Good Grief

Whew. Y'all, it has been a lot. It's been a big week for us. Oh, she's going to be so mad that I'm going to say this. I'm going to say it anyway, because I just like to share about my life. But Molly has pneumonia. My wife, Molly, has pneumonia at home. She's doing a lot better, you know, but she thought she just had a cold, but it was a lot more than that. So if you guys could just pray for her, that would be appreciated.

Oh, man, it's been a wild week, though, because, you know, when someone's sick and you're just trying to have the kids at home. Is anyone excited about school starting? Parents? Are you? Yeah. It was great news. If you're a Summit family, my kids go to Summit, and we get an extra month of summer this week. So we're so excited. We get home in September. It says off as well. So we're excited about that because they're rebuilding and building,

and it's not going to be done until October. So you can pray for us. No, pray for my kids. They've been bored. They've been bored. It's been hard for them, you know, and with the weather and everything. But we're doing well. So thanks for all those who reached out and stuff this week, but she's doing better. All right. I'm just going to jump in here. So we're just going to do... We had finished up a series. We're kind of between series right now. We're going to start a little short

series. And you're going to be like, okay, I won't come that day. But on September 8th, we're going to do a short series on politics. But I would encourage you to come, okay? And I'm going to make this very clear. I'm not going to tell you who to vote for. I don't really, it's not about partisan politics. It's about the Bible and the political, which is a part of life, you know, inevitably has been throughout all of time and existence. People are political. We're social. We're embodied.

We live amongst other people. And so your life is inevitably political. And so we shouldn't have nothing to say about that, but we're not going to enter into partisanship. I'm not going to tell you who to vote for. I'm not even going to do what pastors do when they say they're not going to tell you to vote for or when they just suggest who you should vote for. I'm not even going to do that.

I'm not even going to go there at all. So I want to make that guarantee to you so you won't feel like, oh, when the 8th comes, you don't want to be there. I would just encourage you to be a part of that because, I mean, especially this time of year, have you guys noticed that there's an election coming up? Anyone talked about that or read anything about that? No, probably not.

But there's a lot to think through. You know, there's a lot to think through in terms of how do we be Christians in a democracy and how do we, you know, live out our convictions. So I want to encourage you guys to be part of that on the 8th. But what we're doing right now is we're just doing a little bit of just kind of two one-off messages here. And this is the first one. And I'm calling this a good grief.

Like I I would have put Charlie Brown up, but there's like copyright infringement probably, right? In case you didn't know, there's a whole industry of blogs and podcasts and conferences that are aimed at just pastors. I mean, just like probably in whatever field you're in, there's something similar, right? There's kind of a trade culture going on where people are kind of speaking into the lives of your unique career field.

And it's true of pastors. And one thing that I've noticed, especially lately in the broader pastoral discourse, you know, between the podcast and the blogs and all this stuff, is that a lot of those things have been focusing on grief, particularly grief that pastors are experiencing. and sing. And that's, I think, because, well, it's probably true of culture more broadly, but over the last four years since COVID, it's been really hard for churches and for pastors in particular.

And this is not a pity party. I'm just saying a lot of churches have imploded or split apart, and a lot of people have moved away. I mean, even in our own congregation, a lot of people have moved to different states and stuff like that, or different parts of the state. And there's a lot of challenges going on in communities. And there was one podcaster that was talking about this recently, and he said this, and I thought it was very striking.

He said, pastoral ministry is a series of ungrieved losses. Pastoral ministry is a series of ungrieved losses. And I have a special place in my heart for pastors. I love pastors because I think pastors do kind of, they do a pretty hard job. But as I heard that phrase, I thought more and more about it, and I realized something.

And that's, while I do think that that's true of pastoral ministry, Because it involves such an emotional investment in people that there is a lot of grief that comes along with it, I am increasingly convinced, actually, that this is true of most people's lives. My life as a pastor can be, at times, a series of ungrieved losses, but I believe that your life is very likely—you could say the same thing about your own life. Most people's lives are a series of ungrieved losses.

And every year that I've spent pastoring, and it's been like 15 years or so, I am more and more convinced that ungrieved loss is the biggest crisis, spiritual crisis that there is. And it's totally ignored. We don't think about it often. We are not a culture that likes to think about grief, likes to think about loss. We have lost, I think, our traditions around grief, mourning, and loss, and we don't have them anymore.

