Letting Go of Disappointments and Painful Losses (7 page)

Look around you right now. Find five things that are the color green or have green in them. With your mind-set tuned to look for green, the color green will start to jump out at you.
Your eye will be drawn to a green shirt, a green book, leaves on flowers, a green notebook or pen. Have you ever noticed that after you’ve bought a new car, you begin to notice every other car like yours on the road? People find what they are looking for. If you’re looking for conspiracies, you’ll find them. If you’re looking for God’s perfect plan, you’ll find it too.

When Nathan was diagnosed with Down syndrome, John and I were abruptly faced with the difficult assignment of letting go of many things we held near and dear to our hearts. We had to let go of our agenda for our lives, of our dreams for a healthy baby, of my professional position because much more of my energy was needed at home, of once-cherished areas of church involvement, of some of our free time, of my creative writing for five years, and of a few relationships due to lack of time and cultivation. It was a dark season of grief for all of us. But perspective arrived in an unexpected package one afternoon shortly after we brought Nathan home from the hospital.

I received a phone call from a friend. Knowing I had my hands full trying to adjust to so many changes, Kay said, “I’m coming over to clean your house. What’s a good day?”

Kay showed up on my doorstep a couple of days later with our friend, Delight. What a sight greeted me when I opened the front door! These two looked like they had just stepped off the set of a science-fiction movie. They wore buckets on their heads, gas masks on their faces, combat boots, striped socks, and aprons over outfits that would have been rejected by the homeless.

They had come to make me laugh. And it worked!

Kay and Delight’s visit was far more significant to me than the laughter—or the clean floors and dusted furniture they left behind. Kay is the mother of two, Kurt and Kara. We had known the family for many years because their son was in our youth group years ago when John and I worked with teenagers. Kara, their youngest, had been born with cerebral palsy and over the years had undergone extensive surgical procedures. For twelve years Kay had walked the path I was just beginning.

When I saw her standing there in that crazy getup on my porch, smiling from ear to ear, I remembered the many times I had seen her in the past and thought,
She has such burdens. How can she be so happy?

I plopped myself in our big stuffed chair in the living room to nurse Nathan and said, “Kay, I’m struggling with something. I don’t know how to view Nathan’s handicap from God’s perspective. How do you see it?”

Wise lady that she is, Kay didn’t give me any platitudes or pat answers. Instead, she pointed me to Scripture. One of the passages that had been meaningful to her family since Kara’s birth, she told me, was John 9. I had my copy of
The Message
at hand. Eager for some answers, I immediately picked it up and began to read:

Those verses gave me a fresh perspective that brisk fall afternoon. They challenged me to look for God in the midst of my daily grind. I resolved to quit trying to figure it all out and to believe that God would be working in our family as we made the adjustments needed to welcome Nathan.

Look instead for what God can do.
I pondered those words for a long time as I held Nathan that day. I wondered how the blind man felt before Jesus came into his life. My hunch is that he assumed he would always be shrouded in darkness. Little did he know that he was headed for historical significance. Little did he know that one day he would stand boldly before the religious leaders of Jerusalem and testify to God’s healing power in his life.

Who can give you and me the ability to believe that we have a future?

God.

Who can give you and me the faith to believe that our children are in God’s hands—no matter what?

God.

Who can give us the faith to believe that God will have His way in our children’s lives when circumstances seem to be pointing another direction?

God.

God challenges you and me to let go of our effort to make sense out of unexpected enigmas and to have eyes of faith for ourselves, our children, our marriages, our jobs, and our ministries. He says, “I know the plans I have for you.… They are plans for good and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope.… When you pray, I will listen. You will find me when you seek me, if you look for me in earnest” (Jeremiah 29:11–13,
TLB
).

God, with a full awareness of our weaknesses, wounds, handicaps, and disappointments, challenges us to run to Him. To place our trust in Him. Even when our hearts are breaking. Even when our logic screams that He doesn’t care or that He has made a terrible mistake.

