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Top 10 TRUTHS about Child-Loss Grief
TRUTH #7b) Child-Loss Grief is pervasive throughout...our Soul.
#7) Child-Loss Grief is pervasive and invasive throughout your system. It is multi-dimensional, affecting your body, soul, mind, heart, and spirit. Your old beliefs about God, and about how the world works will be challenged.
Child-Loss Grief is pervasive, affecting your body, soul, mind, heart, and spirit.
On this Thursday's Therapy, we examine how Child-Loss Grief often affects our souls:
"Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed.... Never shall I forget those flames which consumed my faith forever. Never shall I forget that nocturnal silence which depressed me, for all eternity of the desire to live. Never shall I forget those moments which murdered my God and my soul and turned my dream to dust. Never shall I forget these things, even if I am condemned to live as long as God Himself. Never."
~Elie Wiesel, when as a small boy, he encountered unmasked evil in the Holocaust, from his book, Night
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"Things must go, not according to your understanding but above your understanding. Submerge yourself in a lack of understanding, and I will give you My understanding. Lack of understanding is a real understanding; not knowing where you are going is really knowing where you are going. My understanding makes you without understanding. Thus Abraham went out from his homeland and did not know where he was going (Genesis 12:1). He yielded to My knowledge and abandoned his own knowledge; and by the right way he reached the right goal. Behold, that is the way of the cross. You cannot find it, but I must lead you like a blind man. Therefore not you, not a man, not a creature, but I through My Spirit and the Word, will teach you the way you must go. You must not follow the work which you choose, not the suffering which you devise, but that which comes to you against your choice, thoughts, and desires. There, I call; there you must be a pupil; there it is the time, there your Master has come."
~Dietrich Bonhoeffer's readings from "The Seven Penetential Psalms," before he was martyred in World War II.
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In our soul's when we lose our child, we begin to experience "Shattered Assumptions" of what we once held true. It forces us to re-examine everything we once had assumed, understood, or believed about God with the goal of holding onto the Truth, and throwing out the False, the heretical falsehoods that may have crept into our otherwise legitimate beliefs about God over the years.
For me it is important that I ever remember God is God, and I am NOT God so that I take my questions before Him honestly, tearfully, and beseechingly, but respectfully, recognizing there is much I will not understand this side of Heaven.
(As Scripture reminds us in I Corinthians 13: "We see through a glass darkly now, but then we shall see face to face. We will be known as we are fully known.")
Also I try to keep in mind, God views us and the current world in which we live from an infinite perspective, while we see from a limited, finite one.
~Angie
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Your assumptive world is violently shattered.
{What you assumed to be true of the way things worked in the world (your assumptive world), the way things worked with God, the way things worked in many ways in this lifetime, are shattered when you lose a child. Assumptive beliefs have to be re-examined and sorted out all over again right when you need a solid foundation of beliefs to help you cope with the sudden loss of your child.}
~from a Thursday's Therapy blog post 7/22/10
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I ran fartherest away from formulaic answers of religion.
Regarding spirituality, grief changed everything for me.
I wanted to run to God but felt like I was afraid to...
~Tommy Prince
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Some of the Symptoms we may feel in our souls:
- Helplessness, powerlessness, feeling out-of-control
- Loneliness, abandonment
- Ambivalence
- Disorganization, depression, and despair
~from a Thursday's Therapy blog post 7/29/11, quoting Dr. Therese A. Rando
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Other Symptoms we may feel in our Souls:
- Shattered assumptive world; cognitive dissonance, changes in the way you think about yourself, the world, others, life, spiritual beliefs
- Meaninglessness, senselessness, disillusionment, aimlessness
~from a Thursday's Therapy blog post 8/12/10, quoting Dr. Therese A. Rando
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Spiritual…assumptive beliefs are challenged…
- The question “Why” reverberates
- Where was God?
- If God is all powerful, why allow this?
- If God loves me, how could this be?
- Prayers weren’t answered…
~Therese A. Rando, Ph.D., from her Complicated Mourning presentation
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"We follow a scarred Captain,
Should we not have scars?
Under His faultless orders
We follow to the wars.
Lest we forget, Lord, when we meet,
Show us Thy hands and feet."
~Amy Carmichael
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We groan inwardly as we wait eagerly.
~Romans 8:23
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"If God is truly sovereign -- if He rules over all things -- then nothing that ever happens is senseless. The cross is not a senseless tragedy, but the most important redemptive act in history."
~R. C. Sproul
~Dietrich Bonhoeffer's readings from "The Seven Penetential Psalms," before he was martyred in World War II. Bonhoeffer took this quote from Witte's Nun freut euch lieben Christen gemein, 243-244. Bonhoeffer's copy is marked at this place. Witte in turn quoted from Luther's 2nd edition of "The Seven Penetential Psalms," 1525 (LW:14:152 [WA 18:484, 15-27]).
~the above two entries, the Amy Carmichael poem, and R. C. Sproul quote all from Nancy Guthrie's book, Be Still My Soul
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