And I think we are suffering as a result. I think it is one of the biggest spiritual crises there is. And why is that? Well, it's because loss and pain, if undealt with in your life, will become an obstacle to faith, right? We think, oh, well, there's my faith life, and then there's, you know, what happens to me and my grief, and we keep everything separate. But I think they're so intimately tied up. Loss and pain, if undealt with, will become an obstacle to faith.

We are not nearly as rational as we believe that we are. You are not. I am not nearly as rational as I think I am. We are emotional beings, and unless we can do something to make sense of our loss and our pain, we will struggle to move forward in our faith. The counselor H. Norman Wright, and many counselors I've heard have said something like this before. He says, everyone has grief, but mourning is a choice. Everyone has grief, but mourning is a choice. I think I have that on the slide.

And what I am suggesting today is that everyone, of course, we all know this, everyone will face grief and pain and loss, but what we choose to do with grief will shape our souls. What you choose to do with your grief is going to shape your soul. Mourning our losses is not just something we should do, it's soul care. I would actually tell you that it's pretty essential to continuing on and persevering in your faith and also in your marriage and in your life and in your career.

Like you have to intentionally choose to mourn your grief. I want to give a note. And this is, I kind of have a deal with God, something, the conviction that I have that every year, at least once a year, I'm going to teach basically this topic, right? And maybe you've heard me teach on this topic before. That's because every year I'm going to do it. So next year you can expect the same thing, probably around the same time.

So if you want to avoid the last week of August, there's a good chance that's what's going to be next year. Don't do that. So I have this deal where I'm going to teach about this every year, but the past two times I've taught about grief, this has happened. I have heard from someone coming up to me afterwards, after the message, in the week after the message, basically saying, were you thinking about me when you did that? Or were you thinking about this other person for this message?

It's happened every time. And so I just want to be super clear. If you are someone who has recently gone through loss or grief, I'm not thinking about you in particular. I'm directing at you in the sense that it's relevant to you, but I am not thinking of one One single person. I'm not thinking of one individual. This is not a message for one person. In fact, it's a message for everybody. And I think that's interesting because here's the thing.

There's not one time of any year when I could give a message and not have it be really relevant for at least one person in the room. So if you're feeling like, oh, this is directed at me. Look, you happen to be a person who's going through grief or through loss. And next week, it'll be someone else. And the week after that, it'll be someone else. I'm not trying to be a downer here. I'm just trying to be honest about what it looks like to be a part of a congregation, a community of people.

People are going through loss, major loss. There is no time when that won't be relevant to someone in a room, you know, where there are about 50 people in the room like there are right now. Someone is going through major loss and someone next month will probably go through major loss because pain and loss and grief is normal. This side of heaven.

But I think it's really interesting that this happens even beyond that because I think that the fact that I get this reaction whenever I talk about grief that people think oh you must be about this person it must be relevant to this person demonstrate something else and that is that.

Most of us understand that people who go through major losses like death of a loved one or something we know that we need to mourn but I'll tell you this most of you most people that I know don't understand the importance of mourning outside of those major losses. And so I talk about grief and people say, oh, it must be about this person who had somebody who passed away recently. But I'm just telling you, yeah, maybe not everybody had someone recently passed

away. Maybe not everyone is in the midst of mourning. But I promise you, most people in this room are dealing with loss. Might not be the loss of a loved one, but you're dealing with pain and and disappointment, and something, and I'm telling you that that matters too, not just when you have a major loss. Grief can be good, and mourning matters, not just for those of us who have had major losses, but actually mourning matters for the little things in life too.

And what, because the thing is, most of us are totally blind to the cumulative damage of small losses. And I think we We need to wake up to it. You know, I think this is especially true for men, not to pick on men, but we're not exactly well known for being in touch with our emotions. If you are a man and you are at least, you know, 35-ish, if you're getting up into middle age or beyond, I think you probably feel these things, okay?

You probably feel, if you're a man who's been going at life for a while and you're at least 35 or older, you likely feel disappointed and disillusioned by your career. Even if it's been relatively successful, and actually, especially if it's been relatively successful, I know so many people who are successful, who do well, who are just beating themselves up about the opportunities that they've missed and what they perceive as their own failings.

