life.

[Brent]: If we have trouble, we want to get past the trouble fast and get back into, you know, [Unintelligible]

[Janis]: And turn it into a book.

[Janis]: Yes, or in silly or a best movie, whatever. We want to do something with it and sometimes, we just have to walk through the grief.

[Brent]: Yeah. So, there's really no substitute with getting through it, walking through it, but we think we've done a really bad job in our culture, of allowing people to not only prepare themselves for this, but to be able to experience this. Billy Graham was quoted later in life saying “Americans have no clue how to grieve”. We just don't know how to do it, you know? We don't know what to do, we don't know what is okay. We have a lot of people constantly apologizing to me for some of their feelings.

[Brent]: That they're crying or that they're angry or that they're down and you know, I know I should be more hopeful than this and I should believe this that or the other and I go “quit it! Quit apologizing, just be okay”. But also know it won't last forever. There will be a morning, there will be a time that we can move through this and feel differently, but you will feel differently when you feel differently. It's, you know, people go “how long is this going to last?” and I go “I don't know you know; it will be done when it's done” and the healthiest way we found for people to heal, is genuine and real and honest.

[Brent]: Just be real, just be honest and as we're going to talk about that, you may not be able to be that way around everybody.

[Brent]: Because there are people-- We're going to talk about safe people. There are going to be people in your life they're not safe. Now, they may be great people, some of them may be family. Family has a really hard time with us grieving, because they want us--

[Brent]: Yes, they want us to feel better so much quicker. They want to, you know, a pastor wants to give us an answer or a quote or whatever that helps them feel better tomorrow and no, it's just being with them, it's sitting with them and--

[Janis]: But I think one of the biggest challenges as helpers and as family members, is we don't realize how long it takes to get through something. I remember going to the doctor a number of years ago right after my sister passed away and she passed away in November and I think I was in the doctor's office in late January or early February and he said “so, do you have any stress in your life?” and I mentioned a couple things and then I said “well, and my sister died” and he said “well, that was last year” and I think “what do you-- Three months ago”.

[Janis]: But we do tend to do that as a culture. One of the things that I found helpful and I came upon this totally by accident, but I had a woman in my office who had lost her husband about five months ago, five months previously and she said “I'm still dealing with some of this brain fog and I just get so sad” and I just looked at her and I went “of course, of course you get sad, of course you're dealing with that. Your husband only died five months ago” and she came back the next session and she said “that was the most helpful thing for me, because when I find myself going ‘ugh, I'm so confused, I'm not thinking clearly’. Instead of beating myself up, I can go ‘well, of course I feel this way, I just lost my husband five months ago’”.

[Brent]: And a lot of people we deal with, are dealing with complicated grief.

[Brent]: People will come in and you know, they're dealing with some depression and they're having a hard time getting motivated at work. They’re, you know, something's happened with one of their children, something stressed in their family and I'm listening to their story and I'm counting on my fingers how many losses that they've experienced and I start articulating them “well, you've lost this and you're worried about this happening and this happened” and [Unintelligible] like “oh my gosh, I never thought about that”.

[Janis]: It's cumulative grief.

[Janis]: And sometimes cumulative grief can be around a certain thing. So, we move to a different town and we lose our friends, we lose our grocery store, we lose our church, we lose the gym that we worked out and so, there can be cumulative grief around one incident or you can have cumulative grief around--

[Brent]: Multiple things.

[Janis]: Yes. “I lost this and this and this, and then my dog died”. I mean, all of those things add up and they make it more difficult as we walk through grief.

[Brent]: Yeah. So, you're going to hear us talk quite a bit today about “be okay with not being okay” and there's something that can happen in us, some strengthening that can happen through this. Now, we don't believe that God thinks we all need to get stronger, so he's going to cause all bad kind of things to happen to us.

[Brent]: It's in this life we will have trouble and--

[Janis]: And so much of what we want to talk about is just like, if you had a physical injury, we would encourage you to take time off to rest, to recover. You'd have people around you that would go “oh, let me do that for you, let me do this” for a long period of time until you fully recovered. But with grief, we oftentimes are there-- I think I read one author say “the first 10 days there are people there for you”.

[Janis]: After that, things drop off, but it's like a serious, serious wound that will take time to heal.

[Brent]: Yes, and just recognize that we realize that the culture is going to push you, to falsely be okay. I get really frustrated at funerals oftentimes. Now, we were pastors for many years and did several of these, but when I've attended funerals, oftentimes I hear the pastor talking about the family going “well, the family has such great faith. Look, they're so strong in this” and I'm like “they're still in shock, they haven't even started the process of grief” and so, everybody kind of rallies around, you know? Around the funeral time and just a little bit longer than that and then, everybody goes back to their normal life and it is anything but normal to people that have had the loss and they just feel left and they don't know what to do with that and they assume they should be better. “I should be feeling better, I guess, because everybody expects that I should be better. If I had great faith, I would be better”.

