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Posted 9 months, 2 weeks ago at 9:31 pm. 0 comments
A couple of weekends ago we were at a friends wedding at a Manor House in the Countryside which was quite overwhelming, especially since he and his bride had paid for us to stay there over the weekend.The Wedding took place on the Saturday and I welled up and almost cried at 3 points during the day. Looking back on those times I think I was overcome with joy each time, but for different reasons.
The first moment was at the beginning of the ceremony. Now, my friend is the kind of character who needed his own entrance into the hall! The service began with a great rendition of the song “Oh Happy Day” which got everyone excited, then towards the end of the song, my friend came in with his 9 (yes, 9) best men jumping and hollaring and whooping in celebration of their mates imminent marriage.
My chest felt squeezed and my throat tightened as I saw such awesome joy in my friend as he bounced and whooped down the aisle, but it was especially due to the joy his best men had in celebrating this moment in his life. My eyes certainly watered as they partied down the aisle encouraging the whole congregation to join in with their jubilation.
The next moment of joy which made me well up was during one of the worship songs in the ceremony. I looked forward to see the special couple and saw my friends hair bobbing up and down as he was consumed in his worship of God. I think it was seeing the joy my friend had in giving thanks to God for this day and moment of marriage that got to me and made my heart feel heavy again.
The other time when I felt moved enough to cry was during the reception as my friend was finishing his speech. I knew he studied music at university (where I met him) and that his chosen instrument was his voice, but I had never heard him sing opera. But to conclude his speach, he sang a piece of opera to his new wife. The piece went on for alot longer than I thought was necessary, but I think that it’s length and the fact that he never moved his eyes from hers was what made me tingle with delight in seeing his total joy in and devotion to his new wife.
I hadn’t seen or felt such joy for a long, long time, and each moment shook me. It is quite strange to want to cry for joy because your physical responses are so similar to when you cry because of pain, except there is no pain, only delight.
Posted 10 months, 2 weeks ago at 9:59 pm. 0 comments
A couple of weeks ago I was getting very angry. Not about anything in particular, just in general. Small things which annoyed me would send me into a rage and I didn’t know why and found it hard to control myself. I swore and smacked a cupboard door at one point over fumbling with a tea spoon.
I was a bit scared too becuase I didn’t like who I was or who I was becoming because of this anger. I slowly realised that it was probably due to a wave of grief over Amy, plus anxiety about Toby arriving and about needing to make more money through my web business to support him and Mary-Lou.
One evening during this time I sat down and watched a film called Junebug. It’s about an art collector from Chicago who goes to meet her new husband’s family who live in the southern states. The film has a unique style and shows the clash between her liberal tactile ways and the conservative, christian family in a humerous way. The reason the film is called Junebug is because her Husband’s brother’s wife is expecting a baby imminently and wants to call it Junebug.
As I was enjoying the film, I was intrigued by the husbands brother, the father of the unborn child. He obviously had issues, one of which was anger. In one scene he tries to record a TV program for his wife while she is having her baby shower upstairs but the video recorder kept ejecting the video. He gets so angry that he starts shouting and swearing which makes the ladies upstairs hush in embarrassment. His wife comes down to see what’s wrong but he rejects her help and throws the video against the wall. I was interested and glad to see somebody else dealing with anger issues.
A bit later in the film, his wife goes into labour, rushes off to the hospital all excited, then loses the baby.
At this point I literally sat forward in my chair. I couldn’t believe this baby had been stillborn. I couldn’t believe that such a movie would deal with stillbirth. I was positively shocked. All of a sudden the film took on a whole new meaning for me.
The most amazing scene in the film was in the hospital after the baby had died. The mum and her husbands brother were talking together and the mum (played by Amy Adams who was rightfully nominated for an Oscar for her role) went beck and forth between talking about normal things and crying so desperately about her lost baby and her husband. It reminded me of our weekedn in the hospital after Amy died. We too would go from talking normally about something to crying together then back to chatting casually. It was a very strange time.
One of the things the mum said in the hospital scene was that she felt so scared because shes didn’t know what her husband was thinking. He had left the hospital without saying a word. I felt even more that I related to this character, this angry dad who had lost his first baby. I don’t think I’ve ever felt that I could relate to a character so intimately. It was reassuring but sad.
Posted 10 months, 3 weeks ago at 7:55 pm. 1 comment
I recently blogged about Job and his suffering and how he chose to still love and honour God throughout. I was inspired by the book Where Is God When It Hurts to realise that Job didn’t deserve the suffering he endured and that God does not punish people with suffering.
Further on in the book, Philip Yancey explains his confusion at God’s response once he does eventually decide to speak to Job. Instead of comforting Job with “there, there, well done for enduring, you’ve matured and proved me right to Satan, thanks!” he launches into one of his longest speeches in the Bible all about what an awesome creator he is! He pretty much ignores the previous 35 chapters worth of questions about pain and suffering!