If you are a man and you're 35 or older and you're married and you've been married for probably like 10 years or more, you've probably been married long enough to realize that though you may love your spouse, and I encourage you to love your spouse, love them for all that they are, you probably have come to realize that they are not going to change in the ways that you would like. And they don't exactly meet all of these kind of idealized ideas that you have about what a spouse should be.

And truthfully, that might be a little bit hurtful. And not only that, you are likely, if you are of a certain age and even younger than that, you are likely finding out that you are not nearly as smart, not nearly as competent, not nearly as reliable, not nearly as likable as you thought you were. Me too, by the way. Me too. I find that out all the time.

And then you're also, if you're a man, you're 35 or older, you are likely realizing that your friendships, which were so important in your early life, are less lasting and less satisfying than they used to be. Look, I'm just kind of painting a picture of most of the men that I know who are of a certain age. I'm not trying to press on your heartstrings, but I am trying to make this clear.

Most people in the normal course of life are dealing with a lot of pain and loss, and they're usually just brushing it off and saying, oh, well, it happens to everybody. It's just things that happen in life. Yeah, it is. It doesn't mean it's not painful. Most men that I know feel a major sense of loss and grief over these things, and yet so few men that I know, and I'm not just picking on men to say all these things about women too, are not actually mourning these things.

They're grieving these things, but they're not mourning these things. So few are making the choice to mourn, which is to bring that pain and that loss to the the Lord, like to bring it to God and to actually deal with it. You can choose to mourn. I think that's really just fundamental to the way Jesus saw life. I mean, Matthew 5, verse 3, Jesus said, blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted. Now, this comes from the Sermon on the Mount.

It comes from the Sermon on the Mount. And, you know, we've been going through a series in Matthew, and we got up to Matthew 4, and we're going to pick up in Matthew 5. So I don't want to talk too much about the Sermon on the Mount because we're going to be doing that in a couple weeks when we get back into Matthew. But what Jesus is doing here in the Sermon on the Mount is he's presenting his view of what life is like.

He's presenting his particular take on what it looks like to be a part of the kingdom of God, which is his language.

And for Jesus, that means what it looks like to live your life in the context of a relationship with God that Jesus is making available through a trust-filled reliant dependent kind of life Jesus is inviting people into that kind of life and he's doing so and he's illustrating that here in the beginning of Matthew 5 in in a surprising way and he he talks about all these things we call this section the Beatitudes.

But he's painting a picture, a surprising picture of what a life of a relationship could look like. And he's surprising everybody. He talks about being blessed. He's talking about being poor in spirit. You can go back in Matthew 5 and see this crazy list about all these things where Jesus is saying, God will show up in the middle of these things. And one of these things is in the middle of mourning.

See, when Jesus went around, he's talking about, he's teaching everybody about, and everybody found this so compelling.

He's teaching about the fact that because he had come because he's come because god is through him setting up the kingdom and creating this new way of living a life he's saying basically that life is not going to be the same he's saying that as the kingdom comes as i the king come into life and they set up this new way of being a person jesus is establishing a means to live a different sort of life and to go through pain and difficulty

and loss and and the good and the bad in a different sort of way, through a different perspective. And what he's saying, I mean, the way he pronounces the gospel, the gospel of the kingdom, he says, this is true for everybody. It's a wide open invitation to step into this kind of life. He's inviting you and he's inviting me to a new way of being a person. And it involves seeing the world the way he did.

Because Jesus can say these things that blessed are those who mourn for they will be comforted because he He understands something about what's true now because of what's happening with the coming of the kingdom. You guys know I really like Dallas Willard. I mean, he kind of explains the ethos that Jesus was getting at here and the way that Jesus particularly sees the world.

He says this, Jesus' good news about the kingdom can be an effective guide for our lives only if we share his view of the world in which we live.

To his eyes this is a god-bathed and god-permeated world it is a world filled with a glorious reality where every component is within the range of god's direct control and knowledge though he obviously permits some of it for good reasons to be for a while otherwise than as he wishes it is a world that is inconceivably beautiful and good because of god and because God is always in it. It is a world in which God is continually at play and over which he constantly rejoices.