[Brent]: Gosh, I think in our in our faith cultures, we're like maybe worse at this than anybody, because if we believe-- If we believe God is good and every-- You know, everything's gonna be fine and we have to believe the people that died are in a better place or if I lost my job “well, there must be something good about this and I'm going to have a better job then” and we think all-- We have all this pressure and it causes people to get stunted in their grief and so, I think-- I think everybody's getting the point.

[Brent]: Okay, good.

[Janis]: Well, let me say this it also, all of those messages can cause us to pull away from God. Because if we're supposed to have this faith and things will be better and we don't feel that way, we're still broken and hurting, which is natural, then it's “oh, God must think I'm doing a bad job of this and so, I'm just not going to talk to him” or maybe I'm mad at him, but I'm just not going to talk to him for a while until I feel better.

[Brent]: Yeah. So, we're going to talk about some handles, for kind of what to do when you feel these different kinds of waves of emotions. Now, many years ago when we first started doing this, kind of work 40 years ago or so, we kind of thought this was all linear. That there were stages of grief we were taught and you kind of start at number one and you spend a little bit of time there. Then you go to number two, then you go to number three, then-- And then hang out for number four for a while and then, you're done, okay? And we found out it just doesn't work that way, that we go in and out of this. As a matter of fact, even Elisabeth Kübler Ross who kind of designed some of this with her studies-- Now, she was studying people that were dying and so, they had a-- They had a terminal disease and they were dying and so, it's a little different population than what most people are experiencing. But even--

[Janis]: But we took that model.

[Brent]: We took that model, you know? And even she shared later “no, I didn't never mean it for it to be linear”.

[Brent]: “I knew that people were going to go in and out of this” and nobody wants to hear this, but studies do suggest that if you had a literal death of a loved one, that it's a two-to-five-year process to really grieve that loss and some would suggest if you lose a loved one, you'll never fully get over it. Now, that doesn't mean six months later or a year later you're going to feel the same intensity of the day they were lowered on the casket in the ground, but we're going to have moments. We're going to see somebody that looks like them. We're gonna see-- Watch a movie it reminds us of something. We're gonna have a holiday and they were-- They used to sit right over there, you know? In our dining room and they're not there now and so, all of these things are going to kind of keep swirling in us and so, what do we do?

[Brent]: What we find is with these different stages that we find, that most-- Everybody will go through. No, not everybody's going to do it the same way, they're not going to spend as much time in each of these, different personalities do things differently. But in my experience, we generally find that most people are going to experience all of these stages we--

[Janis]: At some point.

[Brent]: At some point.

[Janis]: And generally multiple times.

[Janis]: I mean, I tell my clients that grief is like an old-fashioned pinball machine. You kind of go… In all different ways and then you go back to the first one again.

[Janis]: But grief is, as you mentioned, grief is also sneaky.

[Janis]: So, just when you go “okay, I processed through the anger stage, I'm fine”. Then, all of a sudden something does happen and it triggers that anger again and it's okay to keep revisiting those stages, because we need to do that in order to heal.

[Brent]: Yeah. So, we're going to kind of talk through these a little bit. Again, they don't go in order, even though we're going to talk about them in order. We've got to start with something and--

[Janis]: And that probably will go off in tangents.

[Janis]: In the midst of the steps.

[Brent]: Yes, absolutely-- We hope that's true and so, you know, one of the things that people do experience is some sense of shock and denial. You know, shock is this we're kind of overwhelmed by outside stimuli. Something that's happened outside of us that has overwhelmed us. Obviously, it's a little bit like, the car accident victim that's sitting on the side of the road. They're just staring into space, they look numb. You can kind of wave your hand in front of their face and they don't even hardly know you're there. The body and the mind seem to go into shock when something we hear-- You know, we got the word that we lost our job or our son had this horrible situation happen or we got a-- Somebody got a medical result, you know’ Of sickness or disease or whatever and we just feel shocked and for some reason, we just have-- Everything-- and kind of all systems shut down.

[Brent]: Now, there's not a lot we do with that proactively to get through that, just realize we need to be graceful towards ourselves. We need to give ourselves time to just be numb. That's why at most funerals people are still a bit numb. Now, they're smiling, they're shaking hands, they're trying to be present, but they're really numb and--

[Janis]: I remember Jackie Kennedy. Obviously, I was very young, but I was alive when JFK was--

[Brent]: Yes, we were.

