February 12, 2018 | General Posts

writing a grief journal~Day 6

When you consider the losses of a lifetime, even a session or two is not enough time to really grieve all that you’ve lost. So let’s dwell on this subject a little longer.

Grieving is hard work; people need to be shown how to grieve, or maybe how to give themselves permission to grieve. And maybe we need to be shown how to be patient as the grief process does its healing work.

A lot of people are stuck coming to grips with their brokenness. And a lot of folks have never exited those broken places by grieving them.

What does this look like? For me, I had to fall into my own brokenness. I had to grieve the loss of the daughter I knew and raised, and get to know this new person who was a stranger to me. I had to face the pain, grieve it and learn to walk through it. Its a process and I am still learning. But going through the grieving process is necessary.

All that we lose

We lose so much in this modern world. We lose our sense of safety first of all, and with it, our identity. We find ourselves wearing the mask of a false self and along the way, we lose the truth. We can’t believe that we are precious and we are loved.

So many people these days grow up in broken families where they feel alone. Life on Facebook is a thin gruel for a hungry soul. And we’re left with that gnawing sense that we’ve missed out on something fundamental.

A home should echo with the glad memories and happy times of family life. The hearts of those who slept in its beds should be filled with laughter.

It’s a sad thing as a child to navigate the wasteland of broken relationships. And it’s tragic when you are an adult who wants to make your marriage and your family different, but you find yourself losing that dream.

Yes, we lose so much. Yet we are loved by a Lord whose name is Wonderful Counselor. He knows our dark pain; he wants to redeem our broken places. And he does so, not through forgetting, but remembering – exchanging truths for lies.

A grief journal is a great tool for this. What you lost was priceless. It can’t be replaced, but it can be treasured. So you go back and remember. Putting pen to paper, you name that thing that you loved – that relationship, that part of you that died, that safe place. And you call it for what it was. It was valuable; precious even. And you invite Jesus, the Counselor, to make that place of desecration holy again.

It’s been over three decades since the teenagers in The Breakfast Club grieved their broken lives. None of them felt OK inside, and living with that secret was the worst thing about it. The path to healing started when they named their pain.

That’s the beauty of a grief journal – it brings remembrance and honesty to those places where you lost pieces of yourself.

A grief journal restores you to yourself.

Application

How to Write a Grief Journal

1. Get a journal and schedule a block of time.

2. Go back through these seasons of your life: childhood, adolescence, college age, adulthood. For each season, ask the following questions and journal out your answers:

What great pains did I suffer?
What did I feel?
What did I lose?
What have been the consequences?

Spend enough time that you have thoroughly dealt with the pains you felt and feel. Don’t skip over anything.

3. Next, ask God:

Where were you in each of those seasons? Try to picture yourself in that time and place and say to God, “I felt alone and abandoned there, where were you?” And wait for him to respond. Journal out what he says.

4. Ask God, “What do I have to do to move on from that place?” Journal it.

If you do this well, you might fill 20 pages or more of your journal. The time you spend remembering and grieving is a way of honoring the dead – the dead parts of you that needed more. A grief journal brings your life back into spiritual alignment.

5. After you’ve done this, look at what God has been saying to you. Has he given you any actions to take to be able to move on? When you’re finished journaling, follow through and do what he says. He loves you – every single forgotten and shameful part of you.

He wants you to laugh again.

writing a grief journal~Day 6

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