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Christlife Posture: Submitting to God's Love and Leading

Topic: Trusting God with Relational Loss

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Suggested Approach: Choose 1 thing from each of the three boxes

OR Choose 1 from Media or Reflection + 1 from Scripture 

Media Excursions         (Watch/read/listen and be ready to discuss Q's)

Painting

  • Deposition (Rogier van der WEYDEN)  In this painting of the scene around the death of Jesus, the artist depicts a different grieving responses.  In which person in this painting do you see your own grieving tendencies?  What emotions are present here?

Video Clip

  • The Mourning Booth (Skit Guys) What did you learn is unhelpful in listening to others who are mourning a loss?  What is helpful? Have you experienced the ministry of presence in your own times of pain?

  • Testimony: Ethan Hallmark (I Am Second) Sometime our grief is not over a death or a breakup, but grieving because of a loss someone else is facing.  Identify who is grieving in this short video. What kinds of “secondary” grieving have you experienced? How did God meet you in it?

  • Testimony: Chris Coghlan (I Am Second) We all have ways of coping with grief and loss. What were Chris’s coping strategies? What are yours? Which one’s were functional/healthy and which one’s weren’t?  

Song

  •  Be Still (The Fray) If you are mourning a relational loss, let this song wash over you.  What words help you the most?

Articles  Read both and compare:

Online Teaching

Reflection Options  

Journal

  • What do you resist about the process of grieving relational losses? What helps you embrace grieving?

  • What are the most meaningful ways for you to grieve? If you don’t know how to grieve, ask 5 different people how they grieve best and then write about one you want to try.

  • Does grieving feel like something you need to do alone? Or with others? How do you experience God in the midst of facing loss?  

Quote Interaction 

  • Only people who are capable of loving strongly can also suffer great sorrow, but this same necessity of loving serves to counteract their grief and heals them.  (Leo Tolstoy)

  • No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.  (C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed)

  • To weep is to make less the depth of grief.  (William Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part II, Act II)

  • Guilt is perhaps the most painful companion to death.  (Elisabeth Kubler-Ross)

Exercises from the book, Shaping The Journey of Emerging Adults:

  • Read the story of Jackson and Clay (pp. 234-235).  Take a moment and consider how things like expectations, idealization, sin, imperfection and conflict may complicate our feelings of loss.  

  • Grieving can take so many forms.  Sometimes we grieve a life stage (pp. 123-124).  Another area of grieving may be grieving over old wounds--see Roberto’s story (pp. 152-4). Think of how you have or need to walk through those steps yourself.  Share and then ask the other if they need to grieve expectations or unmet goals.  

Explore Scripture

Meditate on one or more of the following passages. Always look them up in context.  Take some time to really explore the verse in relation to this topic.  What do these verses help you understand about grief or the grieving process? Identify areas of hope in the midst of loss. Make a note of what you discover to share later.  See "Learn More About Ways to Study Scripture" below for help in getting the most out of the verse.

  • Genesis 23:2

  • 2 Samuel 12:16-17

  • Job 2:13

  • Psalms 16, 23, 34, 91

  • Matthew 5:4

  • John 14:1-27

  • 1 Corinthians 15:54-55

  • 2 Corinthians 1:3-5

  • 2 Corinthians 5:1-9

  • Philippians 4:6-13

  • 1 Thessalonians 4:13-18

  • Revelation 21:1-22:5

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