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Century Christian
Church 1301 Tamarack Road, Owensboro, KY 42301, (270) 684-0286, Pastor: Rev. Jim Westmoreland |
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You Can Begin Again . . . After Great Sorrow by Jim Westmoreland Today, we move to the second sermon in this series, You Can Begin . . . After Great Sorrow. Isn’t it interesting how we get in a really comfortable routine and we are just cruising through life, working, resting playing? We make plans for our future and we dream of how things are going to be. And then, our life gets shaken by that heart pounding presence, Sorrow. All of the great plans for our golden years that we made is gone. We experience sorrow, or grief, when we lose anything or anyone that is significant to us. We usually think of the death of a loved one. Our first experience of sorrow may be have been a grandparent. The closer we were to them, and the more they had a part of our lives, the greater the impact it has on us. For some children, the great sorrow may have been the divorce of their parents, that feeling of aloneness, sorrow, anger and guilt all mixed together in our hearts. Children often blame themselves for the troubles their parents are having at home, and they feel to blame when their parents’ divorce. Such great sorrow for such young lives. Who of us has lost a parent? A brother or sister? A child? Or who has lost a husband or wife and experienced the loss of companionship and the loss of all of the things that you shared doing together. Before we go on, I want to say that death is not the only cause of great sorrow. The loss of a job, a career, an important dream, a way of life is a loss of great sorrow. The loss of a limb, the ability to walk, or see or hear, can be a loss that we deal with on a daily basis over and over a gain. As serious illness marches on through our lives, we often lose the ability to do things, the ability to care for ourselves, and when these times come, we feel the losses, and we feel great sorrow. Listen to these words from the life of David, 2 Samuel 12:15b-23, a passage that comes after David’s great disgrace. “The child born to David and Bathsheba became very ill. David secluded himself in his grief. He prayed constantly, refused to eat and laid on the floor for a week. When the child died, the servants were afraid to tell David for fear that he would do harm to himself. But, David knew what had happened when he saw them whispering to each other. He arose, bathed, combed his hair and went to the house of God to worship. Then, he returned to the palace and ate a large meal. The servants wondered why he had grieved while the child was alive instead of afterwards. Because, he said, while the child lived I thought that maybe God would spare him. Now that he is gone, there is no need to punish myself. I can go to where he is, but he cannot come back to me.” There are a great variety of emotions in grief. Grief is not just one emotion, but a collection of emotions that we experience when we have great sorrow. We do not all experience everything in the same order or with the same intensity, but most of us will move through these emotions. When we suddenly experience a great loss, our system is shocked, and our first response is to often deny believing what we are being told. We feel, “No, it isn’t true! I just can’t believe it. . . . I just can’t believe it!” We do our best to function, but it all seems like a bad dream. An emotion coming soon after denial is numbness. Our defenses wall us off from such a great blow to our system. When denial doesn’t work and what we must accept is so painful, our emotions try to shelter us from absorbing all of the pain at once. And we go through a period of hours, days or weeks, feeling numb as slowly more of the reality sets in and we deal with more and more of the pain, hurt and loss. Another emotion that asserts itself at will throughout our grief is the emotion of anger. We are angry at whoever caused this to happen or who did not do enough at the right time to keep it from happening. We get angry at doctors, nurses, hospitals, at the people who might have caused this accident, at the person who died for being careless, for doing too much, for any number of things that may pop into our heads. And we get angry at God for letting this happen! We cry our hearts out and shout, “Why did you do this, God?” Or, “Why did you let this happen?” First, we turn our anger outward at others, at God, maybe even family members. Then, we begin to turn our anger inward on ourselves. We fall into despair and self-pity. What will we do? We feel so helpless. We have so little energy anymore. Depression drains and saps us. Depression is our frustration and anger turned in on ourselves, and it consumes us and debilitates us. We can’t get out of bed. We can’t eat or get out of the house or be around friends or go to church. Sometimes, we need help working through depression. In our community there are support groups for those who have lost spouses, lost children, and they are a great resource. Trained counselors can help get us through the darkness and begin to get control of our lives and thoughts again. Some of us have such great sorrow that it affects our image of ourselves. We become filled with self-doubt, self-loathing and self-hate, which leads to any number of self-destructive behaviors. Low self-esteem creates self-talk that says, “If they really knew me, they wouldn’t like me.” So, we find ways to keep a false front up, to make jokes, to put others down, to blame others, to keep our private self at a distance. We fulfill our own worst self-images in the way that we take care of ourselves, eat, exercise, and relate to other people. We have trouble trusting other people, and, we get our feelings hurt easily, because, at the core of our being, we don’t like ourselves. The reason that we are here today, and the reason that I have begun this series is that “You can begin again, after great sorrow.” We have all suffered losses, some more than others, and all of us need the assurance and the hope that, no matter what the loss we have experienced is, no matter how devastated we feel, we can begin again. We have to move toward acceptance, as David did in our reading from 2 Samuel. When we start to move