Receiving an Invitation to Enter Into Grief

Before we lost Micah, I was under numerous misconceptions about how we ought to support those in grief. One of these was a misunderstanding about how to best support those in grief in the context of everyday conversation. I incorrectly assumed that any reference to the deceased would trigger certain memories or emotions that he or she had not previously experienced. In reality, a grieving person could tell you that you cannot harm them by discussing the deceased. A grieving person does not “pack away” memories of the deceased into the attic of the mind, and then only bring out these memories when someone else refers to the deceased. Anyone grieving the death of a loved one will tell you that thoughts of their loved one are nearly constantly on their mind.

In our case, we have found that, when a friend or family member is kind enough to converse about Micah, the conversation brings a flood of emotions, not because we have not already been grieving inwardly, but because the conversation provides an outlet to share these emotions. Rather than resulting in unwelcome emotions, sharing memories with us provides us with a welcomed outlet for our emotion.

According to our mentors Pat and Judy Misener, it is incumbent upon us, as the grieving parents, to grant others “permission” to enter into grief. In other words, because friends and family members don’t realize that it actually benefits us to talk about our deceased child, we need to invite them to do so. Whether we initiate conversations surrounding Micah, or even create new traditions or activities to remember Micah, it is good and healthy for us to “invite” others to grieve along with us.

If you know a grieving parent, I encourage you to accept any invitation offered to you to enter into their grief by conversing with them about the deceased loved one.

Micah's Age in Heaven

In the last scene of the movie, “Tree of Life,” the main characters are shown walking together through the ocean surf in front of a beautiful sunset. The movie follows a family of five (three sons—just like ours) through various times of life. While the disjointed plot of the movie does not provide us with many of the details, we do learn at one point that one of the boys had died unexpectedly. This final scene of the movie, in which all three of the boys are pictured together with their parents, provides a moving image for us, as we await our great reunion in Heaven.

Of particular interest in this final scene was the fact that the deceased son was pictured as a young boy, and not as an adult, like the other two sons who reached adulthood. Instead, he is shown to us as he was portrayed earlier in the movie--at about 7 to 10 years old. For these parents, they enjoyed not only a joyful reunion with their sons, but were reunited with their long-deceased child according to how they, as parents, last remembered him.

As grieving parents, Heather and I have often wondered how old Micah will appear to us when we see him again in Heaven. Will he be 9 months, or will he have grown older in the interim, just as we have grown older here on earth? Like other grieving parents we speak with, it is our hope that we might be able to see our son as he appeared to us, so that we might be able to not only enjoy our son’s presence again, but enjoy the very process of seeing him “grow up.”

I was surprised to learn that many Christian theologians down through the centuries have asked the question of how old we will appear to be in Heaven. Thomas Aquinas, for example, argued that regardless of our age when we die here on earth, we will all be about 33 years of age in Heaven—about the age of Jesus when we was crucified and resurrected. The theory is that, since this is the age when most humans reach a peak of physical strength, but before the human body starts to degenerate, then this is the age we will all be, as pictures of perfection. According to contemporary author Hank Hanegraaf, “If the blueprints for our glorified bodies are in the DNA, then it would stand to reason that our bodies will be resurrected at the optimal stage of development determined by our DNA.”

Others suggest that the New Earth will be filled with people of all different ages. For example, in Isaiah 11:6-9 we are told that, in the New Earth, “…the infants will play near the hole of the cobra, and the young child put his hand into the viper’s nest…” If infants are going to play next to cobras and vipers in the New Earth, then not everyone can be 33 years of age! Instead, grieving parents might have the opportunity to parent their children through those years that they thought they had lost with them here on earth.

I’ve decided that it is OK for us to consider how we will see Micah again on that wonderful day. While we don’t know for certain how Micah will appear to us, we can be certain that God will reveal Micah to us in a way that will give us the most joy and God the most glory. For many children, Christmas is so enjoyable because, regardless of what they receive as gifts, they know that they will not be disappointed. Similarly, we as believers can look forward to Heaven, because while we might not know what Heaven will be like, we know we won’t be disappointed.

