Tonight there is a summer thunderstorm — the sort that writers love for inspiration. The chickens were made to go inside, clucking reluctantly all the while but docile, and the dishes are shiny clean. Contrary to the stereotype about single people having all the time in the world, the modern girl must keep a house and snatch spare moments to write the same as many other plebeians who don’t write for a living.

This article has been difficult to write. It hasn’t been long since I was deep inside the valley of shadow, and it changed me forever and yet life is happier now than it was before grief. Those things are hard to reconcile when it seems like grief was the blow that preceded freedom from anxiety and depression. I even find myself seeing it as some sort of a gift.

I hate this, because it was horribly painful and I have friends even at this moment enduring horrors. The last thing I would do is go up to someone in the deeps and say “what a gift you have been given.”

For those who have never been on the inside of grief there is a curiosity about the strange beauty of this time. Is it necessary to be broken to know God? To have God be near us? No one chooses such hard paths on purpose. Had Adam and Eve known what suffering was being unleashed on the world because of their choices, and ours have followed theirs, we would flinch in horror. None of us see forward in that way, unless God somehow opens it up to us, but even then he tends to be kind and keep our eyes closed to tomorrow and the next day, beyond the plans set that we don’t know will happen.

Life may change in an instant and has for some of us. We didn’t see the death coming 60 seconds from now. We didn’t know that our spouse would ask for divorce. We didn’t know that the baby growing inside was going to die. We didn’t see the financial ruin or the church betrayal or relationship rejection.

A few nights ago I watched Jojo Rabbit with some friends, about a little boy who is a fanatical Nazi in the glory days of Germany. He suffers devastating losses when the glory turns to gore and grief. It happens in a moment. One minute your mom is alive, the next she is not. Some know when that comes, some don’t. We all have ideas about reality which are confronted by death, whether that is death of a person or a relationship or a job or pretty much anything.

When death comes, the roof of our worldview is drawn back and harsh rain and hail beats on us. I have never known such pain in my life. Rocking back and forth on cold concrete outside my church waiting for my oldest sister to call back and the involuntary cry that was drawn out of me when she said mom was dead.

“No no no no no.”

A no is not always respected and mine was not. My world shattered and I went with it, splayed against the edges of time reaching out for someone I could no longer access.

I spent a year in deep grief and a year in rehabilitation. It is only in the past few months that I can say with any confidence that grieving is past. Even then it is a loss which I carry in my body for life because my mom is not here on earth. I am back and mostly put back together, but there are cracks God has been sealing everywhere, I hope with gold.

There are certain things which I suffered during that time that were not grief, but things I believed about myself, the world and God, that were false. I don’t know how else to put it other than I became keenly aware of how bad sin is and how much I was part of that problem. I saw that trauma piggybacks on sin and sin piggybacks on trauma and the whole thing is an immoral and stupid lie which has become our truth.

The hardest struggle I faced in those two years was enduring immense loss while fighting lies on every side. Not only was I weaker than I have ever been in my whole life but things like bitterness and selfishness and cynicism were preying on me. They were truly giants of despair and more than once I wanted them to succeed. I wanted to give in to the darkness. Something about that would have been such a blessed relief. As a friend recently said, crucifixion is a slow agony and we have to walk that road if we want to follow Jesus. New life will come, but we take up our cross.

I’ve wanted to write this post for awhile because I know the truth now about those lies. Even so I have to be realistic with you. This post and the things in it will not save you from suffering. I take the approach Jesus did in saying that in this life there is suffering, but take heart, be cheerful as you can, because it is not the end and there is more to this story than what death alone is trying to teach you.

Modern thinking taught me to dull the edge of evil

To me this is one of the worst things modern Christianity teaches us, because when we take away this piece of truth we take away much of the justification for our sorrow and most importantly, void the work of Jesus on the cross. If there is no evil and there is no sin then what you and I are feeling is all in our heads. That isn’t true and it’s not in our heads. It is interesting that our thinking has progressed to the point where we are convinced that we must do away with sin and replace it with personal responsibility or victimhood. Personal ownership is a piece of this because sooner or later we all know more fully how much darkness lurks even in our own hearts, but sin and evil isn’t just subjective. It is alive in wars and racism, sexual abuses, betrayals, greed, and every wrong thing. Scripture says we wrestle not against flesh and blood and I think we have to understand that spiritually there is something that wants to kill, steal and destroy.

