Leaning Into Grief and Finding Jesus

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Welcome to Grace at the Fray, a podcast that explores the many dimensions of God’s grace that we find at the frayed edges of life. Come explore how God’s grace works to renew your life and send you on mission in His kingdom.

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0:00:22.0 Jim: Hello, beloved. Welcome to the third episode in a little series that we’re doing on how the gospel of Jesus works itself out in our sufferings. In this episode, I want us to go on a little journey into the nature of grief. And before I go any further, would you do me a favor? Think of someone who needs encouragement in this area and send this episode to them and then plan on getting together with them to talk about it. My guest today is a longtime friend who’s had a huge influence on my life. He was a pastor in my area for over 40 years and when he retired, he and his wife joined Serge’s Missionary Care Team, serving missionaries in secure locations, so I have to keep his identity anonymous. We’ll call him John. Well not long after they joined up with Serge, his wife was diagnosed with cancer and she is now with the Lord. It’s always difficult to articulate, but you can imagine her ever-present absence is so much a part of his life now, and it has significantly impacted his current ministry. John’s story is one of immense loss as he continues to minister to our missionaries while leaning into the grief, seeing the Lord meet him in that grief, and how ministry from sorrow to people full of sorrow creates a rich and robust confidence in the good, sovereign love of God. Do you know how to grieve? Do you ignore it like it’s an unwanted distraction? Does it sneak up on you and debilitate you? Are you tired of weeping? In his poem entitled “Grief” George Herbert gives us a picture of profound sorrow that has expressed all the tears that can be wept, but there’s still more grief, seemingly endless grief.

And the poem goes like this, “O Who will give me tears? Come all ye springs, Dwell in my head and eyes: Come clouds and rain: My grief hath need of all the watery things that nature hath produc’d. Let ev’ry vein suck up a river to supply mine eyes, My weary weeping eyes, too drie for me, Unlesse they get new conduits, new supplies to bear them out, and with my state agree.” And it continues, but if you know the experience of grief and deep loss, I hope this episode will be of great comfort to you as you discover that the Lord counts your tears, as you lean into the grief.

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0:03:04.7 Jim: Well, welcome. Welcome to the podcast. It’s a little weird. You know, I’ve known you for quite a long time and I have to keep you anonymous because of the field, the fields that you work at with Member Care. So you’re off camera and well, I won’t call you by your real name. We’ll call you, we’ll call you “John”. So John, [laughter] who are you and what do you do with the company? And yeah, just give me some of the background and we’ll go from there.

0:03:40.9 John: Thank you. It’s good to be here. Well, I’m working with the company doing Member Care, pastoral care with a number of our folks who are on the field. And it is an incredible joy and privilege to walk with these folks that are laying down their lives for the Lord, serving him, walking through, often through suffering and many challenges and just to be there in a pastoral role to encourage them and help them process hard things that they’re going through and point them to Jesus. It’s a joy and privilege to walk with them.

0:04:25.1 Jim: Yeah. And so you retired recently, you and your wife and joined the company and then started doing Member Care. So tell me what that was like with you and your wife. You had just finished an amazing 43 years of pastoral ministry and then you transitioned to this role. Tell me how pastoral ministry and how doing that with your wife transitioned into doing Member Care with your wife.

0:04:58.4 John: We had, for years, had a heart for our overseas workers, workers that we sent out from our church. And it was a high value of our church for years to send us to visit them, to do shepherding with them. So we’d already been doing it, representing our church for a number of years. And when this opportunity came, when I was leaving my full-time role at the church, when this opportunity came up, it just seemed like, whoa, this couldn’t be more perfect because of how our gifts and burdens complemented each other. And we just jumped in and loved it. We loved to travel together and loved getting to know a lot of folks that were new to us, not just the people sent out from our church, but others. We were also invited to be part of a couple of retreats for workers, sometimes just with workers from our company, sometimes with workers from a variety of companies in a city. And we did some speaking and teaching, and that was a great way to get to know folks. Two, we led a marriage retreat for a number of workers at one point, participated in a retreat for singles, just did some general teaching for all of our people in one of the countries. And that was great. That was a good way for them to get to know us a little better and for us to bring the gospel to them in their contexts.

0:06:36.9 Jim: One of the things that you said to me earlier this week when we were talking about what we would talk about was the privilege of getting to minister to these folks, but also, and I want you to say more about this, how those folks began to minister to you. So what was that like? 