forward out of our great loss, we do it in little steps. It is a process, like physical therapy for those of you who have had shoulder, knee and hip surgeries. You don’t do it all at once. But, if you want to regain movement again, you will do your therapy, even though it is painful and not easy. Daily and even hourly, you make an internal decision to Begin to Begin Again! When we begin the journey to begin again, we suffer the pain of living “without” and living “because.” It isn’t always easy to say what those mean, but it is a process and a journey that we all go through eventually. I want to suggest four things that we can hold onto that will make a difference in our lives. One, we can hold onto good memories. There are plenty of things to look back at and wish we had done differently and done better. Acknowledge those thoughts but let them go. Gerald Mann spoke of a little voice in his head he believes was put their by God. It came to him as he was being suffocated by guilt over things he wished he had done for his wife, and the voice said, “You must have loved her very much because nobody could be that guilty, unless they cared deeply.” That is when we allow our hearts to remember the good things that we shared together. It is surprising how special the little things become–spending time together, the little things we did for each other, knowing when we were needy and vulnerable and gently caring for us. Hold onto good memories. You can begin to begin again after great sorrow. We know that each one of us, if we are not having it now, we will have great sorrow and loss to experience and work through in our lives. And when that happens, I encourage you to hang on to the good memories. A second thing we can hold on to is gracious people. Friends, family and salt of the earth people in the church encourage us, pray for us, lift us up with their cards and words of support. Let all of us remind ourselves of how much our support means to others who are going through great sorrow. We may never preach a sermon or get up in front of anyone to speak, but we can use the phone and write our cards that make a difference for others. Let us be the gracious people that are there for others to hold on to. If we were to give an analogy to describe our church, which best fits Century Christian? An organization, a cause or a hospital? Maybe we could say it is all three, but what I want it to be first is a hospital, a place to come and be healed. So, you can begin again, even in the midst of suffering if you’ll hang on to gracious people. The third thing that we can hold onto is glad reunions. The time of our great loss is also an opportunity for us to experience some glad reunions, people we haven’t seen in a while or had occasion to be around. God can give us some experiences and relationships that we need from some of these glad reunions. We never know which ones will make a difference for us, but they are a gift for us to receive. Glad reunions. You can begin to begin again after suffering if you’ll hang on to glad reunions and let your pain trigger reunions with people that will enrich your life. When our grief is the greatest, the thing that we need to hang onto most is God’s future. We are all tempted to quit, give up and distance ourselves from all memories. That is when we need to receive God’s future the most. We can’t think about quitting because God isn’t finished with us yet, and there is love for us to give and people for us to care for in whatever way we can. And, if we will let God, he will fill our sails with air, he will fill our esteem needs with his love and blessing, and he will fill our insecurity with his security. In the scripture reading this morning David grieved during the child’s illness, but not after the child died. David, for all of his problems and faults and sins, had everything in the right focus. Think of that last verse, “I can go to where he is, but he can never come back to me.” David understood that there is only one option for us, and that’s forward. We want to give up and quit, but God keeps imposing his future. Forward is the only direction that we have to go. The only future there is is God’s future! Paul’s message to us in 1 Corinthians 15 is so true. “If it is not true, then we are the greatest fools of all,” he said. “In the twinkling of an eye the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall rise, never to die again!” And then he says that we shall see him, Jesus Christ, as he is. “And we shall be like him.” We all have plans about our lives. Go ahead and plan, do things, do the best you can, but never forget, When the darkness of grief comes over you, hang on to God’s future. Forward is the only direction we have. One of the great preachers of America, John Claypool, lost his daughter, Lauralu at thirteen with leukemia. Twelve years later, he was speaking at a conference, and a woman came to him and said, “Can I share something with you?” And he said, “Yes.” She said, “Last night, I had a dream that I was at Oxford University in the library, and there was a beautiful young woman there in her twenties, blonde hair, sitting at a table, and I was looking at her, and she motioned for me to come and sit beside her. I went and sat beside her, and she said, ‘I am Dr. Claypool. I think you know my father.’ I said I don’t know him. I’ve heard him speak a few times. She said, ‘I and my colleagues are working on a cure for leukemia, and every time we think we have the riddle solved, it evaporates in our hands. We get so close, and then we don’t solve it.’ She said, ‘I’ve become convinced in recent days that it is because my father will not let me go. If you see my father, please tell him, ‘Let me go and live my life so that you can live yours.’ That story has an eerie, almost cruel quality to it when we first hear it, but it tells the truth. If any of us are in grief now, or when grief does come to us through a great loss, hang on to four things: Hang on to good memories, gracious people, glad reunions and God’s future. I believe C. S. Lewis was right, Our suffering on earth’s time line is God’s megaphone for getting our attention. You can begin again after great sorrow! Amen. Century Christian Church, October 14, 2007 - Sermon by Jim Westmoreland _________________ |
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