[Janis]: Yes, I was. When JFK was assassinated and I remember people talking about “wow, she just has handled it all so well” and it was like “no, she was in the car when her husband got shot”.

[Brent]: Oh my gosh.

[Janis]: And she's holding up because she can't allow herself to not hold up. I mean, she's still in that stage of shock and that's really when we need other people to step in and help.

[Brent]: And just to do things for us that we can't do and just, you know, be present in a way that almost functions for us and we also know that we can have aftershocks.

[Brent]: You know, it's not just that immediacy all the pictures of her, you know, that we see, she was in shock, you know? Right? And-- But there's going to be times of aftershock. We have people that are-- We just got through the holidays not too long ago and somebody that lost a loved one this last year, well, the holidays they got re-shocked, you know? Because “oh my gosh, mom used to be over there and she planned all of this and she's not here this year” and so, everybody's “oh my gosh”, you know, it's--

[Janis]: And I don't know about you, but with my clients, if I've got somebody that has experienced the loss of a family member, I encourage them to try to do holidays differently for the first year or two. Sometimes I'll have people that will go on a cruise instead or they'll have Christmas at somebody else's house. But I encourage them to do something that's different, because it is so painful to do the same traditions with that person missing. So, it's hard, because part of you wants those traditions, but the other part of you it's like “I just can't face it without dad here her or mom here”.

[Brent]: Yeah, it's just in some ways, it allows for a little bit and we're gonna talk about that in a second, a little bit of healthy denial, you know’ There's healthy and unhealthy denial. A little bit of healthy denial is that we're going to go off and do a cruise as a family and we're just gonna try to not think about it as much. But it's also developing some new traditions, some--

[Brent]: Life can go on and we can have positive experiences, even with this loss and so, I think it does a bunch of things, I think it's a brilliant idea and I do recommend that to clients is, at least maybe one thing this holiday, do something different that's a new tradition, that's a new some-- New fresh something and so, it's again, allowing ourselves to experience shock and to that slowly dissipate. It will slowly dissipate, you know? Eventually we'll begin to wake up and go “this wasn't just a bad dream, this is real” and the shock will begin to slowly diminish.

[Brent]: The second is-- Another one is denial and denial; I think it has two sides to it. One, is healthy denial, which-- Well, first of all, let's talk about unhealthy denial. We usually talk about denial, we think about “oh, they're just in denial”, which is a “they're just not acknowledging this”. Which you could almost say there are-- We have a culture of denial to a certain extent. We just don't think about it, we're gonna not realize the impact that it can have on us. There are some, I think, even in the faith traditions, that they feel like if they talk about pain or even anger or depression or whatever, then that's “I don't have good faith” and so, I think they're in denial, we don't think that's very healthy, you know? We encourage people to just be able to be real and honest with themselves and with others and that that's the healthiest way through.

[Janis]: Jesus wept, so it's okay if we do too.

[Brent]: Absolutely, absolutely, and so, that could be-- There could be an unhealthy denial there, but there's also a healthy denial, which is we don't want people sitting around 24/7, sitting on the edge of their bed staring at the wall and this is all they think about. You know, it's oftentimes a blessing and I say to most of my folks, that it's good you have a job that requires you to get up and go to work every day. That you've got kids that you're chasing around, you know? That you have things to do and so, it's okay to have get your mind off of it at times, because it will surface back up again. As long as when it surfaces backs up-- Back up again, we don't just push it down, we don't just repress it, but we just let it be. That's going to be okay, but it's allowing ourselves some distractions and being okay with that.

[Janis]: I call it-- With my clients I call it “planned denial”.

[Janis]: You know, sometimes you're so emotionally exhausted you need a break, just to get rest and to just kind of be rejuvenated before you go through more of the process of grieving and so, I will say “find a funny light movie”. Now, have somebody check it out ahead of time to make sure nothing's going to happen. I remember years ago we went to a movie; I think it was “Hope Floats”. I don't know if you remember that, but we went to a movie and it was a it was supposed to be I thought, a romantic comedy and then in the midst of it, the main character went to visit her father in the nursing home and he had had a stroke or an aneurysm, I don't know what. But he could walk, but he couldn't talk and so, she was talking to him. Well, that had just happened with my dad and my dad was in that exact same situation and so, she's trying to pour her heart out to him and he doesn't have much of a response and I just-- I'm sitting in this movie theater sobbing like… But things like that are going to happen. So, your planned denial-- All that to say your planned denial, find some things that are lighter, find some books that you can read. Positive music that you can listen to. It's not denying the loss that you have, but it's just giving yourself little pockets of rest in the midst of grief.