0:06:55.9 John: Yes, that’s a very important part of the story. And that, of course, is very directly connected with what happened. In our story, a year and a half into the job, we discovered that my wife had a very serious terminal cancer, And that was a game changer in so many ways in terms of what our lives became for the next two and a half years that the Lord gave to her. So we had had a year and a half experience with the company, a year and a half to get to know these folks. We were growing in our love for them. They were growing in their love for us. And from the time that the cancer started on, we were able to still do a lot of our Zoom calls with them. Of course, we didn’t do any travel for a while, but we did a lot of the Zoom calls together.

And right from the beginning, we both had a sense that, wow, this has really transitioned into more of a two-way ministry, because these are folks that had grown to love us and wanted to know how we were doing with our journey, with this sobering prognosis and treatment that my wife was going through. And it was very sweet. So we’re on a call to minister to them and point them to Jesus, but they are ministering to us and pointing us to Jesus and bringing comfort, the comfort of the gospel to us. And it was a huge blessing that continued throughout most of the journey. Her last few months, she was so much weaker. We didn’t do many calls together then. But for most of that two and a half years, we were still doing a lot of it together. And what… Yeah, we were so encouraged and so blessed by the prayers, the input, the words of encouragement and love from these folks.

0:09:06.4 Jim: Yeah, there’s… The beautiful thing about your job is that you weep with those who weep, but then they weep with you. And the mutuality of it is remarkable. So how long ago did your wife pass away? 

0:09:26.6 John: Two years ago.

0:09:27.3 Jim: Two years ago. So the thing that I’m very curious about is, I mean, you’re a pastor, I’m a pastor. You have way more experience than me. So I want to know, well, how to grieve, how to help others grieve, how to help others help me grieve. The mutuality of this is very fascinating for me. Like I said earlier, there’s so many questions that I want to ask you, but I am very curious about what the last two years have been like. So unpack that.

0:10:13.1 John: Yeah. One of the ironies of my situation is that my wife for many years had been a leader in the GriefShare ministry at our church. And she was not only a leader in our church, but she was also recorded on the GriefShare videos that are seen in tens of thousands of churches around the country. But for a number of years before her cancer, I would hear her stories from the Grief Ministry at our church and hear her talk about how people were processing things and leaning into the grief, what kinds of things help in the grief process, and the kinds of things that don’t. And little did I know that the Lord was using all of that to prepare me for this new reality in my life. But one of her big emphases, one of the big emphases in GriefShare is the importance of leaning into it. They say when you’re going through grief, you can’t go around it, you can’t go underneath it, you can’t deny it, you need to lean into it. And they flush that out with lots of practical suggestions, and they’re quick to say, too, some of them, that frankly, men are often not as good as women at grieving and leaning into it. And I heard that loud and clear from her for a number of years. And…

0:11:46.3 Jim: Yeah, this is fascinating that your own wife is teaching you how to grieve losing your wife.

0:11:56.3 John: Yeah, I know.

0:11:57.7 Jim: I mean, I don’t even… I’m kind of speechless, like, what a gift, I suppose. It’s profound.

0:12:06.1 John: Yeah. An amazing gift.

0:12:07.0 Jim: So what has your wife taught you? 

0:12:09.9 John: We don’t need to be afraid of it. We should lean into it. The Lord will meet us in that sorrow. Here’s where so many of the Psalms of Lament help. We see the reality of loss and sorrow and grief in so many of the Psalms, and parts of Scripture came to life to me in new ways along those lines. Just the need for a rich and robust confidence in the good, sovereign love of God, which she had wrestled with because she went through a very hard experience when her father died at a relatively young age, just when she was beginning college, and wrestled with the Lord’s sovereignty and goodness. Does He really care? But that was really a transforming time in her life of resting more solidly in the Lord’s sovereign goodness. And a number of years before her cancer, she put a quote on our refrigerator that she never took down, that I still see every day in my house. And the quote says this, “If I knew what God knows, I would want exactly what I have today.” And she, through her faith and trust in the goodness of God, taught me so much about resting in the Lord in the midst of suffering and trials, when we don’t understand why it’s happening, but we know that He is good. And throughout her journey with cancer, she was not afraid, she never complained, and she really believed that quote that’s on the refrigerator. And that taught me so much, even as we were both grieving the reality that her life was going to be much shorter than we had hoped, I was going to be going through a good portion of life without her. There were so many things that she was going to miss, that brought so much sorrow to her and to me, because she… We have a number of grandchildren in addition to our kids. She loved them so much, she knew that there were so many big events in their lives that she would be missing, and I mean, that really hurts, it still hurts. But knowing that the Lord is always up to something good, especially when we don’t understand, and she had a confident faith in that, and the example of her faith, and her anticipation of seeing Jesus face to face, has given me such hope and such strength. Toward the end of her life, one of the last days before she died, when she was still lucid, when I said, “Honey, it looks like the Lord’s going to take you home to be with him very soon.” And even though she was on morphine, she said so clearly, she said, “That is my sure and confident hope, all of this is not worth comparing with what lies ahead, and I’m going to see Jesus face to face.” Wow. What more can you ask for than that? And that there was such peace and joyful anticipation. She didn’t want to leave, I didn’t want her to leave, but she knew where she was going, she knew she was in the Lord’s hands.