Something wants to take us out and we seem to be powerless against it. What’s worse, is this thing is inside us.

The knowledge of good and evil is crushing. On one hand we see terrible things and become victims and on the other hand we can’t quite seem to be good enough to overcome it. We have made good progress toward changing things, for instance, I am not a feminist but I see how Jesus radically changed how women were treated and the message of the Good News we were given before the news reached man. Christianity has transformed reality for women in a way you still don’t see happen in most Muslim or Buddhist cultures or in places of tribalism or even post-modernism.

Yet when I heard the story of women in Africa who are regularly raped on their way to get water, which they must have, I knew that we have not done enough. It is devastating to know these things, and to know that somewhere women daily face terrible realities because I am not big enough to do anything about it.

When grief broke me I realized that paltry explanations of suffering in the world couldn’t satisfy my sense of justice for how wrong this all was — I instinctively and logically knew that death was a horrible reality and it stemmed from evil. I also knew with every fiber of my being that I was part of this mess and helpless. I hated that. Not only do I have to see and hear about these terrible things but now I am part of them?

I could not bury my head in the sand. I think that is a mistake. I don’t listen to the news, but I keep my eyes and ears and senses alert because people did that for me and it helped save me. If they had turned away from my suffering I don’t know what I would’ve done.

Modern thinking taught me that I can save myself

Here I was, confronted for the first time with the reality of this world and I gamely set about to be strong and courageous, on my own.

Two years into my grieving process I had a deep intimacy with God and felt loved by him, but I wasn’t able to honestly say I thought God was a good God. There were underlying cracks in my foundation where I was deeply unhappy. I felt bankrupt in my spirit, and no matter how much I praised God or worshipped him or proclaimed gratitude or was vulnerable with those around me, I couldn’t quite get better. No matter how much I focused on positivity or good things. No matter what boundaries I drew, it didn’t help. I felt hopeless and this baffled me a little. Why? I felt that as a Christian I ought to at least feel hope in the goodness of God if I couldn’t have it in the goodness of life. My fundamental upbringing was heavy on truth and starved on empathy. If I could just believe the truth enough or be grateful enough or bootstrap it through, it might be enough.

It baffled me that I could believe in God, believe in the central doctrines of scripture, be surrounded by amazing friends, have the Holy Spirit active within me, hear the voice of God, have a really good life, and be so impoverished that I was constantly fighting off despair. Is this all there is to Christianity?

One night about three months ago I was beyond miserable. It’s pretty easy for me to go somewhere and enjoy myself even in a hard time but when it gets really bad I can’t compartmentalize it anymore. I scrunched out of sight of as many people as possible and listened to the speaker talk about listening to the wrong voices.

By the by, if you find yourself avoiding people, it’s a sign something isn’t ok. It doesn’t mean you have to be completely socially “on” during hard times. We can have seasons of withdrawing and I am fully sympathetic to needing to say no to seeing people, but I have also seen it happen where people call it their personality. That’s not a personality thing. It’s a suffering thing. It’s a hurt thing. It’s isolation which twists us, because we need people. Keep stretching and doing exercises, or you will not be able to walk afterward.

I couldn’t do it anymore and went home to wrestle it out with God. There are some things that community cannot fix.

I pled with him, “God, what am I believing that is incorrect. What voice do I listen to that isn’t a good voice?”

The answer was almost immediate. “You need to lay down modern psychology. You still believe you can save yourself. You can’t. I am your God, the God who saves.”

I was listening to my own voice, and it wasn’t working. Over and over I would tell myself that I had to make it through. If God didn’t help me, I’d help myself, thank you very much. I was picking up the slack where I felt that God wasn’t taking care of me.

When we do this vertically with God, we do it horizontally with our fellow humans too.

We do it where our parents didn’t see an important struggle. We do it when our friends forget us. We do it when our spouse isn’t as attentive or considerate as we want, or forgot to help with a household chore. We do it when we have to slog through one more tough professional situation.

