Monday's Mourning Ministry - I Believe, Help Thou My Unbelief! / Beyond the Veil

Lord, I believe.

Help Thou my unbelief!

I can't see through these tears

Beyond the Veil to Thee....

Beyond the Veil

Monday's Mourning Ministry

I Believe. Help Thou My Unbelief! / Beyond the Veil

It seems Bill Gaither is one of those saints who has walked alongside me through many years of my life... As a teenager, I remember teaching the seven-year-olds of our church (including my oldest nephew, Curt) in their Training Union Class on Sunday nights (like an evening Sunday School in the Baptist church) Gaither's wonderful song of,

I am a Promise; I am a Possibility!

I am a Promise with a capital P;

I am a great big bundle of Potentiality!

And I am learnin' to hear God's voice,

And I am tryin' to make the right choice:

I am a promise to be anything God wants me to be!

(See the full lyrics below.)

Later, as a young adult, when I had my own children, I taught them this wonderful song so that they too would each know,

"I am a Promise!"

And now, as a middle-aged adult, I am singing along with Gaither to his song,

"I believe; help Thou my unbelief..."

as I walk through this devastating, tormenting loss and grief over my baby girl while I still experience her death from this side of the Veil...

And so today, I bring you Gaither's poignant song, "I believe. Help Thou my unbelief!" and then I add a verse of my own just below his lyrics that can be sung along to the same tune...

Lord, I believe.

Help Thou my unbelief!

I can't see through these tears

Beyond the Veil to Thee....

I Believe, Help Thou My Unbelief!

written by Bill and Gloria Gaither

sung by Bill Gaither, Marshall Hall, & Guy Penrod

2008

from Gaither Vocal Band Reunion Volume 2

Lyrics

I believe.

Help Thou my unbelief—

I take the finite risk

Of trusting like a child...

I believe

Help Thou my unbelief—

I walk into the Unknown

Trusting all the while...

I long so much

to feel the warmth

Others seem to know;

Should I never feel a thing,

I claim Him even so...

I believe.

Help Thou my unbelief—

I walk into the Unknown

Trusting all the while...

I walk into the Unknown

Trusting...

I long so much

to feel the warmth

Others seem to know

But should I never feel a thing

I claim Him even so

I believe

Help Thou my unbelief

I walk into the Unknown

Trusting all the while...

******

{My added lyrics}

Beyond the Veil

Lord, I believe.

Help Thou my unbelief!

I can't see through these tears

Beyond the Veil to Thee....

Lord, I believe.

Help Thou my unbelief!

My baby girl's with Thee—

Someday... You'll come for me!

I long so much

To feel Your touch

As You walk through Grief with me.

But even when my days grow dark,

I know You're...still with me!

Lord, I believe.

Help Thou my unbelief!

My baby girl's with Thee—

Someday... You'll come for me!

My baby girl's with Thee—

Someday...

******

And straightway the father of the child cried out, and said with tears, Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief.

~Mark 9:24 KJV

******

Lyrics for

I Am A Promise

I am a promise
I am a possibility
I am a promise with a capital “P”
I am a great big bundle of potentiality
And I am learnin’ to hear God’s voice
And I am tryin’ to make the right choice
I am a promise to be anything God wants me to be.

I can go anywhere that He wants me to go
I can be anything He wants me to be
I can climb the high mountains
I can cross the wide sea
I’m a great big promise you see!

I am a promise
I am a possibility
I am a promise with a capital “P”
I am a great big bundle of potentiality
And I am learnin’ to hear God’s voice
And I am tryin’ to make the right choice
I’m a promise to be anything God wants me to be
Anything God wants me to be!

******

I am a Promise...

Therefore, the promise comes by faith, so that it may be by grace and may be guaranteed to all Abraham's offspring—not only to those who are of the faith of Abraham. He is the father of us all. As it is written, "I have made you a father of many nations." He is our father in the sight of God, in whom he believed—not only to those who are of the faith of Abraham. He is the father of us all. As it is written, "I have made you a father of many nations." He is our father in the sight of God, in whom he believed—

the God who gives life to the dead and calls things that are not as though they were.

Against all hope, Abraham in hope believed and so became the father of many nations just as it had been said to him, "So shall your offspring be." Without weakening in his faith, he faced the fact that his body was as good as dead—since he was about a hundred years old—and that Sarah's womb was also dead.

Yet he did not waver through unbelief regarding the promise of God, but was strengthened in his faith and gave glory to God, being fully persuaded that God had power to do what He had promised.

This is why "it was credited to him as righteousness."

~Romans 4:16-22 NIV

Picture: the white sheet by Lisa KC:

http://digital-photography-school.com/21-beautiful-portrait-photos-on-imagekind

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sa4VJUsEL_o

Poem - Beyond the Veil - Angie Bennett Prince - 1/25/10

Friday's Faith - Where Was God...?

Friday's Faith

Where Was God...?

After we experience the death of a child, many of us have a crisis of faith of some sort or other. For me my very foundation was turned inside out. I never doubted God was with me and that God loved Merry Katherine, and I was incredibly grateful that He had rescued her off of that hard ground amidst Satan's evil work, and taken her to be with Him safely in Heaven. But many of my assumptive beliefs about God were challenged, turned upside down, and stripped bare. This reassembling of my very foundation has taken a lot of work, much angst and soul-searching before God.

Lewis Smedes, also a strong Christian when his son died, had a crisis of faith, asking,

"Where was God?"

and

"What was God doing when this evil happened in front of our eyes?"

Below is Smedes heart-breaking story:

A Father Grieves The Loss of a Child

by Lewis B. Smedes

Lewis B. Smedes, who died in 2002 after a fall at his home, was professor emeritus of theology and ethics at Fuller Theological Seminary. This article is excerpted from his book, My God and I: A Memoir, © 2003 Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. Used by permission.