[Brent]: Yeah, yeah, and so, I always say that healing is a little bit like going to chiropractor. If you've gone to a chiropractor, you know that they don't work on-- Whatever they do, adjustments and everything, they don't do this for 12 hours, right?

[Brent]: They do it for a few minutes. They tell you go home, come back and we'll do some more later.

[Brent]: And so, it's a little bit like allowing our-- When emotions come up, we're going to work on them, we're going to give you some handles for what to do with this. When these other emotions pop up, how do I process these in a healthy way? But after that, if I can just get distracted and think about something else, that's okay. I'm letting the-- Just like the chiropractor’s letting your muscles adjust and settle back in and stuff and then we'll do some more adjustment next time and so, kind of going in and out of this is that we found the healthiest way to do this.

[Janis]: And one of the tools that I found that's really helpful, that the first time I heard about it I was like “that's weird”, but is to actually schedule some grief time. In the midst of our busy life, especially if you have kids and you have a lot of things going on, it's hard to have that time and so, over time I found that people like to adopt a grief time. Maybe it's Tuesday and Thursday evenings from 7 to 8 or 9 to 10 or maybe it's just Thursday evening, but a chance to just go “I'm going to set aside this time to just let myself feel what I'm feeling and allow myself to grieve the loss of this person or a significant other loss” and do whatever is helpful and we'll talk about that more, but do whatever is helpful to let yourself go through the process.

[Brent]: Yeah. So, there's-- These next ones we're going to talk about, are ones that we have to be I think, more proactive with. That when they do surface, we need to do something with them and what we found is, as these other ones surface, I'm thinking of anger and depression and mourning. That when they surface, if we process them in a healthy way, then the next time we experience it, we find the intensity is a little bit less. Now, it's not a lot less, usually it's kind of just moderately less, but the intensity will be less and then the stages will start spreading out. The times that we experience these feelings won't happen quite as often and then, again, little by little we come to kind of one of the end results of this, which is acceptance. Which is “yes, a bad rotten crummy thing has happened, but gonna be okay, gonna get through this” and then if we do those well and again, well is kind of a, you know, subjective term. If we do it in the healthiest way--

[Janis]: If we allow ourselves.

[Janis]: To process.

[Brent]: Yes. Then eventually we will come to some place of meaning, which is kind of a healthy byproduct of healthy grieving. That something can deepen in our root system, that we can grow through this experience. Of course, we had early in our marriage, we had -- When I think about meaning, I think about kind of the multiple miscarriages that we experienced and of course, as the mom, you experience this in a much greater depth than I think I ever could experience it, but I still felt it, you know? We we're hoping for family and went through these and we were ultimately blessed with a really beautiful family of four children. But we didn't know that, we didn't know we were going to have a family and--

[Janis]: And I think infertility and pregnancy loss is one of the areas that Americans aren't very good at acknowledging. I think we're getting better, definitely better than 30 years ago, almost 40 years ago when we were going through it. But Americans don't know how to do that well. Maybe other cultures don't either, but I'm just here.

[Janis]: But oftentimes people discount the pain of infertility, they don't recognize the month in and month out pain of “I thought I was pregnant this month. I had these little twinges, I thought this would happen” and then the disappointment that happens, while you watch your friends go on and have children and then, also miscarriage, you know? People will say the craziest things in an attempt to be comforting. “Well, at least you weren't pregnant very long”. Well, you know, once you find out you're pregnant, once you suspect you're pregnant, for most people they've already figured out when that child's going to kindergarten, when they're going to wear maternity clothes, when they're going to graduate from high school, how that affects them with their cousins. I mean, so many different things. It is a loss of a person and so, people often don't know how to deal with that.

[Brent]: Yeah. So, we were going through this and at the time, not only were we unable to be able to have a baby, but we were working in a large Ministry at the time and one of our-- We had a big counseling Ministry and then one of our areas of responsibility, is we had a maternity home and a Crisis Pregnancy Center and an adoption agency that was under our responsibility and all these 15, 16-year-old girls, the last thing they'd ever wanted to be was pregnant, you know? And saying “we only did it one time”.

[Brent]: And we were like “what the heck!”.

[Janis]: “This is not fair!”.

[Brent]: “Why can't we have a child and these don't even want to have these children?”. It just was very, very confusing and I do remember, it seems like it may have been a few years past that, that we were talking and it seemed like we both kind of had come to some deeper understanding of our faith. I think in our faith training, we've kind of been taught that “if you love God and you serve God and you do the right things, then good things are always going to happen”. It's like you have the steering wheel.

