the experience of loss: grief the maps of grief

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Grieving: God’s gift

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Grieving:God’s gift

The experience of loss:GRIEF

The MAPS of

GRIEF

Our faith and loss:Loss can strengthen our faith. It enables us to trust

more in God and His resources rather than ourselves. With every loss, we are reminded of the fact that we are not in control nor are we self-sufficient. Every loss allows us to rest in the grace of God. Loss enables us to change our perspective and allows our hope and anticipation of the life to come to grow (2 Cor. 4:17 ff).

Loss produces maturity. Character qualities such as patience, endurance, humility, long suffering, gratitude and self control can develop through our losses. (Rom 5:3,4)

We live in a world which demands immediate satisfaction. Losses teach us that lesson that it doesn’t always work that way. We cannot have what we want when we want it, no matter what.

When you experience loss, you will discover the extent of the comfort of God.

Norm Wright

Goal of the grieving process:“...is not recovery but putting the person[expectation/dreams, thing(s), etc.] who was lost into such an appropriate place in our memory that our hope for the future is intensified, while life on earth is more deeply felt and experienced.”

Atchison, Grief, p28

The goal of grieving is to acknowledge 4 issues:Must confess what the loss means to me.Must accept the emotions that accompany the

recognition of these profound changesMust face the fact that I have doubts at many

levelsNeed to embrace the mystery of God—

ways are inscrutablecannot be controlledunder no obligation to explain His ways to me.

The messages of grief

Through grief you express your feeling about your loss.

Through grief you express your protest at the loss

Through grief you express the effects you have experienced from the loss.

Steps to follow in recovery:You need to change your relationship with

whatever you lost. You must learn to exist without the person the way you once learned to exist with the person.

Develop your own self and your life to encompass and reflect the changes that occurred because of your loss.

Discover and take on new ways of existing and functioning without whatever it was that you lost.

Discover new directions for the emotional investments that you once had in the lost object, situation, or person.