In the end, He will use us in His own special way. He will orchestrate our unique, divine assignments. And
nothing
can stop Him from achieving His purposes.
¹

In the midst of the pain and confusion that often accompany letting go, we need to run to God and say,
God, I need Your help. Give me Your perspective. Let my eyes see as You see. Let my heart hear Your heart. Grant me insight into what You are doing in my life right now. Show me what I need to do to cooperate with You in my healing.

And then, dear friend, pay very close attention to the people who cross your path and the situations that present themselves. Be mindful of the insights that bubble to the surface and the whisperings of the Holy Spirit. Because God will be faithful to answer those kinds of prayers.

C
HAPTER
S
IX

P
AINFUL
E
MOTIONS
ARE BUILT INTO THE LETTING-GO
process. No matter what we have to let go of, whether it’s sending our youngest off to kindergarten or saying a final good-bye to our spouse of more than fifty years, we will feel grief. We will feel some degree of sadness, ambivalence, emptiness, anger, or confusion. These feelings aren’t bad. They’re normal, and it’s necessary for us to feel them.

Time and again, psychiatric research has shown that an important part of letting go is feeling. Feeling leads to release. Denying, stuffing, or numbing our feelings with some sort of addictive behavior only prolongs and intensifies our grief. It blocks us from moving on in life.

I remember the ache in my empty arms after our first baby died halfway to term. With my postpartum hormones raging, the grief was more than I wanted to endure. At the counselingcenter one morning I said to a colleague, “I wish therewere a pill I could take that would make these feelings go away.”

He was very kind and, like a good friend, spoke the truth in love: “I can sure understand that, but then you would
just have to work through your grief later.”

He was making a point that I understand more fully now. Letting go demands that we feel and ride out our painful emotions. When we are feeling our pain, we are
progressing.
We tend to get mixed up about this process. We think that if we feel pain deeply, we are losing it, cracking up, or getting ready for the funny farm. Nothing is further from the truth. When we are feeling, we are moving ahead through the grief process.

I have a few statements I like to teach my clients:

In our book
Women and Stress
, Jean Lush and I share sixteen creative ways to release feelings constructively.
¹
When we talk about managing emotions, we use a simple diagram of a storage pot. We are all storage pots. Scraps of emotion are collected in our pots: anger, jealousy, guilt, fear, joy, sorrow, excitement. In the process of letting go, all sorts of emotional scraps pile up in the pot. These scraps create tension. Our emotions are aroused, churning inside, and we begin feeling agitated, troubled, conflicted, tied up in knots, and out of sorts.

In the midst of this agitation, it’s important to remember some basic truths of nature. First, tension is energy, and energy will always strive to be discharged. Discharge may come in a variety of
ways, depending on our natural predisposition and choices.

Some people are fighters. They rarely close their lids. Whenever they are tense, they immediately unload their tension, regardless of the cost. They act out their emotions. Their rule of thumb is to find inner peace at any price. Fighters feel much better after blowing off steam, even though those around them may end up splattered on the pavement.

Other people are what I call “fighters.” They have mastered the skill of sitting on the lid of their pot. Since the tension isn’t discharged outwardly, it gets discharged inwardly. Flighters commonly suffer from psychosomatic illnesses and depression and engage in behaviors like avoidance and procrastination. Their motto is, “I must keep peace at any price.”

When we have to let go of something important to us, we need to find ways to open some release valves, as we would on a pressure cooker, to let some of our emotional tension out in constructive ways.

One safe place to start is to talk to God—to tell Him about our hurt, our anger, our disappointment, and our sadness. Not for His sake, but for ours. He already knows the secrets of our hearts.

I’m not talking about prayers consisting of fancy, pious, religious words. I’m talking about authentically sharing our thoughts and feelings with God as we would with our most trusted friend. Whispers in the dark, cries from a lonely heart, sighs of confusion, and fumbling utterances offered to God will find their way to His ears. Some of the best prayers have more feelings than words.

I’ve seen powerful breakthroughs when people invite the healing presence of God into their place of brokenness. Some of the most effective therapy occurs when people talk to God in prayer. As they share their pain with Him, healing happens. When they have suffered terrible losses and gross injustices, logic and pat answers don’t defuse their pain. Releasing their grief does.