Heart Laid Bare to God

In his book, Hope for the Brokenhearted, theologian John Luke Terveen writes about how U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt faced his grief following the death of his first wife. Roosevelt, the great politician who was never short on words, wrote in his diary the day of his wife’s death that, “All of the light has gone out of my life.” John Luke Terveen, Hope for the Brokenhearted, 61. And yet, after a short time of grieving, Roosevelt never mentioned his first wife again. Several years later, when a friend of Roosevelt’s also suffered loss, Roosevelt simply counseled the friend to “put it out of your mind and never mention it again.” Terveen, 61.

Rather than following Roosevelt’s example in grief, Terveen suggests that we follow the example of the Old Testament prophet Jeremiah. In the book of Lamentations, Jeremiah lays out his heart in brutal honesty to God as he laments the condition of Israel. At the time of Jeremiah’s “lament,” the nation of Israel has been subjected to the humiliation of the rule of the Babylonians, a nation that does not honor God. Throughout the book of Lamentations, it is clear that Jeremiah’s attitude is not that the Israelites should just “grin and bear it.” Rather than trying to minimize the pain, or “make the best of a bad situation,” Jeremiah calls the nation into a state of mourning. Jeremiah tells Israel to “…let your tears flow like a river day and night…” and “…pour out your heart like water in the presence of the Lord…” Lamentations 2:18-19.

Terveen, a theologian and a fellow grieving father, writes that Jeremiah wants us “…to learn the lessons of grief by remembering our sorrow with unflinching honesty within the embrace of an understanding Father God.” Terveen, 62. Thankfully, Lamentations shows that we and other grieving parents need not “stuff” our grief. It cannot be healthy for us, or honoring to Micah, to pretend that Micah never existed or that we should just simply “get over” our grief. Even when the newness of the tragedy has worn off for those around us, we still have an understanding Father who has not forgotten and can bring great comfort in the midst of our heartache.

God's Ways and Ours

In Isaiah 55:8-9, God compares the nature of His thoughts to ours.
“For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
neither are your ways my ways, declares the LORD.
For as the heavens are higher than the earth,
so are my ways higher than your ways
and my thoughts than your thoughts.” (ESV)

In his book, “Be a Circle Maker,” Pastor Mark Batterson discusses the size of the universe--the distance between the heavens and the earth. In one day, light travels 160 billion miles. In one year, light travels 5 trillion, 865 billion, 696 million miles. And yet, even at these incredible speeds, it would take light 15.5 billion years to travel to the edge of our universe.

The size of the universe is difficult to comprehend. And yet God uses the size of the universe as an analogy to how much greater his wisdom and power are in comparison to ours. Not only can I not begin to comprehend the nature and extent of all of God’s ways in our own lives, but I cannot even begin to comprehend how much superior his ways are to mine.

In light of this gap, we have reason for hope. We can trust that, when life circumstances appear to be a nightmare, or when there appears to be no redeeming value to a life failure, that God’s ways are greater than ours, and that he will ultimately redeem our sufferings. Grieving parents can live in the hope that our children did not die because God could not save them or, if he could, that he chose not to because he does not love us. Instead, we can live in the hope that our God, whose ways we cannot hope to completely “trace out,” has ordained our child’s passing for our ultimate good and the good of our children.

Ugly

"I have sometimes thought that we cannot know any man thoroughly well while he is in perfect health. As the ebb-tide discloses the real lines of the shore and the bed of the sea, so feebleness, sickness, and pain bring out the real character of a man." President James Garfield.

One of the ways that God uses unspeakable suffering is to make us more like Him. But like skipping through the middle part of a book and reading the end of the book first in order to find out how it ends, we are being unrealistic if we gloss over the reality of what it means to be “sanctified” (that is, made more like Jesus Christ).

It’s a startling, humbling discovery when you pull back the veil around your heart and you have occasion to see the full extent of your own selfishness and sin that resides deep inside. The Old Testament Prophet Jeremiah wrote, “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?” Jeremiah 17:9. While it is true for all of us, it seems that for me and for a few other grieving parents I know, deep grief has a way of accentuating each and every imperfection in our life. Those who know me best know that, even before Micah died, I could be impatient, selfish, short-sighted, and easily angered. Now, with Micah's death, each of these undesirable traits seem to have been magnified. Rather than becoming more patient, I found that in my grief I had grown less patient; rather than extending grace to those around me, I found that I could feel the anger boiling up inside of me at a moment’s notice. My imperfections previously seemed like small ant hills to climb; now, they now appear before me like the Himalayas.

