God Is In the Grief of Dreams That Do Not Come True

"I'm so sorry for your loss."

We say this to the grieving and hope it will help, and as someone who has been in this club no one wants to join (a club most of us are in anyway), I can tell you it does. There is some comfort in knowing that what causes us sorrow causes someone else sorrow, too. There is some soothing in knowing we are not alone in feeling life is less than it used to be because of who or what is no longer in it.

But sometimes we grieve for something or someone we never had in the first place. We grieve the absence of someone who was never present. We face the fact that the Author has said "no"—not "wait," not "not yet," but "no"—and mourn the death of hope that it or they ever will be part of our story.

Someone asked me recently if I knew of any examples of barren women in the Bible to whom God never did give a child in any way, at any time. This lovely woman longs for one faithful example to claim, one ancient kindred spirit to comfort her. I could not give her one. She is mourning—in an ongoing way—that her dream of motherhood has not come true.

Other friends dream other dreams that also have not come true and look very much like they never will.

Dreams of second children.
Dreams of marriage.
Dreams of loving parents.
Dreams of healing.
Dreams of deliverance from the demon of depression.
Dreams of homes.
Dreams of callings.
Dreams of friendship.
Dreams of reconciliation.

These are things God has called good, things He has blessed for someone else. It seems as though God would want to make these dreams come true for everyone.

But sometimes He does not.

We don't like to say this, but the fact is that there are good things God does not say "wait" but flat-out "no" to.

These are not dreams deferred. These are not dreams detoured because someone else is exercising the free will God allows each of us to have. These are not dreams-come-true disguised as something that just looks a little different from what we asked for.

These are dreams that, as far as our life on this earth is concerned, have reached a dead end.

These are longings and cries and yearnings of our heart that we know God could fulfill and grant because He can do anything but that He does not fulfill and grant because He does not do everything He can do.

Often, God's not-doing looks like mercy, and we are so grateful for it.

But when He does not give us or do for us things we long for that seem to us to be pure and good and generally favored by Him, there is grief. There is mourning. There is a keening for something lost that was never gained to begin with.

This grief must be given its due. It must be allowed to count. The giving up of what we yearn for cannot be brushed off as some lesser loss just because we never held it in our hands in the first place.

God prescribed "a time to mourn" (Ecclesiastes 3:4); He did not limit what could be mourned in that time.

Overlapping and mixing with our mourning, though, is our grappling with new, raw understanding of who God is and what He's like and what we're supposed to do with those facts.

We agree this world is not our home and that we are not supposed to feel completely content here.

We declare that God is good even when His will does not look or feel good to us.

We acknowledge that our relationship with God is in some ways—some—like our relationship with anyone else we get close enough to to really know: there are things about them we do not like and things we do not understand, even though we love them and trust them.

The longing may continue, both unmet and unabated. It does not fade, but neither is it fulfilled. We know we must do something with it lest it become our idol. We know we must allow God to redeem it.

So our dream becomes our sacrifice. It becomes our choosing place where what we choose is this good God. It becomes one means of dying to ourselves and living for Him.

And in the dying, new dreams are born. They are dreams of comforting others in ways we otherwise could not. Dreams of going places we otherwise could not. Dreams of singing songs we otherwise could not.

These are different dreams. They do not replace the former dreams anymore than to love someone new means we have replaced someone we have lost. The spaces for those old dreams are still there. But next to them are new dreams.

We offer these to God, too. We tell Him we know He can make them come true. We tell Him we believe He is good even if He doesn't. 

And we trust that after nights of mourning, He will awaken us to mornings of dancing.

"I remain confident of this: I will see the goodness of the LORD in the land of the living." (Psalm 27:13)

How to Help Your Hurting Child (When Everything Isn't Going To Be Okay)

My younger daughter looked like she'd just lost her best friend. Probably because in a way, she had. Actually, she'd lost her two best friends.

Her BFF from school and her BFF from church were still very much alive, and both still wanted to be my daughter's friend. Thank goodness on both counts.

But her school friend was leaving to go to a different school, and her church friend was leaving to go to a different church. Both still lived nearby, but my daughter wouldn't see them every day or every week. "Can you believe what so-and-so did?" was going to have to give way to "you'll never believe what so-and-so did!" The minutiae of middle school and the chatter of church would have to be merged via text and chat and FaceTime.

