Several months after my daughter left for college, my mom died.
Suddenly, my world got smaller.
With my husband working late hours, I’m often home alone with the two youngest. And Sundays—Sundays have become especially hard. Once, every seat around the table was full. I used to wake up looking forward to the day—church in the morning, lazy afternoons together, then gathering around the table for dinner. I love the table. I love the food, the conversations, and how it pulled us close. My mom would be there too, and we’d talk about the sermon about the week ahead. Sundays became sacred, a day I treasured.
But now, the table feels emptier. And I’ve gone from savoring Sundays to wanting to skip right over them.
Things look different now. Now, many seats stay open around the dinner table, making my heart ache.
Making Room for God’s Deep Work
No matter how hard we try to hold on, time keeps moving. For an entire year, I sat beside my mom at the dinner table every Sunday night. Now, her chair sits empty.
And no matter how hard I try, I can’t recreate those dinners. So around 5:30 PM, when my mom used to walk into the kitchen and wrap me in a hug, I find myself standing there, tears falling. And that’s grief. Grief for what our Sundays used to look like.
Every ounce of me wasn’t to shoo the pain away, to hide it, bypass it, stuff it, to keep it from interrupting the order of my actual life, but I take a deep breath and allow the tears to flow.
“Our culture offers quick fixes and how-to-guides to bypass or suppress our feelings. Even our Bibles seem like instruction manuals, a way to transform sadness into instant happiness. But grief and healing don’t operate on a quick timeline. The more we buy into the false theology that following Jesus guarantees a pain-free existence, the more we overlook the significance of grief or treat it like a problem to be solved.” -quote from my book, “The Freedom to Feel: Finding God in Grief and Trauma.”
When we’re not sure God will meet us in our pain, it’s tempting to use our faith to bypass our emotions. This is called spiritual bypassing. Psychologist John Welwood coined this great term and defined it as ” the use of spiritual practices and beliefs to avoid dealing with our painful feelings, unresolved wounds, and developmental needs.”
The Temptation to Bypass Grief
When we feel uncomfortable in emotions, it’s easier to slap a comforting Bible verse on our wound, such as, “All things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose.” Romans 8:28, then to feel the pain. We buy into the false theology that if we pray hard enough, our pain will go away. It’s very similar to toxic positivity; we hope it will relieve those uncomfortable emotions, but it only disconnects us from reality, causing the emotions to become stuck in our bodies.
Our most significant example is Jesus, who processed his emotions in the presence of his Father. Jesus chose to wrestle with the sadness of going to the cross with his Father, revealing that one has to feel it to heal.
Avoid Numbing
Numbing includes scrolling mindlessly through social media, popping pills, or even shopping. Just think of all the ways that our culture tolerates numbing, the quick fixes and self-help tools and antidepressants and booze and social media obsessions, and all the other things marketers target into our psyches to promise that there’s an easy way out of pain. In spiritual circles, the numbing cloak themselves in spiritual gargen. It comes in the form of hours of praying spent inhabiting non-dual awareness or Bible studies every weekend or attending one spiritual retreat after another, seeking the next tool to avoid feeling loneliness. None of these things are bad, but doing them to avoid feeling pain can keep us from an intimate relationship with Jesus and others. We begin to go through the motions, and before we know it, we’ve created a wall around ourselves to not only keep out the pain but also keep out the joy and fulfillment in life. Before we know it, we are numb and lacking compassion for the people around us.
How did Jesus remain full of compassion and not become numb to the pain and suffering around him?
Matthew 14:14-21: “And when Jesus went out He saw a great multitude, and He was moved with compassion for them and healed their sick.”
How Jesus Processed Pain
Jesus is “moved with compassion” when He sees the needy multitudes exhausted and wandering like sheep tattered from cruel fleecing. Twice, He is “moved with compassion” when He sees the hungry multitudes without food (Matthew 14:14; 15:32).
The key to staying compassionate and not numb to the world is to process our pain with our Father as Jesus did.
In the Bible, Jesus models how to process pain in the presence of God the Father:
- Psalm 22: When Jesus cries out in anguish from the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
- Psalm 22, where the feeling of abandonment leads to salvation. Jesus’ cry expresses his anguish and his faith in God’s victory.
- Mark 15:34: Jesus cries out in agony, “My God! My God! Why have you forsaken me?” In this moment, God the Father turns his back on Jesus and pours out his wrath for humanity’s sin. Jesus then says, “It is finished,” and dies.
- Garden of Gethsemane Jesus models crying out to God the Father in the Garden of Gethsemane. Some say that Jesus’ example shows that humans need others and should cry out when they are in pain.
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Many effective practices aid in processing even the most unpleasant emotional states, such as journaling and mindful prayer, where you experience your hurts before God. Releasing exercises like mindful walking or pilates explores one’s inner self, allowing an ever-deepening awareness of our emotions. All these aim to create space for recognizing and embracing negative feelings so transformation may occur, eventually leading to a new state within total soul elevation. Also, remember, we cannot heal alone. We were made to heal in community. Reach out to people as much as possible.Maybe today, instead of numbing the ache, you can pause. Maybe you can take five minutes to breathe, to journal, to pray—just as you are, without trying to tidy it up. Perhaps this is where healing begins.
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