The Apostle Paul , the man whom God handpicked to lead the early church, is not shy to disclose the ugliness that he sees residing in his own heart. He naturally follows the law of sin that dwells within him. He even calls himself a “wretched man” for his innate sinfulness. Romans 7:24. Regardless of the way we view our own morality, the Bible teaches that none of us are good enough, on our own, to make it to God on our own. For each of us, our moral imperfections keep us from God. That is, we have all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. Romans 3:24.

In light of this moral ineptitude, how much sense does it make to “turn inward” in order to address the obvious ugliness that springs from within? In researching the options generally available to grieving parents following the death of a child, so many resources are premised upon the idea of finding the answer “within ourselves.” But my experience, coupled with clear Biblical teaching, shows that it is illogical for us to turn to our own hearts to find hope in our grief and to address obvious personal shortcomings. The answer is not found within ourselves. When we have a greater awareness of our own moral separateness from God, we have no choice but to fall upon God for his grace and his mercy.

God, in his mercy, provided His Son, Jesus Christ, as an answer to our ugliness. Paul writes in the 8th chapter of Romans, “There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus...By sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and for sin,he condemned sin in the flesh, in order that the righteous requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.” If you know me, you have extended grace towards me and put up with a lot of ugliness since Micah died. Similarly, if you know another grieving parent, you might need to be ready for some additional ugliness in their lives. But, by God’s grace, none of us are left alone in this ugliness of our own making. Let’s praise God for how, in spite of our moral imperfections, and the ugliness that has been apparent to God even when not apparent to us, He came to earth to save you and me from an eternity stuck in our own ugliness.

Sentimentality and Infant Salvation

In “A Grief Observed,” C.S. Lewis discusses how he found himself focusing more and more on his perceptions of her personal attributes, but not necessarily what she was actually like. He feared that the further he traveled down the road in his remaining life away from the date of her death, the more his memories of her personality would diverge from the reality of who she actually was.

Similarly, we find that some grieving parents tend to sentimentalize the life and innocence of their children that have died at a young age. I, too, am guilty of projecting an unrealized future for our now-deceased child based upon an over-idealized past. That is, we tend think to think about how, if they were still living, how perfect and beautiful they would be, or how they would be engaging in such-and-such an activity, or excelling with this-or-that skill.

Living in such groundless sentimentality provides us with have no real basis upon which we can believe anything. This is of particular relevance as we consider the eternal destiny of anyone who has died as an infant or a young child. Such sentimentality provides us with no solid ground by which we can believe that our children will be saved for all eternity. As I discuss on the “Hope For the Mourning” website, we can take great hope in the fact that, by the blood of Jesus Christ, our children are indeed saved for all eternity. http://www.hopeforthemourning.com/Where-is-my-child-now/HOW-ARE-OUR-CHILDREN-SAVED.aspx

It is crucial for us to understand that our children who died in infancy or as a young child are not saved because they were innocent or because of a projected “good” moral life had they lived longer; it is only by the blood of Jesus that our children are saved. Rather than drifting in an ocean of unfounded sentimentality about our children, we can rest in the strong and sure promise that Jesus of Nazareth, by his blood, has saved our children.

Commonplace Religion

Enduring significant suffering seems to create the opportunity to be drawn deeper into a relationship with God. In his book "The Call," Os Guiness writes, "If we have never had the experience of taking our commonplace religous shoes off our commonplace religious feet, and getting rid of all the undue familiarity with which we approach God, it is questionable whether we have ever stood in His presence. The people who are flippant and familiar are those who have never yet been introduced to Jesus Christ." It is certainly not necessary to have to endure significant suffering in order to get rid of a flippant religious attitude or what Guiness calls "undue familiarity" with God. But for me and for other grieving parents we know, we have realized through the death of our children how much more mysterious, profound, powerful and loving are the ways of God than what our simple minds had previously understood. When Christ calls us to follow him, He calls us to set aside our overly-simplified conceptions of who God is and know Him and His love for us through even the most difficult life events, even the death of our child.