[Brent]: You can steer your life into only good and we were living in a season we're known; you can pretty much be doing the right stuff and really crummy things can happen. But we found a place of strength and peace in the-- We found God showing up in the midst of the pain and it hadn't been fixed yet, we hadn't been resolved yet, but we found our root system deepening and we found that to be some meaning, some strengthening. Now, again, we don't think God thought “well, Brent and Janis Sharp need to really work on their faith, so I'm going to cause all this bad stuff to happen to them”.

[Janis]: “And they'll get their act together”. Yeah.

[Brent]: “And they’ll get their act together”. But it was this-- Is this stuff happens in life and if we can move through that-- Now, it was a difficult season of grief going through that, but we felt-- And everybody's meaning is going to be different, but that was some of the meaning that we experienced, I think.

[Janis]: And I think a lot of times you have to be careful to not go “I'm going to find meaning in this now”.

[Brent]: No. Absolutely, yeah.

[Janis]: Because then it turns into a “I don't know, I've got to prove this is-- This is okay”.

[Brent]: Valuable in some way.

[Janis]: And if its valuable, exactly. So, we don't-- I don't think we can go “I'm gonna search for meaning”. I think as we walk through the process and walk through our time with God in this, then we find that there are some benefits or not benefits, there's some positive things that can come out in our growth.

[Brent]: Yeah. It really requires growth; it does requires strengthening.

[Janis]: It does. I think that's the best way.

[Brent]: Because it demands us almost to somehow deepen our life and-- But you're right, it's not “oh, I'm going to write a book about this now”.

[Brent]: “I'm going to do this” or you know, that we have to force it into meaning. It's a natural byproduct.

[Janis]: Yeah, and I think we have to be so careful when we're interacting with other people, because again, because we want to fix it. We want to go and I've heard this so many times from people that have gone through tragedies and they said “well, my friends say maybe I can write a book about this or maybe I can become a speaker or I need to do a non-profit organization for people who have gone through this” and it's like there has to be a reason for it. People don't-- They're not okay with their not being a clear-cut reason why this happened and it really involves you saying “I have no idea why this happened. It's terrible, but God, I'm going to lean on you in the midst of this, even though I'm kind of mad at you or very mad at you, because things are not going the way I wanted them to and this is not fair” and that's where we have the growth and I often tell a story of-- You know, right after our last miscarriage, which I had no idea of knowing it was our last one. But right after our last miscarriage, I was so angry being around all these young girls that were having babies and all my friends having babies and it was-- I was so angry that one night, I just said “I am going to stay up all night and wrestle with God until he tells me why this is happening to us. We're nice people! We're pastors! This is wrong that we're going through this!”.

[Janis]: And so, I stayed up all night long and I screamed and cried and did all kinds of things and my answer in the morning, was not an answer, but it was right. It was a deep sense that God is good and it made no sense with what was going on in our lives, but there was a comfort that came with that, that I wasn't getting because I was just holding God at arm's length. Just a “I'm not gonna hang out with you until I know if you're gonna do what I want you to do”.

[Janis]: But learning to just trust in God for who he is, easier said than done, was probably the best thing that I've ever been through.

[Brent]: It does require that we let go of control, which is the probably one of the most challenging things for us humans to do, because we crave control. We try to control our dynamics around our life and grief requires that we're not in charge, you know? Because if we were in charge, we wouldn't cause-- We wouldn't let any bad things happen.

[Brent]: We wouldn't let any disappointments happen, right? And so, it is a releasing of control and there is something strengthening in releasing control, it's kind of the oddest thing, you know? Is that it's the opposite of what we think should be helpful. We should be getting more control in life and it really is releasing control in life and learning how to live there.

[Brent]: So, as we go today, we've kind of given you a bit of an intro on understanding of grief and it's a process and we're all grieving something all the time. The next few times we're going to get together here, we're going to talk about some of the emotions that you're going to experience, to take some more proactive effort, to really put some energy into to begin to move through dealing with anger and depression and mourning and so, we're going to talk about that more in detail next time.

[Brent]: So, today as you go, blessings to you. We trust you for peace in the midst of real-life challenges. So, as we've begun to look at loss, recognizing we all are grieving something all the time and we've talked about shock and denial and the next stages that we're going to talk about, the next emotions that we find that many people experience, are going to take some efforts, some proactive effort to walk through. We're going to give you some handles for those next time and we trust that as we all deal with the losses in our life, that there is a place of peace in the midst of the storm. So, blessings to you. Go in peace.