I'd been all the way around on the tween Ferris wheel once already with my teenage daughter, so I knew this much: how a girl feels about her closest friendships is how she feels about life in general.

I'll never forget the look on my daughter's face when she walked in the house the day she learned about her school friend's departure. I wish I could. But then I'm glad I can't, because what kind of mom wants the ease of forgetting her child's pain while that child is still in that pain?

I held her while she cried, and she told me, "Please don't tell me everything will be okay, because it won't."

And she was right. We would get through it. The pain would lessen. But nothing was going to make the practical loss of two friends "okay." 

I had to find my way along then, figuring out what would help my sweet girl through that season of change. Here's what I told myself alot during those hard days...

Let her feel what she feels. 
Our modern society favors a short list of emotions: happy, cheerful, optimistic, and fine. People who are sad or discouraged or upset are encouraged to get over it...now. On top of this, as moms, we yearn to heal what is sick, mend what is broken, and right what is wrong. When our children are hurting, we want to ease their pain immediately if not sooner. But I knew I had to let my child walk through, not around, what Ecclesiastes 3:4 calls "a time to weep and a time to laugh."

I told her we would be patient while she processed the new reality she was facing without her friends as she had enjoyed them in the past. And she herself warned us not to brush off her sadness by telling her she had other friends. She helped us see that friendship is not like a scale: as long as the balance of friends stays the same, all is well. Instead, her close female relationships form a puzzle: incomplete when one piece is taken out. 

In addition to striking "everything will be okay" from our stock-phrase vocabulary, we also learned not to say "cheer up!" or "what's wrong?" When in doubt, we did what everyone knows you're supposed to do to comfort someone who has lost someone they love: hug them and say "I'm sorry."

At the right time, direct her mind sometimes away from The Thing toward Something Else. 
I didn't want to rush my daughter past the reality of what she was losing. If I did, I would be dishonoring her feelings and the friends she was saying a kind of goodbye to. She needed to mentally process the situation. But there comes a point when continually stirring The Thing That's Bothering You around and around in your head serves no purpose and accomplishes no good. 

I gave my girl an assignment: come up with Something Else to redirect her brain when it had spent enough time on The Thing. Something Else could be a Bible verse, a prayer, a list of what she was looking forward to, the lyrics to a favorite song, or a review of the available flavors at our favorite ice cream shop. Whatever--as long as it gave her mind somewhere safe and comforting to land.

Check in...but allow her some space. 
A couple days into our journey, I told my daughter I thought we needed a plan and a code. I could not spend the next several days or weeks or (heaven forbid) months constantly asking her, "Are you okay? What's the matter?" I knew she wasn't okay, and I knew what was the matter. But neither did I want to ignore her if she needed to talk again or if something else had come up (heaven forbid). 

We settled on two guideposts: 1)if something else was wrong or if she wanted to talk further about The Thing we already knew was wrong, my daughter would tell me so I wouldn't have to guess what the look on her face meant; and 2)if I wanted to confirm that the look on her face was because of what I already knew was wrong, I could mouth or whisper "friend thing?" just to confirm and acknowledge.  

Give her good medicine. 
The day my tween officially found out about her school friend's departure, she was scheduled to help out at a class function. I took her to it, hoping the activity would distract her from thinking, but she was bored and had plenty of time to think. On the way home, her face was heavy with sorrow, and I was scrambling through all my mom tricks to figure out what I could do to help her. 

A few minutes after we walked in the door, my older daughter called to her from our family room. "Come out here! I have to show you something!" My heavy-hearted girl went to her sister (grudgingly), and within a couple minutes, I heard both of them howling with laughter. My firstborn had dug up an old camera she hadn't used since her pre-iPod days and hooked it up to her laptop to play a slide show. While the girls watched old "modeling" videos they'd made and clicked through pictures of their elementary-aged selves, they laughed...and laughed...and laughed. From the other room, I could hardly reconcile the sound of my tween's delight with the despairing look I'd seen on her face minutes before. 