Until our thoughts of God have found every visible thing and event glorious with his presence, the word of Jesus has not yet fully seized us. What a wild thing to say. Really? I mean, I know that is a leap for a person who's mourning, right? I mean, it's kind of a slap in the face, honestly. So I apologize for slapping you in the face like that. I didn't really and to intend to do that.

But I think we have to just keep pressing at this because what Jesus is saying is he's saying something that's provocative. The whole Sermon on the Mount is provocative. It's deliberately kind of like the sort of thing you would hear and you'd say, how does that make any sense? How does it make any sense that the morning would be blessed? How does that make any sense?

But the whole point, especially the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount, is that those things that that we normally take as evidence against the goodness and faithfulness of God. See, those very things can actually become, in the kingdom, they can actually become a place of grace and encounter with God. Because in the culture in which Jesus was ministering, people would say, well, bad things happen to you. It must be because you're a bad person and God's mad at you.

And what Jesus is saying is this. He's saying, in the context of a relationship with me, bad things can happen to you, and you'll, instead of feeling, instead of having that like convince you that God hates you and that he's far from you, saying that very thing is gonna become, it can become a place of encounter with God, where he's actually gonna take you through the difficulty and that pain and he's gonna meet you in that place with a great comfort.

So Jesus kind of knew that what he was saying and what he was suggesting was provocative and it is difficult. And I'm not trying to in any way just smooth over the difficulty because actually the whole point is that Jesus is saying, yeah, even in the midst of those difficulties, even in the midst of mourning, God can show up because at least according to Jesus, those who mourn will be comforted. And grief and pain and loss can become a place where God is known in all of his kindness.

Grief is, I believe, believe it has been in my life i can i can testify to that grief is and can be an invitation to know the god who comforts us the god who lives the god who restores and so all of that is to say, is that I don't think we need to be afraid of grief. And I think that we are welcomed into mourning, intentional mourning when we have grief, as opposed to just ignoring our grief, mourning our losses, mourning our grief.

And that the extent that we do that, the extent that we just walk with Jesus through those things, that that can become a place of restoration and hope. I'm just laying that out there. I think that is what Jesus invites us to. And so what I wanna do, look, this is a big topic and I don't have a lot of time and I don't want to go on and on and forever the way I always do. So I just, it's like, I can't reduce the process of grief and mourning down to simple steps, but I'm going to try.

I'm going to try and I'm going to fail. This is life. But I just want to, want to just kind of give you some, some way points along the way. And you can think of these as, you can think of these as sort of like, you know, the break glass in case of emergency box, right? Things that maybe you can come back to if you do face major loss. But what I really encourage you to do is actually we'll think about how do I apply these again to the minor losses, right?

The normal losses, the things that I would normally just gloss over. Because I actually think that's pretty key. If you're going to be prepared to walk with the Lord through major grief, I actually think you can start practicing now with the little pains that accumulate to great pains. Make sense? You're like, I don't want to do this. It's summer, man.

Sorry. All right. Hey, number one, number one step, the little skill that we can learn to walk through grief into mourning, to walk through grief and pain into comfort. And number one is just talk about your pain with God. Develop that skill. Talk about what's wrong. I think the thing is, a lot of us, this is, by the way, talking to God is just prayer. That's just what we call prayer.

I think the biggest obstacle to my prayer life has been, and probably I would suggest to your prayer life, is that I have all these ideas about prayer that are really grandiose. And I think, well, if I'm going to talk to God, I just have to worship him and tell him how great he is. And when I'm in pain and when I'm in loss, like I don't feel that. And that's not the first thing that I want to bring from my lips.

And so instead of bringing God, like talking to God about my pain, I just say, well, I'm just not going to talk to you at all, God. I'm not going to pray. I'm not going to talk to you about my difficulty. I'm not going to talk to you about the things, the losses and the grief that I have in my life. And then we learn that as a habit. And then when major loss comes up, we just continue to feel distant from God. So we just need to learn to talk to God about your pain.

Man, I mean, you know, the question is, well, how do we do that? I mean, you just talk. You just talk to God. It's not easy. It doesn't come naturally, especially to men. We don't like to talk. Isn't that funny? But that's what prayer is. Prayer is just communication with God. Now, maybe you need something more tangible than that. You probably do. I do. And here's the thing. I'm going to give you this thing. This is worth the price of admission this morning, okay?

