Disconnected

This morning on my way to the hospital to sit with my dad I was thinking about how disconnected I am from myself and from God, and therefore from others. I can go weeks disconnected—unable to remember the core of who God made me to be. In fact, I have gone years before. In the midst of spending time with family, interacting with friends, ministry, church, school work, and even prayer and worship, I can remain disconnected. I invite distraction and never quiet my soul because I don’t want to face any sorrow there. Yet, I seem to be most connected when I allow myself to grieve and be disappointed with life. Ironically, that is when I feel most alive. I was wondering if there’s something messed up about that—I’m most alive when I’m grieving? But then I started reading the book by Michael Card today called A Sacred Sorrow: Reaching out to God in the Lost Language of Lament, and it made sense. In the foreword, Ken Cope addresses what I’ve been thinking about.

“We are taught that grieving is feeling sorry for yourself, and that real strength is to not show any emotion at all. Because we do not know how to be sad, we want to get to the end-stage of grief; we want the benefits and the results of healing, but we do not want to take the time to move through the often long and painful process of grief. For too long we have been taught that shedding tears is a sign of weakness and that you must not wallow in your sorrow. And the mandate of Psalm 46:10, “be still, and know that I am God,” is lost.

“As a result of this approach to grief, we have a whole generation of people with unresolved issues, hurts, and pains in their past that have been shallowly dealt with at best, and at worst have been ignored and discounted completely. The result has been an increasingly shallow Christianity and a profound lack of understanding of the nature of God and how, as His people, we are to move and live in a fallen world. We do not know ourselves. And while we know a lot about God, we do not truly know Him. We have been unwilling to sit in our sadness and pain, and we have missed much of the intimacy that He longs to offer us.

“… We live in a fallen world, full of disappointment and loss, and we often feel empty and unfulfilled and incredibly alone. But while God is not there to fix our problems and make our pain go away, He is always walking beside us. In the ongoing journey of life, we are given the opportunity to know Him and ourselves through the process of lamenting and grieving. … If we really want to encounter God and grow in our relationship with Him, then our attitude toward grief must change from viewing it as an uncomfortable and unwanted drop-in visitor to seeing it as an integral part of our daily journey with God.”


I remember writing about The Journey of Desire, the book that introduced me to the daily spiritual discipline of grieving. Because we are far from home, we grieve this world, this life. It is not how it was meant to be, and it never will be, though we can get glimpses of home. I’ve been walking through life wondering when everything will finally be the way I want it to be—when I get to enjoy life and take it easy—so I live dissatisfied. But I remember being most satisfied when I was grieving. I need to continue to grieve my disappointment with life, even my disappointment with myself, to recognize that in my grief I am most connected to God, most connected to my true self, most alive, and most satisfied.