At the church where I serve as pastor, we offer a grief support group to help anyone who has lost a loved one to release and deal with the bottled up emotional pain. I encourage you to find such a support group somewhere and get involved with it for your sake and for your family and friends.

The third response to our loss deals with the future. How will our loss change us, redefine us, as a person? One thing is sure: Our loss will change us!  The question is: will the change be positive or negative?

Rabbi Harold Kushner, in his best seller When Bad Things Happen to Good People, tells about a Chinese mother whose son dies. She goes to a holy man and asks him for a magic potion to bring her son back to life so she can get beyond her paralyzing grief.  The holy man says that for such a potion he needs her to bring him a mustard seed from a home that has never known sorrow and loss.

So she sets out to find such a seed. She goes from house to house asking if the home has known sorrow and loss. Regardless of where she goes, whether the house is a mansion or a hovel, every home has known some sorrow and loss. As she hears people tell her of their losses, she thinks to herself: “Who better to help these grieving people than I who have lost my son?” So she spends time in each home listening and helping those who have loved and lost. She never finds the mustard seed, but soon it no longer matters. Her loss changes her in a way that enables her to help others.

Will our loss lead us to be open to that which can never be lost? Will our loss lead us to be open to God? When God is mentioned in connection with our loss, most of us immediately want to ask: Why? Why, God? Why did this happen? Why did you allow this tragedy? I have come to realize that tragedy is a price tag for freedom.

Like you, I have asked that “why” question often and in anger. What I have learned from my loss is that more than needing an answer to my question about pain, I need a presence in my pain. More than needing an explanation of my tragedy, I need to experience God’s presence in my tragedy. For me, Christ on the cross reminds me that God knows my pain.

I believe that my tears and my pain over my loss are exceeded by God’s tears and God’s pain over my loss. God knows, for God has been there where we are in our loss. Tragedy can drive us away from God in bitter disappointment or tragedy can lead us to God in longing hope. The choice is ours!

For me, a change occurred in my grief as I changed my thinking about my three-year-old daughter who died of a brain tumor. Formerly, I had thought about her as being MINE, MINE by right -- she was MY daughter. Thus, I felt justified in my anger and bitterness because, after all, I had been robbed of what was MINE!

But when I began thinking about my daughter as a gift to me, a gift that ultimately belonged to God, not to me, then my anger over losing her from my life began to give way to gratitude over having had her in my life at all. When I changed how I viewed my daughter, my grief changed from bitterness over my loss to gratitude for her life; and I changed as I stopped demanding a big answer from God. Instead, I allowed myself to be in the bigger presence of God. We need something to believe in that is bigger than this life alone. We need to believe in something, someone, who cannot be taken away by life’s tragedies.

Grief is an experience common to all of us. We all lose someone we love sometime, somehow. All of us grieve but not all of us grieve with hope. My wish for you is the wish that the Apostle Paul had for the grieving people of his day (1 Thess. 4:13). May you grieve with a sense of hope for this life and beyond.

The basis for my hope, even in my grief, lies in this faith claim: In life and in death, we belong to God. I believe that claim from the bottom of my heart and from the top of my mind; and I believe it most passionately when I stand over my daughter’s grave and think about what could have been.

Through the Old Testament prophet Jeremiah, God spoke to the people of Israel when they had lost everything and were exiled in a foreign land. To those ancient people grieving their loss and to us modern people grieving our loss, God says: “I know the plans I have for you, plans for your well being and not for harm, to give you a future and a hope” (Jer. 29:11).

You and I, who have loved and lost, need a future with hope.