0:16:06.7 Jim: CS Lewis has two books that come to my mind, that came to my mind as we were talking about having this conversation. It’s Surprised by Joy and A Grief Observed, and I really wish that it had been flipped. I wish that it had been like A Joy Observed and Surprised by Grief, because I feel like that’s more, my experience is that joy is this thing that I kind of observe from far away, but grief is this thing that sneaks up on me and surprises me, and just I’m overwhelmed with it, and so it’s interesting how both of those things were kind of at play when through the morphine comes this confident joy and thankfulness in the midst of a deep immense grief.

0:17:05.3 Jim: So I wanted to give a few quotes from that book. I know that you love C.S Lewis so I had a feeling that you had digested A Grief Observed, but I’m going to just read a quote, and yeah, you tell me what this has been like, because I think that you can resonate with Lewis’s story. He says, “getting over it soon, but the words are ambiguous. To say the patient is getting over it after an operation for appendicitis is one thing. After he’s had his leg cut off is quite another.”

0:17:45.0 John: I have probably quoted that hundreds of times to friends, that losing a spouse, we were a couple for 52 years. We met at the beginning of college. We were married for 48 years. So you work all these years on building your partnership, your teamwork, loving each other, laying down your lives for each other, and the Lord blessed us in many ways. Both sinners, it was hard work, but he gave us a beautiful relationship. Well, I can’t think of a better metaphor than amputation to describe what it is like to lose a spouse that you have been with for so long. We processed everything together. We were such partners in life and in family and in ministry, and I miss her in a million ways. And amputation, yeah, I do feel like half of me has been cut off, that half of my brain has gone even, and sometimes I feel like saying that to people, I don’t want to be too vivid and gory, you know but when people ask how I’m doing, am I over the grief yet? Not that I get asked that very often, but sometimes people essentially ask that, and I say, can’t you see? I want to say, can’t you see? I’m an amputee.

0:19:12.5 Jim: Yeah.

0:19:13.1 John: You know, so much of me is missing. And when you think about it, that’s the way it should be, right? If the Lord has given you a deep and strong and intimate marriage where you have grown together, we met when we were very young. We felt like we grew up together. I think in healthy ways we relied on each other. I’m sure there were ways that maybe we relied on each other too much, but I think most of it was part of a healthy marriage. And so yeah. You’re going to be looking at your life and your new reality and saying, “Yes, I am an amputee.” A friend of mine who lost her husband a few years ago, she still says, “It all seems so strange and surreal that he is not here.” And I totally get it. I totally get it. Yeah. There’s a process in grief, but and I’m not as raw as I was two years ago right after she died, but it’s still so fresh. And some people say, has this year been easier than the first year? And I say, well, maybe a little bit. But in most ways, no, because there’s still this… Yeah. There’s still this amputation that is part of the picture. Yeah.

0:20:42.7 Jim: Yeah. When it sneaks up on you, you have to lean into it, and it could happen at any moment. And just because a year has gone by, or two years have gone by, doesn’t necessarily mean a whole lot. There really are no rules for this.

0:21:04.4 John: Right.

0:21:04.5 Jim: Yeah.

0:21:04.4 John: Right, right. Yeah. I’ve never been much of a crier. It would take a lot to bring tears to my eyes, but these last two years have been totally, totally different. And, you know, I can get blindsided. Often worship songs in the middle of a worship service just hit me and I’m a mess and the tears are flowing. And they’re, for the most part, they’re good tears. They’re not tears of despair or anything, but tears of joy rejoicing in the hope of the gospel when I’m reminded in songs that we sing about the power of the resurrection and the hope of eternal life and the grace that the Lord gives us to finish the race. Well. Oh yeah. So many songs have just touched me deeply. In fact, I… often, what I do before I go to bed at night is listen to a couple of worship songs that touch me at a very deep level and that strengthen my faith and remind me of what’s true, and remind me of the gospel hope that I have.

