I have a confession to make … I am easily distracted! I had a plan to write and post every week … and guess what? Weeks have gone by without so much as a single word from me.
I do have excuses (although that old adage “the pathway to hell is paved with good intentions” echoes in my head). I’ve been project managing the last few pieces of my renovation. The driveway and patio are finally done. Wahoo! My health scare was just that – a scare (I give all the thanks and praise to the Lord!). And I think that I can finally have some time to think and dream.
We were talking recently about seeking God, and one of my dear friends suggested that we need to set time aside to worship, read the Bible and get quiet before the Lord. We need to be filled so we can pour out into our families and communities. As women, we tend to take care of everyone else and forget about ourselves. We then wonder why we feel so tired, depleted and empty. That’s when depression and anxiety find a way to seed and root in our minds.
Be still and know that I am God
Psalm 46:10
My aha from that conversation was this. In order to find meaning in our lives, we need to have time and space to consider our current circumstances. By consider, I don’t mean beat yourself up and berate yourself for all your failings and shortcomings. No! I mean consider your current situation with love and compassion. You would NEVER talk to your friends and family the way you talk to yourself – at least, I hope not. If you do, that’s a very different conversation.
During the time that you set aside for yourself, focus on self-care. That word, “self-care”, has become the word of the moment. I think being in lockdown on and off for two years, having to be so careful around others, and so on, has caused us enormous strain, and we need to take time to heal. And with healing comes purpose and meaning.
The COVID pandemic has shown us all the five stages of grief, whether we choose to acknowledge that or not. We have lost precious time with family and friends, and some of us have lost family members or people that were close to us. We lost some of our freedoms – freedom to travel, freedom to be out and about (we do have some of those things back but with strings attached). We’ve gone through all five stages – denial (in the beginning of the pandemic we were sure this was just localized to another country, couldn’t possibly affect us); anger (how could this happen?) and I want to add fear into this stage (how are we going to get through this? How long? Will life ever be normal again?); bargaining (with health providers, with God); depression (the worst stage of all where it’s almost impossible to see the light at the end of the tunnel without thinking that the light is probably just a train); and acceptance (okay, so this is my life right now, how am I going to make the best of a horrible situation?).
Just thinking about these stages, it’s so clear to me that this doesn’t just apply to death situations; they apply to any traumatic experience. You may have received a diagnosis that feels like a death sentence. You might have lost your job, your sole source of income that also feels like a death sentence.
I’ve found that the fifth stage, acceptance, is the hardest. It’s so easy to stay somewhere in the first four. It’s easier to be angry, fearful, in denial, and depressed than to work through to acceptance. Is that the way we want to live out our lives? I’d hazard a guess and say no.
When I did some research on the five stages of grief for my earlier posting ( April Fool? … Fooled Ya!), I discovered something very interesting about the five stages and my understanding of them. The five stages are presented in a linear format – you go up and down like a roller-coaster in one direction or backward in the other direction. But as we all know that’s not how it works in real life. I discovered that they were never meant to prescribed as linear or a once-off process (it would be great if you could go through them once and you’re done, never to have to go through them again). Grief is ongoing. I’m sorry to tell you that it never goes away. But I am excited to tell you that it does change. The pain becomes more manageable, and the days do get brighter.
David Kessler (an expert on grief and the coauthor with Elizabeth Kubler-Ross of On Grief and Grieving) states in the introduction of his book Finding Meaning, the Sixth Stage of Grief that “The five stages were never intended to be prescriptive. . . . They are not a method for tucking messy emotions into neat packages.”[1] This was such a relief to me. I’m not going mad, and I’m not beyond recovery. There is hope!
David Kessler’s discussion on the fifth stage of grief is particularly helpful. “The fifth of Kubler-Ross’s five stages is acceptance. At this stage, we acknowledge the loss. We take time to stop and breathe into the undeniable fact that our loved ones are gone.” This is very hard and painful, but oh so necessary if we want to move forward and be happy. We have to do the work! And this is where the sixth stage comes in. Meaning and hope. If we can understand that the pain of grief will diminish with time (that’s not to say that memories will – we need to hold tightly onto them), we can allow our grief “to transform into something else, something rich and fulfilling.”
By taking time for yourself to sit quietly in the Word, to sit with the Lord, you’ll be able to find peace and allow yourself to find that rich and fulfilling meaning. He is our Hope. He is our Meaning. Allow yourself to dream again. Your future is in your hands. You get to choose.
[1] Finding Meaning-The Sixth Stage of Grief by David Kessler, Introduction, Page 2
Voyage through Life 