So does this mean that God has no answers? Or does it mean he has a huge self-centred ego? Yancey suggests that God’s message to Job is
“Stop whining, you have no idea what you’re talking about”. Or as Frederick Buechner puts it:
“God doesn’t explain. He explodes. He asks Job who he thinks he is anyway. He says that to try to explain the kind of things Job wants explaining would be like trying to explain Einstein to a little-neck clam… God doesn’t reveal his grand design. He reveals Himself.”
I swing from being intensely angry that I don’t know why Amy died and why this happened to me, to feeling OK about not knowing since it’s something I’ll never get an answer to.
But I do like the idea that God would rather simply reveal himself and his love to those who suffer than give pat answers which sum up the purpose for peoples pain. I like that idea because it points to God’s compassion.
Yet I feel distant from God.
My Mum gave us a copy of a Nooma video about grief a few months after Amy died. In it Rob Bell explains the Jewish tradition of Sitting Shivah where people coming to see those who are mourning, . They don’t crowd them with activity or conversation, they simply sit and wait for the mourner to make the first move. Rob Bell suggests that this tradition comes from the Jewish understanding about how God relates to those who mourn. He sits close by waiting for the mourner to come to Him. He doesn’t pressure them to keep praying or reading the bible everyday, He just waits near by.
When Mary-Lou and I watched the Nooma video, the Sitting Shivah idea really helped us relax about us and God. We both have got a struggle on our hands in terms of feeling secure and safe in Gods arms.
We’ve only just started facing Him again from time to time.Which is probably why I feel distant from Him. I do believe He wants to reveal Himself to me in new and unexpected ways, but for now, I’m still working things through in my heart
Posted 11 months ago at 11:08 pm. 1 comment
I have asked many times why Amy died. I’m not asking how she died, her stillbirth was one of the 50% that are unexplained. I want to know why.
Mary-Lou particularly has battled with the idea that Amy died because of something she did or didn’t do. No matter how much doctors, midwives and friends reassure her that she didn’t cause Amy’s stillbirth, she still wonders. All she wants is for God himself to tell her that it wasn’t her fault, but he hasn’t.
I knew this was a broken world long before Amy died. I grew up in an evangelical family and was aware that bad things happen to good people as a result of The Fall. I also believed that God was totally good, and this confused me a bit. But I had never experienced any major suffering to have to really figure it out, it was just another confusing tension which I could easily put to the back of my mind. I was also aware of my own sins and pride and never believed that I was one of those good people who didn’t deserve bad things.
When we suffer pain, or a loss, we humans often question why it has happened to us. I wondered whether Amy died as a punishment to me. I couldn’t think of a single sin that might have caused the punishment, afterall, there are many to choose from.
I have also been angry with God and wanted to blame him. WTF was he doing when she died? I believe he had the power to save her, so why, why, why didn’t he?
Reading “Where Is God When It Hurts” recently helped me think through the idea that Amy died as a punishment to me. Philip Yancey points to Job and Jesus to show that it is not a valid conclusion.
Job was blameless, that’s why Satan wanted to ruin him to prove to God that mankind will only freely love him whenthings are good. So Jobs suffering was not because he deserved it or as a punishment and even though Jobs friends urged him to repent of whatever sin broughthim his suffering, he disagreed that this was the reason and still chose to love and honour God.
Then there was Jesus who relieved many individuals of their suffering put never inflicted pain or suffering as a punishment. If God regularly punishes people, you’d have thought Jesus would have broken a few bones!
There are of course plenty of examples of God punishing Israel and others (after repeated warnings) but Yancey argues that this is not how God operates this side of Jesus.
Great. For me. But non of this helps Mary-Lou who is desperate to hear God tell her it wasn’t her fault.
Posted 11 months, 1 week ago at 7:11 pm. 0 comments
I am currently reading Philip Yancey’s book “Where Is God When It Hurts“. I had to buy it after asking my friends if anyone had a copy. I was fairly suprised that no-one had the book, but it’s probably quite telling about Western Evangelical Christianity.
I’m definitely finding the book interesting but so far it has been about physical pain rather than emotional pain so I’ve not got alot out of it yet. But it got me thinking about pain differently. Philip Yancey suggests that pain is a wonderful example of God’s awesome creation - God created pain! The nervous system in each one of us protects us from further harm by detecting heat, cold, pressure, friction, etc. Pain is a warning system. He also suggests that fear, loneliness and guilt are good as they help us to make better decisions.
If all that is uncomfortable, read the book!
I started wondering about spiritual pain. If we are also spirits, can we suffer spiritual pain? What could cause spiritual pain? How would it feel? How would we describe it? Would there be another set of words?
When I picture what happened to me when Amy died I imagine myself being torn to pieces from the inside out. I’ve never been through such an emotional event before so I find it difficult to describe my feelings which makes it even harder to distinguish between my emotional pain and my spiritual pain.
All I know right now is that it’s very painful and confusing.
