How Do I Recover from an Unbearable Tragedy ? www.swordify.com

August 28,
2020

Interview with

Now, before I point our friend to three biblical considerations,
let me say a word about Romans
8:28 here on the eighth month and the twenty-eighth day of
2020.

The flow of thought in Romans 8 goes like this: “We know
that for those who love God all things work together for good, for
those who are called according to his purpose” (Romans
8:28). And then skip a few verses, and you read,

Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall
tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness,
or danger, or sword? [And you could add, “or running over your own
grandchild.”] As it is written,

“For your sake we are being killed all the day long; we are
regarded as sheep to be slaughtered.” (Romans 8:35–36)

data-link= "https://www.desiringgod.org/interviews/how-do-i-recover-from-an-unbearable-tragedy" data-title= "“Some disabilities are physical, some are mental, and some are emotional and spiritual.”">

“Some disabilities are physical, some are mental, and some are
emotional and spiritual.”

And Paul responds to that litany of horrors that happen to God’s
people: “No, in all these things we are more than conquerors
through him who loved us” (Romans 8:37).
Not instead of, but “in all these
things we are more than conquerors through him who loved
us.” So, it’s absolutely crucial, whenever we cite Romans
8:28, that we realize that verse does not spare us Christians
distress, famine, nakedness, danger, but rather makes us
inseparable from Christ in these miseries — in
them.

That’s the clarification we must always keep before
us: Romans
8:28 is not a promise of escape from misery, but a promise
of being kept from delusion and unbelief and destruction in it, and
that in due time God works it out for our good.

Three Ways to Keep Going

Now, here are three considerations that I would like our hurting
friend — still hurting after thirteen years — to consider.

1. Live with the grief.

When Jesus broke into Paul’s life on the Damascus road, he said,
“Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?” (Acts 9:4).
Now at first, Paul had no idea what this meant. “Persecuting Jesus,
the risen Lord of the universe? I don’t even believe you exist!”
Luke had just said three verses earlier what Paul’s persecution
involved: “Saul [was] still breathing threats and murder against
the disciples of the Lord” (Acts 9:1).
Two words stand
out: murder and still.

And Noël and I just read devotions last night, by the way,
in Acts 26:10,
where Paul uses the plural for deaths that he
had been involved in. I had never noticed that plural before, but
here in Acts 9, he says he’s still breathing out murder, meaning,
“I was part of Stephen’s killing, and I’m still doing the same
thing on my way to Damascus.” He was a Christian-killer. And on the
Damascus road, Jesus told him that he was not merely a
Christian-killer; he was a Christ-killer. “You are persecuting me —
Jesus. You touch my followers, you touch me. You imprison them, you
imprison me. You kill them, you kill me.”

data-link= "https://www.desiringgod.org/interviews/how-do-i-recover-from-an-unbearable-tragedy" data-title= "“Your grief and your loss are not a disease that heals; they are an amputation that produces a lifelong limp.”">

“Your grief and your loss are not a disease that heals; they are
an amputation that produces a lifelong limp.”

And it appears from 1 Timothy
1:15 and 1 Corinthians
15:9 that Paul never, never forgot it. He never stopped
feeling the sting, the horror, of being a Christian-killer and a
Christ-killer. He did not mean to be a Christ-killer, but he did
mean to be a Christian-killer. And here he is now at the end of his
life in 1 Timothy, saying that he still feels it: he feels like the
foremost sinner; he calls himself the “foremost” or the “chief of
sinners” because, according to 1 Corinthians
15:9, he persecuted and killed Christians, and through them,
the Lord himself.

Now, my point is not that running over your own grandchild is
like killing Christians intentionally or killing Christ
inadvertently. My point is this: here’s something so horrible in
Paul’s life, in his background, that he did that he never, never
stopped taking it into account. He never got beyond it. He never
stopped thinking on it and its implications; it never stopped
playing any emotional role in his life.

So, I’m suggesting that the way forward is not to be sought
mainly in forgetting — or, God forbid, minimizing — the horror, but
in fact remembering, owning, finding Paul’s supernatural way of
living with the grief and the wrong that was done, in such a way
that it does not paralyze ministry but mysteriously, painfully —
even beautifully — deepens it. Read the context of 1
Timothy 1:15 and meditate on that possibility. That’s my
first observation.

2. Bear with the disability.

Here’s the second one, and it follows from the first: it may be
that the Lord is calling you to think of this tragedy and its
effect not as a wound to be healed, but as a disability to bear.
Some disabilities are physical: Jacob wrestled with God, God put
his hip out of joint, and he walked with a limp for the rest of his
life as an unavoidable reminder of his encounter with God
(Genesis 32:24–25).

Some disabilities are mental, and some are emotional and
spiritual. And it might help if your mindset shifts from getting
beyond the pain, beyond the remorse, beyond the horrible, vivid
memory — from getting beyond all of that — to acknowledging the
ongoing presence of the pain, the remorse, the memory, as
miraculously transformed from a ministry-paralyzing reality to a
ministry-deepening, ministry-softening, ministry-empowering
reality.

Think of the Christ-exalting people you know who have a profound
disability. We could all probably think of one or two or three. And
perhaps they have this disability because of a mindless accident.
And by a miracle of sovereign grace, they have transformed that
life-ruining disability into a life-giving, power-in-weakness
ministry of grace. That’s my second observation: an alteration of
mindset.

3. Embrace brokenhearted joy.

And now finally, the third observation, which follows from that,
and in a sense is an extension of the first two. Surely one of the
great hindrances to ministry after such an unspeakable calamity is
the deep sense that if I rejoice or if I delight in some ministry,
I will, by that delight, by that joy, treat the death of my
grandchild with disrespect; I will, by that joy, minimize the
horror of the deed and the loss to the family. So, there hangs over
you a sense that you dare not return to any form of normalcy lest
you make light of what feels infinitely heavy.

Here’s what I’m suggesting: that minimizing is not going to
happen after thirteen years with you; it’s not. The voice of
thirteen years of sorrow and ministry paralysis is to show you that
you have a disability that you never will leave behind. You will
never become chipper about it. You’ll never become frivolous about
it. You’ll never become callous about it. You’ll never become
indifferent to that awful moment and that immeasurable loss. You
won’t. You won’t.

data-link= "https://www.desiringgod.org/interviews/how-do-i-recover-from-an-unbearable-tragedy" data-title= "“Paul found a miracle of grace to transform the sorrowful, emotional weight of his past.”">

“Paul found a miracle of grace to transform the sorrowful,
emotional weight of his past.”

I’m suggesting that the grief and the loss are not a disease
that heals; they are an amputation that produces a lifelong limp:
you won’t ever run the same. And that limp, I am suggesting, is the
miraculous capacity to minister to other people with a kind of joy
(mark that word: a kind of joy), and a kind of
hope, and a kind of peace that only a person can have who has drunk
this bitter cup that you have drunk. It will be unique to you: your
particular kind of joy, your hope, your peace.

What did Paul mean when he said in 2 Corinthians
6:10 that he carried out his ministry “as sorrowful, yet
always rejoicing”? Could it be that part of the story that Paul
carried with him all the time was the memory that he was a
Christ-killer, as indeed all of us are in one sense
Christ-killers?

Whatever the sorrow was (and oh, how many reasons Paul had to be
sorrowful) what matters most is that Paul found a miracle of grace
to transform the sorrowful, emotional weight of his past from a
ministry-paralyzing memory into a ministry-deepening power, even
with a kind of joy that was peculiar to this amazing man — not a
superficial joy, but the kind of joy that only the chief of sinners
can have in the grace of God.

And that’s my prayer for you.