0:22:12.9 Jim: Yeah. I mean, you know me, I love music. Music is… It’s mysterious. That what, you know, the Lord has given us gift.

0:22:20.7 John: Oh. Yeah. Well, I think gospel truth set to music touches us at a deeper level, right? Emotionally. And it has done that so much for me these last few years. So I’m so thankful for it.

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0:22:34.8 Jim: I want to pause this conversation and invite you to join us in prayer for the Serge field workers that we at the headquarters here in Philadelphia are praying for each week. This week is our fall week of prayer, where we spend extra time praying for our organization and all our missionaries, and all the people that they minister to and serve in all the locations all over the world. And I’ve invited my friend Sarah Jones to pray. She’s a member of the Board of Directors here at Serge, and she’s in town for board meetings this week. So would you pray for us? 

0:23:09.6 Sarah Jones: Thank you for joining with me in prayer. Heavenly Father, Lord, we come before you into your throne room of grace, Lord, and with grateful hearts, Lord, that you meet us where we are. You see us, you care for us, Lord, you hear our prayers. Lord, we thank you so much for Serge and for all of our workers here at the home office, as well as around the globe. Lord, we thank you for the relationships that they’re establishing, Lord, to further your Kingdom. And Lord, we pray that you will continue to meet us at the frayed edges of life, Lord, where you do restore and you do renew us Lord, as we continually strive to reach all around us so that they might know Jesus as their Lord and Savior. And Lord, we pray all these things in his precious name. Amen.

0:24:11.8 Jim: Amen. Thank you so much, Sarah. Now back to the conversation. So grief surprises you. When it does, you lean into it. There are things like music that can take you there, take you through there and bring you to the other side. What are some of the other rituals that you’ve discovered in the grieving process? 

0:24:37.2 John: I’ve spent quite a bit of time journaling, especially the first few months when I felt like I was just a tangled mess of thoughts and emotions. I found that journaling helped me like nothing else did. That somehow the process of writing down my thoughts and untangling the mess that was there and turning it all into prayers was really, really helpful. I’ve spent a lot of time the last two years going through photos, 50 years of photos, that bring back so many wonderful memories. And it’s been good to just reflect on all those seasons of life and the blessings on our marriage and in our family and trips we had together, and all the rest.

0:25:28.0 Jim: I could see that going in two different directions. I can see that going into regret and despair, but I can also see it going into joy and thankfulness.

0:25:38.6 John: Yeah.

0:25:38.9 Jim: So how do you balance that? You look at an old picture, and it doesn’t make you go, long for, but rather be thankful for.

0:25:51.5 John: I think the Lord has been good to us in learning how, as we say in our company, how to preach the gospel to ourselves that we’ve been learning for decades. That we learn from Jack and Rose Marie Miller. And so where there might be temptations to dwell on regret or sadness related to those memories, I think I’ve learned over the years how to push that away and remember what the Lord has done for me. Yeah. There are… are there things to regret or are there failures and sins in the past? Were there some really hard times? Of course. But in it all, the Lord has been present. He’s been faithful, He’s been good. And somehow He’s enabled me to reflect on all those memories and read… And look at those pictures with joy and thankfulness. And there is so much to be thankful for. So much to be thankful for. And I’m, yeah, grateful for the ministry of His Spirit to my heart. I’ve also done things that I call memory walks. I’ve gone back to places where there are special memories for us in our marriage place that we always have vacationed in the summer. The college where we first met, I’ve gone back there and walked around campus and been reminded of where our first date was and where we met at the Christian group on campus and things like that. Our first houses in this area before we moved to our current one, just walking through the neighborhoods and remembering what the Lord was doing during those seasons of life. That’s, you know, part of the leaning into grief that the GriefShare people talk about. So those are things that have helped. And oh, I should also mention too, telling stories about her. I love to be with people, my friends and family, or our people on the field, people who knew her and loved her, and telling stories. She was not only a very wise person, but a very funny person. So, you know, we have a lot of her quotes and sound bites that we remind each other of, and just to be with people whose lives were deeply impacted by her. And there are plenty of them, is such an encouragement to me to remember how the Lord worked in her and through her.