At the computer, listening, I typed a Facebook post thanking my older daughter for her big-sister gift. She said to me later, "Did you hear how I had her laughing? I knew those pictures would do it." I told her, "I just posted about it." I loved how her idea beautifully proved the wisdom of Proverbs 17:22 ~ "A cheerful heart is good medicine." 

Focus her vision on the future. 
Soon after The Day, the mom of my tween's school friend emailed me asking if we could schedule some time for our girls to spend together. She said she wanted to give her daughter "something to look forward to in the near future." Smart mama. We made the date, and I promised there'd be more to come. Weekly dinners or donuts before school. Sleepovers. And in the category "Things I Never Thought I'd Say": God bless texting, tweeting, and messaging for their power to keep our girls emotionally connected even when they're physically disconnected.

Go the distance. 
When our children are hurting, the crisis often passes quickly. (Thank God.) More times than I can count, my girls have come home distraught over some issue with a friend, but a few texts and a few hours later, they're over it. This, though, is not that time. This is a marathon, not a sprint. I had to keep reminding myself that, while I was getting used to the idea of my daughter's new arrangements with her friends, she was still not used to the reality of it. There was no quick fix. There was only patience and grace and time, and I had to commit to the long haul.

For the most part, I learned to clamp my mouth shut on "everything will be okay." Instead, I told my sweet girl a couple things that are probably more true:

• It will get better. (But you might not realize it until a little ways down the road). 
• Things may not be the same. But they can still be good.

If you've got a child who's hurting, my heart goes out to both of you. Maybe what has helped in our house will help in yours. And if you've got an idea I should add to my list, pass it on in a comment or share it on Facebook. Thanks in advance for sending your wisdom my way!

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The Dance of Redemption

When she was 6, our Anna fell in love with dance. She took a ballet/tap combination class every Tuesday...we called it “Tutu Tuesday." I knew how much Anna loved it when she was sick one weekend and told me, “I have to get better by Tuesday so I can go to dance.”

Four months after Anna first put on her ballet slippers, her grandfather died. There was no warning, no time to even try to try to get ready. “Papa Lonn” was young, healthy, and vibrant. His death was an utter shock. In one terrible moment, my husband lost his dad, best friend, business mentor, confidante, wood-cutting partner, fellow college sports enthusiast, and earthly model of Abba—God as “daddy.”

Our family was completely unprepared for the season of grief we were thrown into. Blindly, we started into the year of firsts without Lonn.

Anna’s dance recital, it turned out, would take place on Father’s Day Eve: the night before my husband’s first Father’s Day without his dad. I began to dread a weekend we would simply get through, would merely survive.

But then: I started asking God to redeem the day. I asked Him to make something of it beyond what it would be without His intervention. I asked Him to make it more than just a day we would grit our way through.

Redemption carries with it the idea of something being held captive, of a price being paid for the release of someone imprisoned. The prisoner is powerless to secure his own freedom, and his redeemer rescues him by covering the cost.

I asked God to release my husband’s Father’s Day—and Anna’s recital day—from sorrow, loss, grief, and dread. I asked Jehovah to pay the price and free the day to be glorious.

On Father’s Day Eve, my husband, his mom, my parents, Anna’s big sister, and I took over a row in the auditorium. We did not know to expect the worship experience we saw and took part in that night. It was a tapestry of music and movement. We watched Anna’s class come on stage. In their electric-blue tutus, they had the audience before they'd even started dancing.

We beamed proudly as Anna steadily performed each movement. At the end of the night, she was awarded a scholarship we had no idea was coming, and we all gasped in surprised delight. It was glorious.

The day after the recital, we celebrated Father’s Day without Lonn. I knew God had said yes to my prayer: He had redeemed the day. He had bought it back from mourning and had purchased it for dancing. Abba had given a gift to my husband, who had lost his earthly daddy but still found joy in the careful steps of a little girl in a blue tutu.

"And they sang a new song: ‘You are worthy to take the scroll and to open its seals, because you were slain and with your blood you purchased men for God' "(Revelation 5:9).

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Do you have something you need God to redeem? If you do, there is a Redeemer for it—the LORD of hosts, the Almighty! Ask Him to buy whatever it is back from whatever is holding it captive and make it more than it can be without Him.  

And when He does, I hope you feel 
like dancing.