My dad, brothers, and I used to do a lot of carpentry work. Though none of us were ever seriously injured on a job, we certainly met our quota of smashed thumbs, splinters, and cuts. Whenever one of us boys would get hurt, Dad would look at our wound and say, “Yep, that’s gonna’ hurt ‘til it feels better.” And back to work we would go.
Through the years, as the hurts I encountered became more severe, Dad’s words would come back to me with deeper meaning. What they may have lacked in mercy was overridden by their plain wisdom; and I’ve become convinced that healing from loss depends largely on our accepting that deep pain of the soul will not go away quickly. Psalm 42:5 says it this way:
Why are you cast down, O my soul, and why are you in turmoil within me? Hope in God; for I shall again praise him, my salvation and my God.
To me this means that between my last pain-free praise and my next is a season of waiting and hoping. I’m gonna’ hurt ‘til I feel better.
I’ve talked to a lot of desperate people who’ve been severely wounded by disappointment and grief. One man saw his net worth fall from multiple millions to six-figure debt through an odd series of events that he couldn’t stop. Another man’s fiancée called off their marriage, having given no indication that she was thinking of backing out. A close friend’s brother committed suicide. Another friend’s husband died in a tractor accident. And the list goes on. I talked to each one soon after their calamity, and they all shared something in common: they wanted me to “give it to them straight.” Desperate people have little tolerance for platitudes and soft-selling.
So, I’ll say here what I said to each of them: there are no shortcuts. Yes, there is a way through the pain, but it doesn’t come easily and it rarely comes quickly. You’re going to hurt for a while.
As one who has traveled the grief road, I’ll be bold enough to urge you not to rush it. I know you want the pain to go away. I know you want “normal” back. But will you believe me when I say that you are in one of the richest environments of God-nearness that you will ever experience this side of eternity? So lean into your pain and absorb the nutrients that sorrow brings to your soul. This is how we hurt forward.
© 2021 by Tim Grissom. All rights reserved.
Life is not over for us when our loved one dies, but it sure changes. I know I've never been the same since December 13, 1999, the date of my wife's death. The grief has been hard. Even after all these years I still carry some sadness, but it has also helped me.
About nine months after Janiece died, I was invited to join a support group at my church. On one of the videos we watched, Dr. Ray Pritchard said: “You can’t go back. You can’t stay here. You must go forward.”
I knew those words were true the minute I heard them, but even so I resisted the thought of going forward. I didn’t like the idea of a future that didn’t include her. But I had no choice. The door to that part of my life had been closed.
The only direction to go was forward, and it would hurt. But the reasoning side of me eventually relented. I told myself, You’re going to hurt no matter what, so you might as well hurt while going forward.
Sometimes it helps to put words to our challenges so we can face them better, so we can remind ourselves that life consists of more than we are seeing and feeling at the moment. That’s what I did when I decided to label my grief journey Hurting Forward. It gave me a perspective on life that could accept severe sadness without being overwhelmed by it.
At this point in your grief journey, it may be all you can do to get out of bed. That’s forward. Maybe you’ve conquered getting up and even cleaning up, and now you’re ready to leave the house. That’s forward. Maybe you’re ready to go to the grocery store on your own, or back to church, or to accept a friend's invitation to coffee. Forward. Forward. And forward.
It’s probably asking too much of you to celebrate each step, but can you at least acknowledge that you’re moving forward? Can you recognize that you’re finding the pain a little more bearable today than it was last week? If you can, that’s forward.
I was naive in the early days of grief. Really naive. I actually thought that if I could get to the 40-day mark after Janiece’s death, I would feel much better. I didn’t expect life to be normal, but I really thought 40 days would get me to a much more settled state.
That didn’t happen.
But . . . there came a morning a few months later when my waking thought wasn’t about loneliness or sadness but about what I needed to get done that day.
That was forward.
Hurting forward is not about “moving on” or “getting over,” as if the life of your loved one no longer has meaning to you. It is realism overlaid with grace. It’s learning to walk with a limp. It’s pain management for a soul whose life has been interrupted and who is learning a new way forward.
© 2021 by Tim Grissom. All rights reserved.