0:28:33.9 Jim: Everyone is going to experience this. Everyone who has ever loved, everyone who has ever been in an intimate relationship with a mother, father, child, spouse, friend. I mean, every relationship comes to this, you know? And so it’s… There’s a sacredness to it, you know? It’s just like you’re going into this place, like doing some reconnaissance, and you’re coming back going, hey, here’s what it feels like to experience this kind of loss. And here’s how I hold fast to the faith that was given to me. Here’s how I trust and here’s how I have joy, and here’s how I continue to move in the midst of something so heavy. You know, I don’t know. So, I’ve not experienced the loss of a spouse, you know, so, or the loss of my parents. My parents are both alive. Or in-laws.

0:29:40.1 John: Yeah.

0:29:40.9 Jim: My… A mutual friend of ours, my mentor is… That’s the most significant loss in my life. And I feel his loss every day. And there’s a mystery to that where it’s like the membrane between life and death has become really thin and it’s almost like you have an antenna. You’re in tune with something that the grief has made you in tune with. Does that make sense? 

0:30:15.8 John: Mm-hmm.

0:30:15.9 Jim: I don’t know how to articulate something that you have two years of experience in. So like, how do you articulate whatever it is that I’m trying to articulate? 

0:30:34.5 John: It’s very hard, because obviously as a pastor for many years, I’ve walked with lots of people through seasons of suffering and death, and the loss of loved ones, the loss of a spouse. And I feel that in a lot of ways, the Lord gave me grace to experience empathy and compassion for folks walking through those hard times. But I’ll tell you, looking back on all that now, I understand grief and sorrow at a deeper level than I ever did in all those years of ministry. And is there any way to experience this level of understanding without going through it yourself? Probably not. I mean, I could try to put in words for other people what it’s like, but to experience it yourself is just totally different. I know that I read C.S Lewis many years ago, A Grief Observed. But it didn’t hit me. It didn’t impact my life in the way that it has now since losing my wife. So some things are only fully understood when you experience them yourself. I think we all need to pray, of course, that the Lord will give us grace to empathize with others as they go through things that we don’t fully understand. But we have to realize there’s a limit to that. There’s a limit to how much we can understand it. Again, I’m thankful for what I did learn from my wife through her ministry with the Grief Ministry at our church, because she shared many things that were helpful to me at the time as a pastor, and then prepared me for what this journey is like since her passing. Yeah.

0:32:30.1 Jim: Wow. Let me read this quote from Lewis, because it reminds me of it. He says, “I need Christ, not something that resembles him.” So in the midst of all this grief, there’s a temptation to turn to the Christ look-alikes but not Christ Himself. So how do you… How have you navigated that to where it’s show me Jesus, Jesus, show me yourself? 

0:33:00.9 John: I’ve always been an activist. I’ve always been a hard worker. Probably too much, so, you know, probably with some real workaholic tendencies. So for me, the temptation is always to be too active and to be doing too much in trying to fill up the hole in my life, whatever it is, that way, you know, through action, through… And often through serving others and that sort of thing. So I would say the biggest message I’ve been hearing from the Lord in these two years is the importance of being still, waiting on Him, asking Him for the grace to fill my life and be satisfied in Him. One of the most important songs for me these two years has been, I will wait for you, a Shane and Shane song based on Psalm 130, where the refrain goes, I will wait for you. I will wait for you in your word. I will delight or… Anyway, On your word, I will rely. I will wait for you. I will wait for you till my soul is satisfied. And that phrase has just come back to me again and again, and has become my prayer. Lord, help me to truly, truly wait for you till my soul is satisfied in you. And I know that He’s answered it in a lot of ways, but it’s not a once and done thing. And I know that it needs to be a daily thing of turning to Him. Lord, I want to wait. I want to wait. I want to wait for you. I don’t want to run here and there to try to fill the hole with other things. I want my soul to be satisfied in you. And obviously that’s a prayer he loves to answer, and I’ve seen some wonderful answers to it. But like I said, it’s not… It doesn’t all happen at once. It’s something that needs to happen again and again and again.

0:35:14.0 Jim: It seems like grief is an avenue for that.

0:35:16.6 John: Yes.