So pay attention. attention, it's worth more than the price of admission. Okay, there's this little graphic by a guy named Paul Miller. Paul Miller's written a couple books about prayer. He calls this the J curve, the J curve. It's a really simple visualization of what the Christian life looks like. And for me, this is helpful when I'm in pain. Because his point is, okay, well, we look at Jesus's life, right?

What was Jesus's life like? Well, I mean, Jesus's life demonstrates the power of the resurrection. And the thing about the resurrection is that in order to resurrect from the dead, you have to do what first? You have to die. Death precedes resurrection. And so he's saying like, this is a pattern. He says, it's a pattern for Jesus, but it's also a pattern for the Christian life. All right. And he draws that from Paul's words in Philippians 3, okay?

Philippians 3, and Paul talks about this all, Philippians 2, Philippians 3, he says this, Philippians 3.10, my goal is to know him and the power of his resurrection and the fellowship of his sufferings, being conformed to his death, assuming that I will somehow reach the resurrection from among the dead.

What Paul Miller is saying is that Paul's understanding of how we pursue God and Jesus' understanding and the Christian way to understand life and progress and closeness to God is that it is not just a rising life. It's not just a life of, oh, everything's great and hunky-dory all the time. It takes the shape of Jesus's life and ministry, which was that he died in order to know and experience the comfort and the power of God in resurrection.

And so that J curve that he went, that he was buried first so that he might rise, that becomes the pattern of our own life. He died and then he was resurrected and then our life looks the same. We die. And Paul talks about death all the time. He's talking about how we're always being given over to death for the sake of the glory being demonstrated in our own bodies. You read 1 and 2 Corinthians, that's like the major theme, this whole resurrection

power, working it out in the life of a Christian. and so you want to learn to talk to God about your pain and your suffering, this will be a helpful visual. Could you just file this in your mind? Because the problem, what keeps me silent personally when I'm in pain and when I'm in loss and when I'm suffering is that it's a dismaying, disorienting kind of thing. It's hard for me to put words to the pain that I experience, right? Probably the same with you.

But if we start to think of our lives in this kind of very biblical outline of what it looks like to be a person, then we can start to identify our pain with this. Initial dying process, which is just part of life this side of heaven. But we can know that as we're dying and as we're suffering and as we're going through pain and loss, that we have promises from God that he's going to bring comfort and resurrection and joy and life even through that passage.

I would love to avoid pain and I would love to avoid suffering, but I'll tell you, I have learned more about persistence and character by going through pain. And so I would rather not, but because I have these promises from God, I'm able to endure. And you are too. Because again, we take loss and pain and we say, well, there it is, evidence that God isn't real. But in the context of what Jesus does with our life and what he can do with our pain, this will be the proving ground.

Pain can become a good thing. And you can talk to God about that. Insist. This is not just a nice little picture that I came up with. I believe this is a paradigm of the Christian life. I think you could read all the New Testament and you just like, this is capturing a major theme about what it looks like to be a Christian. So I would say that this kind of visualization, it's a promise from God. And so you can go into pain, you can go into loss, and you can hold God to his promises.

Honestly, that's what talking to God about my pain looks like. Like it's saying, hey God, like I want to identify this pain, this feeling of loss, this feeling of discouragement, these things which hurt and which feel like a death. Bring those to God and say, hey God, I know that you're a God who walks with me into death and then brings resurrection. Could you go ahead and do that? Just keep talking about that. Just keep talking about that with God.

It's a simple thing. But honestly, like I don't think God minds it. When we try to hold him accountable to his promises. I actually think that's faith. Living a kind of life where we think, no, I'm really certain that God will do what he says he will do. And I'm going to just keep pressing in, even when I feel like there's evidence against his faithfulness, I'm going to be pressing and I'm going to demand, I'm going to insist that he show up in my life.

Can you just do that? Because again, the alternative is passivity. The alternative to do is passivity where we just say, no, I'm going to be stronger. I'm going to just keep loading up my backpack with grief, but I'm going to do an extra hard workout. And maybe you can get through your whole life like that. And maybe you can keep moving on, but a lot of us can't. A lot of us aren't going to be strong enough. I'm not strong enough to do that.