We assume we have to get it done ourselves, if no one else will do it.

I got up and wrote those words down “God saves me” because I knew at once that they were true. I saw at once the immense burden I was bearing and the burden that many people I knew also carried. We often see ourselves as our own saviors, but if we are our own saviors, death is an unbearable burden. Of course I could hardly reckon with grief. It’s big enough all by itself, and here I was adding false expectations on myself that I wasn’t strong enough to carry.

I rested, and I have had more energy since than I have had in years. Some of that is attributed to physical changes I made, but it’s hard to separate that from the load that is gone. Suddenly I am able to be more resilient, because I am being resilient with God as my Savior. Pressures feel different to me, because the burden of saving is off me. I am interested in helping save people, because that weight is no longer all my own. No wonder we isolate off from people in the name of boundaries. We are correct. Boundaries, or ourselves using them, can’t bear the weight of salvation.

This is the final way modern thinking failed me:

Modern thinking taught me that I am responsible for no one but myself

Another way of saying this is that I am alone.

If we save ourselves, then we don’t possibly have a way to help save anyone else. The current mode of thought is that I am responsible for no one but myself, but boy hey am I responsible for me! We feel responsible to give ourselves a good life. We feel responsible to make more money, to make the right health choices and think the right thoughts, and if we are just good enough we might actually transcend to a level of reality that we made for ourself that gets to skip the pesky bits of suffering. We ruthlessly cut out people that don’t fit our notion of paradise, and the internet praises us. As usual there is truth mixed into that. Maturity and God do ask a sort of reckoning from us and what we have chosen to do with the life and relationships given to us. Sometimes we do need space from people, but again, if that is our default we are probably really lonely.

Let me take a burden from you. You can’t be responsible for your own sin. You can own that you have sinned and that you can’t correct yourself, but only Jesus’ blood gets the job done.

I don’t think the epidemic of loneliness will be fixed by community all standing on their own island, taking care of themselves. I think the epidemic of loneliness will be solved by the blood of Jesus freeing people to come off their island and onto another one and say “I’m here. What can I do? May I sit with you?”

When we no longer bear the weight of self (because remember Jesus bears that weight and God saves us) we actually have space to help others and to have a hand in carrying them to salvation. That was me for two years, being carried by people around me.

Now, it’s my turn to give back. I will always think back with deep fondness of the people who gave and gave and gave to me. That’s part of this model. Sometimes we receive, sometimes we give, but at the back of it all is the life that God gives us and the reason we are alive. Not because we managed to do or be the right things, though we should be and do with joy and wisdom, but because he has given us this life and we are called to selfless living.

Please don’t mistake me. Many Christians fall into the idea of thinking that we are not important. We are very important. Don’t take away the meaning of salvation and John 3:16 and a God who gave himself for us. It is more that we don’t know ourselves very well and we need God to show us who we are. We need him to save and clean us up and make us into the sons and daughters he sees in us.

Do you not believe in Psychology at all?

If by psychology you mean the inner workings of man then yes. I do believe that it’s worth studying what makes humans, human. Mind, will, desires, emotions and spirituality.

Soul.

The inner world of humans is a fascinating place and people who furnish only their outer world make a mistake that will bankrupt them of resources they will desperately need if (when) suffering comes. The mind is built and disciplined as surely as the body is, and we recognize the value there. Of how much more worth is our eternal soul? (1 Tim 4:8)

Our mind and desires and personality are made in the “imago dei” image of God. Something went wrong with who we are and God sets it right.

This is all the ground I have gained. I don’t always know how to defend the goodness of God. I can’t tell you why pain has taken over your world. One of the mistakes Christians of any ages and times make is to answer that question too lightly. I’m still waiting on some parts of my salvation. I’ve got a new heart now, thank God, and I’ve gotten through depression and anxiety. Some giants lay dead for me, but others don’t. They mock me, as they mocked Jesus, for wanting to do the will of God and see no one perish.

We have the task of endurance set before us. This way does not mean we don’t carry any weight. We do. We suffer, we persevere and endure, and we have hope.

Hosanna, in the highest.

Good night friends.

Lynette