0:35:17.5 Jim: Which that reality, I don’t even like saying that out loud. You know, like, Hey, if you want to experience satisfaction in Christ, let the grief, you know, and I’m like, is there any other way? [laughter] So, yeah. What do you do when the grief just feels like it’s getting in the way, instead of actually becoming the path by which you experience satisfaction in Jesus? What do you tell people when they say the grief is just too much. 

0:35:56.0 John: Fortunately, I would say I haven’t experienced much of that where I’ve been stuck or paralyzed by grief. I’m thankful that the Lord has given me grace, like I said, to lean into it. But I will say that having support, having friends that we can confide in and ask for prayer from, you know, that is huge. And of course, the GriefShare ministry is built around that. It’s partly the formation of a support group. But I have some key people in my life that have been close friends for forever, you know, for decades. And those are my go-to people when I’m struggling and when I’m in need. They’re the ones that I’ll go to with my prayer requests and say, here’s where I’m struggling right now. Here’s how I need you to pray for me. Here’s something coming up that I know is going to be hard. Please pray for me, that I’ll see the Lord, that I’ll rest in Him. That I will appropriate His grace in the midst of this hard time. Whether it’s a holiday, of course, everybody talks about holidays and anniversaries as the big things. You know, my wife’s birthday, the first year, our wedding anniversary, the anniversary of her death. Those are all hard days. And again, how does the sadness, how can the sadness be turned into thankfulness and gratitude for all that the Lord gave me through her and through our many years of marriage. That’s where He has met me. But acknowledging that ahead of time is important. And the first Christmas, which was about six months after her death, frankly, I knew that it would be hard because I’d heard that from so many people. It was much, much harder than I expected. And what do you do? Again, you just walk through it and trust the Lord for grace, but yeah.

0:38:09.7 Jim: Yeah. “All those who sow weeping will go out with…”

0:38:11.6 John: Yeah. Amen. Amen.

0:38:16.1 Jim: “Songs of joy!”

0:38:16.2 John: Amen. Yep.

0:38:17.0 Jim: I think it’s remarkable that the Lord has taken you over the last two years through this because He’s called you into Member Care. Like, you’re still doing that. You’re doing it on your own as an amputee.

0:38:35.6 John: Yes.

0:38:39.6 Jim: So how has doing Member Care changed now that you are an amputee? 

0:38:47.9 John: Well, on one level, I say to people I still wish my wife were here part of this conversation because she brought so much to the table, especially since most of the people I work with are couples. And the way she could connect with the wives and the wisdom and the insight and the intuition and the gifts that she had were remarkable. So I say to them I wish you were still here because I feel like you’d be getting more than you’re getting from just me. But we were together for a long time and I’m thankful that I learned so much from her over all those decades of our partnership. And so sometimes very literally in the moment, I will internally ask myself, what would she be saying right now? What would she say? And I try to do that.

0:39:43.7 Jim: And it’s there.

0:39:46.2 John: Yeah.

0:39:46.3 Jim: That’s what’s amazing. What would my wife say in this moment? And it’s like, Oh, I know exactly. Because of the years and years and years of work that you put into… You know, every marriage in so many ways is oil and water. And so it’s all the years of putting oil and water together to where it’s like, and then suddenly becomes fused where it’s this new thing. It’s neither oil nor water. I don’t know some, that’s the mystery of marriage right there. But then for you to lose your spouse in a very real way, longing that she be in the room, longing that she would say whatever creative thing she was about to say. But at the same time, a piece of her never left, it resides in your soul and in this beautiful, mysterious way.

0:40:47.1 John: Yeah. Yeah.

0:40:47.9 Jim: I think that that’s why there’s this talking about the antenna that you, the grief has given you an antenna to where you can see these things. You can empathize in deep ways, but you also have a wisdom that maybe wasn’t there before. And a trust probably that you didn’t have to. I don’t know. It’s very mysterious. I feel like this conversation has been on the threshold of something very mysterious.

0:41:19.2 John: Oh yeah.

0:41:20.3 Jim: Like I said, you’re kind of on the threshold of, the membrane between life and death is very thin. And your antenna is tuned to the things of a different realm because your wife has gone before you. So how has that shaped your thoughts about Heaven, about your destiny, your longing, not just to be with her, but to be with Jesus? Like how does that longing come into conversation with the idea of grief? 