I have to give my pain to God so that I can have the true power and resurrection life that he He promises working out through my life. Man, I want to, my goal in life is to know the power of his resurrection. And if I'm gonna know the power of his resurrection, it means I'm gonna be walking through pain and loss, but I'm gonna be doing it with him. And I'm gonna be expecting him to show up in the middle of that. And I just need to keep talking to him about that. I think that's what prayer is.

Point number two, I would just encourage you, mark your losses, mark your losses. I sort of touched on this already, but like, usually my MO when things are difficult is that I'm just going to keep going. I'm a good plotter. I'm very good at plotting along. Oh, I'll just wake up the next day and I'll do my thing and I'll be fine. I'll be fine. I'm fine. You know, I'm Scandinavian. We're always fine. Everything's fine. We're terribly depressed. Everything's fine.

Don't try to get over your pain actually remember your pain and this is this you need to learn to do this this does not come naturally to people you need to to actually go ahead and and put some lines in the sand and and set up some memorials and don't try to just get over your pain, jerry sitzer is a pastor out in spokane actually and he's written a couple books on grief brief. Because he was a guy. He was out, I think he was in Yakima, and was driving around.

He had four kids. His wife and his mother were in the car with him in the late 80s and came around a concern. He got hit by a drunk driver going like 80. And his wife and his mother-in-law and one of his kids died. And so he records that pain and his journey through it. That book's back there if you're interested in that. It's a good book. He says this, though, and I think it's really helpful.

He says, grief concerns internal feelings, the emotions that swell up in the soul and threaten to capsize us. Mourning, contrasting grief to mourning, mourning turns grief outward. It channels and ritualizes it. It captures the energy of loss and does something with it, like a dam harnessing the power of a rushing river. And I like that imagery a lot. I'm not sure if this was national news or not, but the town that I moved from in Connecticut, they had these like crazy flash

floods. They had like 12 inches of rain in a day. And my pastor's basement got flooded out and like everyone's basements got flooded out. Why do we have basements in New England? I don't know. It's a bad idea. They always get flooded. And there was just like this massive amounts of water. And what happens when massive amounts of water come down and without direction is that they go everywhere and destroy things, right?

That's the imagery he's saying. He's saying like, you know, grief can come on us like just like a torrent of rain being unleashed. And what we do when we mourn is what we do is we direct that energy. Because if you don't, it's going to cause a lot of damage.

But by marking our losses, by actually saying, channeling, ritualizing, as he calls it, our grief and our pain, actually doing something intentional with it, what we end up doing is we direct it so that energy cannot destroy things in our lives. So what might that look like for you to mark your losses? Well, I mean, like one example that we're all familiar with is when someone who you love passes away, you have a funeral. That is a service in which people can just do something with their pain.

And in the United States, honestly, that's the end of our morning rituals. And that is tragic. We need to do more. If you have a major loss or even if you have minor losses, I would encourage you to be Be intentional about doing things with your pain, things to remember the loss and then to direct that energy. So maybe it's like you lost someone and you really love them.

Well, you know, observe anniversaries really carefully, you know, on the one year or the two years or whatever, even more often every month on the day that you lost this person, spend some time to intentionally remember that loss, which is, again, we normally try to avoid. Lean into remembrance and then spend some time with the Lord. Maybe you have some other pain that is not usually acknowledged, right? When a loved one dies, we have cultural liturgies. We have habits and things

that we do. But what do you do. Okay, I'm just going to go there. I know a lot of women who have had miscarried. Miscarried, you know? And it's like, what do you do then? Women feel this shame about, like, feeling a connection with someone and mourning someone who has not yet been born into the world. So what do you do with that? And honestly, like, things like that, like, you can have a funeral. I've done funerals for children not yet born.

I'm happy to do that. What I'm saying is that whatever the thing is, if it's significant, do something with it. Don't just say, oh, I'm just going to be stronger. I'm just going to press through. You won't. It's like unleashing water into your life and it's going to wreck things. We need to memorialize this stuff. off. There's this book right here. It's called Through a Season of Grief. It's just a series of, it's a well-known resource by Grief Share, which is a good organization.

365 Devotions for Your Journey from Mourning to Joy. There are like a bunch of copies back there. Devotions are a way to ritualize mourning, pain, to actually just say, no, this is real. This is legitimate. I'm actually going to do something intentional with my pain instead of just letting it kind of do whatever it wants. You guys can have these. If they're all gone, we'll just order more. That's the great thing about Amazon. There's an infinite supply.

