Our Stepwise sessions have been a little more spaced out over the last few weeks due to various personal commitments. We’ve been focusing on our group project to find out a little more about the long-term effects of Covid on the lives of those within our community and then explored dealing with challenges for session 7. Some of the group session for this involved exploring responses to grief and this was certainly an area in which I’ve had plenty of experience in recent years!
People often don’t know what to say when it comes to responding to grief and sometimes their response can come across as quite upsetting or hurtful to the bereaved person, even though it is often meant kindly. In my own personal experience, the comments that have been most upsetting have nearly all come from my fellow Christians. They include the following:
- Isn’t it wonderful to think of [my daughter] partying with the angels?
- She’s in a better place now with God.
- God only gives you what you can handle.
- She’s having fun playing with the angels now.
- It’s all part of God’s plan.
None of those were remotely comforting, and I also felt that my faith was being questioned if I couldn’t agree with them. That if my faith was really strong enough, I would be able to find comfort in my daughter being with God and the angels instead of with me; that I would be trusting God rather than being a broken, devastated, angry mess.
But to balance this out, the most helpful response also came from a Christian friend. She didn’t give platitudes, she just held me in prayer – prayer that acknowledged my devastation and everything I was struggling with and held it all up to God. She prayed for my husband, for the ways in which we would grieve differently, for all the emotions that were raging. She reminded me that it was okay to be angry and to throw all of my emotions at God, because God was big enough to take them all and to keep holding me through them.
She wasn’t alone amongst my Christian friends at being there for me in that kind of way, but she was a shining example of how to walk alongside someone in their grief with faith. She saw my pain and she acknowledged it. The problem with those other comments were that they focused solely on the hope and the glory of God and my daughter now being with God, but they ignored my pain and my grief. They were so focused on the spiritual that they forgot the human response. And that needs to be acknowledged and held too.
As part of our reflection on this session on dealing with challenges, we have been asked to look again at our timeline and consider how God has been present in our times of struggle. While there were definitely times that God has felt very far away in my grief, I know that he has been there throughout. He showed himself to me through my friend who held us in prayer in those awful early days of grief. He gave me strength to somehow get through the days and to be able to function for my other children.
I don’t believe that my daughter’s death was part of God’s plan or that our struggles are given to us to teach us lessons. I don’t believe that it is grief’s purpose to do that, just that grief changes us and while we may learn things along the way, it is a side effect rather than a specific purpose. I am not the person I was before my daughter died and I will never be that person again. God has held me throughout my grief, and given me strength and gently encouraged me to keep moving forward and to grow in new ways. He has been putting the shattered pieces of me back together in a new way, creating a new faith – my kintsugi faith.
Here’s my spider web after session 7:
Where have I seen God lately
- In the quiet of the garden, listening to the birds singing and just allowing time to ‘be still and know that I am God’.
- In this time of reflecting on my grief and seeing how God has been there throughout.
- In keeping my son safe when he gave us the slip and wandered off down a busy High Street.
- In the beauty and wonder of a newly emerged dragonfly.
A Kintsugi Faith 