0:42:00.0 John: I would have to say that I’ve been thinking a lot more about having an eternal life since her passing, even though I’ve believed in that part of the gospel and the hope of the resurrection all my life as a believer. But how much have I longed or yearned for it? Or like Paul says in Colossians 3, set your minds and your hearts on the things above where Christ is seated at the right hand and long for it and anticipate what it’s going to be like. And for her last real words to me to be, “I’m going to see Jesus face to face.” just continually ring in my ears and in my heart and say, yes, that’s the reality of what she’s experiencing now. That’s the reality of what I will experience. And come Lord Jesus, I look forward to you making all things new in the resurrection. So yeah, that hope and that longing has grown a lot in me in these last couple of years. I read Joni Eareckson Tada’s book Heaven, which was a huge blessing to me, written by someone, of course, because of her paralysis for all these years, had been longing for it for decades. And it was just really beautiful to hear her express what that longing looks like. So I’ve been very, very thankful for that and thankful that I know that when we leave this life, when we’re in the Lord’s presence, we’ll be more alive than we are now. I mean, that old D.L Moody quote that I know they used at the Tim Keller Memorial Service recently, when Moody said, “One of these days you’re going to read in the newspaper that D.L Moody is dead.” And he said, “Don’t believe it for a minute because at that point I will be more alive than I’ve ever been in this world.” So what a hope we have. Yeah.

0:44:06.4 Jim: Oh, that’s so good. So I’m honored that you would share some of this, that you would kind of take me into this mysterious liminal space that is, I don’t know, like the quote that your wife said, if I saw everything the way God sees it, I would be thankful too. And so we practice being thankful now. So I’m thankful. I’m honored that you would share your story. There are so many people who love you and respect you. So I’m very thankful that I get to hang out with you. So thank you.

0:44:48.3 John: Thank you. It’s a privilege.

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0:44:58.5 Jim: Did you catch it when John said this line, “If I knew what God knows, I would want exactly what I have today.” I filmed this interview many months ago and this line has echoed in my grief stricken heart in the midst of all the sadness and regret and doubt that there rests a hope for God to restore all things and a longing for his appearing. In the midst of your grief. Can you even imagine saying this? If I knew what God knows, I would want exactly what I have today. Look, I know that you have a lot to do today and that you might not have time to sit in the grief, but I pray that you will find some time to be still, to wait on the Lord, to ask him for the grace, to fill your life and be satisfied in him. And if you find yourself overwhelmed with grief, my prayer for you is that you would lean in. And I imagine if I lean in, if I lean in hard enough, I just might find myself leaning on the bosom of Jesus. My prayers are like, catch me Lord, as I grieve and move me into a place of thankfulness and joy. Because if I knew what you know, I would want exactly what I have today. I think the people with this kind of faith have a certain glow about them. I can think of a few people in my life, today’s guest included. And these are the people that know how to weep with those who weep. These are the people that God equips for mission, not because they are capable or talented people who have it all together, but because in the weakness of their sorrow and the desperate dependence on Jesus, they find themselves being used by God. And we in Serge’s Renewal team, we want to equip you for this kind of “ministry through weakness” and help your church in all aspects of life on mission, both in your community and the entire world. We want you to understand the way God has called you to participate in His Kingdom. And we want your church to be a community of goers and senders. My guest today is one of the many folks on our missionary care team whose sole focus is to help set up our missionaries for success, both body and soul. And a huge way for you to be a part of that endeavor is to give directly to Missionary Care. When you give a gift to Missionary Care, you help equip a missionary to navigate difficult situations and you help them stay on the field longer, resulting in long lasting Kingdom impact. Would you give today? I’ll leave a link in the show notes and it’ll help provide the extra care and support a missionary needs so they’re freed up to focus on loving people and sharing the gospel of grace. Now I want to end this episode and this short series on suffering with a hard push toward hope. It’s the, “if I knew what the Lord knows, I would want exactly what I have today” kind of hope. And I see that in the Psalm that has dominated my imagination throughout the last three episodes. It’s Psalm 126, a Psalm of a sense. “When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion, we were like those who dream. Then our mouth was filled with laughter and our tongue with shouts of joy. Then it was said among the nations, the Lord has done great things for them. The Lord has done great things for us and we rejoice, restore our fortunes O Lord, like the water courses in the Negeb. May those who sow in tears reap with shouts of joy. Those who go out weeping, bearing the seed for sowing shall come home with shouts of joy, carrying their sheaves.” So as you go, may the Lord bless you and keep you. May the Lord make his face to smile down on you. May the Lord be gracious to you. Turn his bright eyes to you and give you his peace. In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. One God, life everlasting. Amen.

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