What I'm saying is I don't know what the pain that you're going through is. I don't know what it is, but don't act like it's not legitimate. Actually find a way to express it and do that in the context of friendship and community and church here, and I'm happy to help you. That is the most important pastoral work that I can do, is try to help you guys figure that stuff out. Because again, I think this is what will turn into a spiritual crisis if you don't actually mourn your losses. I really do.

And then finally, and the worship team is going to come up here as we close out, I just want to encourage you to fight for hope. Again, we talked about this in the beginning, but it's so difficult to hear the promises that Jesus makes about what it would look like to be a hopeful, joyful person, and like this Dallas Willard quote, to look at the world and see God's presence in everything.

I understand how telling someone who is in the midst of grief that that's the case is really unhelpful and actually quite discouraging. But I think that what we're called to in grief is to look to a time when we will be able to see that. And I actually honestly believe that the way to that kind of a hope-filled, joyful kind of seeing God in everything, it has to go through loss and it has to go through pain. Otherwise, you're just putting on rose-colored glasses, right?

You're just saying, oh, everything's going to be fine. You know, it's so easy to be 23 years old and you've never had a major loss in your life and to be super optimistic in life. But we probably all, no offense if you're 23, good for you, enjoy it. But you know, what happens in life is people get older and people go through loss and loss comes for everyone. And eventually we're just all bowled over by it.

You know, when you were in your 20s, I'm sure your friends, your peers in that age group, if you looked at them then, and then you went back in your 60s and you asked the same people, hey, are you still feeling joyful? Are you still feeling optimistic? Do you still think life is exciting? So many people will be cynical and discouraged. And it's because they'll have gone through pain and hurt and loss. And I really think this had never leaned into hope.

So what I'm saying is that, yes, it is a difficult thing for me to ask you to be hopeful and to look for God in the midst of pain. I know it. I know it is an audacious and crazy thing to ask, but I want to encourage you to fight for hope.

Jesus says in Matthew 7, he says. You ask him. All I want to do is remind you of some promises that God gives. And God doesn't give promises only to the optimistic or to the hopeful. He speaks those to people who are mourning, who are in grief. And He encourages us, just keep coming back. Ask and seek. Seek in such a way that you're confident of who He is. And maybe you need help with that. Maybe you don't have a clear understanding of God's character.

You don't have a clear sense of his goodness. Maybe you're just too hurt, and you can't see through that. And I get it. What I want to encourage you is to fight for that hope, or at least be open to the possibility that God might restore hope within you. This whole kingdom dynamic that Jesus is saying, he was delivering good news, really good news to people, because he was talking to people who were in a religious system, right, that had rules and prescribed laws.

And, well, if you do this, then God will do this to you. And that was their understanding. His good news was that, hey, in the midst of pain, in the midst of suffering, in the midst when life is not going the way you intended to go, actually, God is going to be present. He's going to bring comfort. He's going to bring peace. And I just want to, even if you're feeling a little hopeless, you know, ask you to just consider that.

Consider what God might do if he could show up, if he would show up, because I believe that that is his nature.

So what I want to do is, I want to just pray for us right now, and then we're going to worship the. Holy Spirit, I welcome you into this place. We welcome you. We want to hear from you. God, you don't comfort us in the abstract. You comfort us with your presence. Lord, you bring joy. You turn our tears into laughter. Maybe not in a flick of an instant, Lord, but you know what our hearts are like. Like, Lord, you know our pain, you know our sorrows.

God, you were a man of sorrows acquainted with grief, Lord. None of this is in the abstract for you. You are present with us, Lord, and you know what it's like to be a person. You know what it's like to experience pain and loss. And so, Lord, I just ask you to be present here. Holy Spirit, would you be present with us right now, would you encourage those who are hurting, Lord, encourage those who are confused, use.

Encourage those who are angry, Lord. Lord, and just teach us these little habits of just going to you. We're not turning away, not being, trying to just be stronger, Lord. Lord, would you be our strength? Lord, would you give us joy? And Lord, would you remind us, of the joy that we had when we were saved, Lord, would you remind us of how good and how kind you are? Even still, Lord, would you restore that hope in us?

Lord, we just bring you our hearts and we ask you, God, to make good on your promise. Music.