This article appeared in The Christian Century, May 3, 2003, pp. 38-39. Copyright by The Christian Century Foundation; used by permission. Current articles and subscription information can be found at www.christiancentury.org. This material was prepared for Religion Online by Ted and Winnie Brock.

About four years into my teaching profession, Doris gave birth to a beautiful baby boy who died before he had lived the whole of a day. God’s face has never looked the same to me since. Because of my Calvinism, God’s face had had the unmovable serenity of an absolute sovereign absolutely in control of absolutely everything. Every good thing, every bad thing, every triumph, every tragedy, from the fall of every sparrow to the ascent of every rocket, everything was under God’s silent, strange and secretive control. But I could not believe that God was in control of our child’s dying.

It was not as if I had found a forgotten Bible verse or saw a familiar one in a new light. It was more like something that happened to me when I was 15, hitchhiking through Georgia, waiting at the docks for a ride with a trucker. I heard a young white man curse an aging black man who had gotten in his way, cussed him out with God-rattling oaths; and what is more, he did it in front of the old man’s friends. I had never known a black person. I had never before seen racism in action. But when I heard its words and saw its face on that early morning in Atlanta, I knew for sure that racism was a terrible thing.

That’s how I knew for sure that God did not micromanage our baby’s death. I had been intellectually excited by John Calvin’s tough-minded belief that all things -- and he really meant all of them, including the ghastly and the horrible -- happen when and how and where they happen precisely as God decreed them to happen. A "horrific decree," Calvin conceded, but if it works out to God’s glory, who are we to complain? On the day that our baby boy died, I knew that I could never again believe that God had arranged for our tiny child to die before he had hardly begun to live, any more than I could believe that we would, one fine day when he would make it all plain, praise God that it had happened.

I learned that I do not have the right stuff for such hardboiled theology. I am no more able to believe that God micromanages the death of little children than I am able to believe that God was macromanaging Hitler’s Holocaust.

With one morning’s wrenching intuition, I knew that my portrait of God would have to be repainted.

I was well aware that every day other people are suffering tragedies infinitely worse than Doris’s and mine. And I remembered that I had consoled people whose loss was much greater than ours with the comforting assurance that God knew best. But grief can be a self-centered thing; I had no tears for the wretched and the poor of the earth that day. I had tears only for Doris and myself.

We had spent a decade making love according to a schedule set by four different fertility clinics in three different countries. And finally, after one summer night’s lark on the sand dunes of Lake Michigan with no thought but love, Doris became a medically certified pregnant woman.

Six months along and doing fine, we thought -- with God answering our prayers it could be no other way but fine -- she suddenly one night began losing amniotic fluid. I called her doctor. ‘She’s going into labor," he said. "Get her to the hospital as fast as you can." And then he said he was sorry, but our baby was going to be badly malformed.

"How badly?"

"Very."

We fumbled silent and bewildered into the car. I told her. We cried. And we promised God and each other that we would love the child no matter how damaged she or he was. After Doris had been tucked in, I went to the waiting room to worry for a few hours. Suddenly, Doris’s doctor broke in and exulted: "Congratulations, Lew, you are the father of a perfect man-child." I told Doris the news. She was skeptical, but I went home and danced like a delirious David before the Lord.

Next day, just before noon, our pediatrician called: I had better come right down to the hospital. When I met him he told me that our miracle child was dead. Two mornings later, with a couple of friends at my side and our minister reading the ceremony, we buried him "in the sure and certain hope of the resurrection." Doris never got to see her child.

A pious neighbor comforted me by reminding me that "God was in control." I wanted to say to her, "Not this time." It seems to me that the privilege of being the delicate organisms we are in the kind of world we live in comes at a price. The price is that things can go wrong, badly wrong sometimes, which should come as no surprise.

The blossoming of every flecklike zygote into a humanoid embryo and an embryo into the astounding creature we call a baby is beset with so many threats along the way that any baby who gets delivered into the world as the pride and joy of its mother is nature’s most marvelous success story. Every healthy newborn child is a biological miracle; if we did not know that it actually happens every day, we would say that the very notion was a wild man’s fantasy.

Doris and I cried a lot, and we knew in our tears that God was with us, paying attention to us, shedding ten thousand tears for every one of ours. Neither of us had a moment’s inclination to give up on God, to quit believing in God or to quit trusting God. In fact, God never seemed more real to either of us. Never closer. Never more important. I could stop believing that God had micron-managed our tiny boy’s dying. But I could not stop trusting that God was still with us.

Four decades later, on the morning of September 11, Doris and I, with people all over the country, were stunned into silence by the sight of two airliners crashing into the two towers of the World Trade Center in New York City. A gargantuan evil -- not a breakdown in physical nature this time, but an evil conceived and willed by human beings. Pure evil does not happen often. Most of the time, evil wears the mask of decency. But this time it wore no mask, and when we saw if, we spelled it with a capital E.

It is true that the purity of another’s evil does not make our own ways good. But this time, no matter how hard I tried to find one, I could locate no stain in our national behavior dark enough to temper the purity of this evil. What happened that terrible Tuesday was born in the evil intentions of evil men’s hearts. The evil of the thing only makes our question the more urgent:

Where was God and what was God doing when this evil happened in front of our eyes?

Calvinists seek their answer in the eternal past when God charted the course of every human event. There, in eternity, God wrote the entire script for the whole human drama yet to come. God, not Osama bin Laden, was really in charge when the terrorists murdered all those innocent people. And they have a splendid hymn to comfort them:

God moves in a mysterious way 


his wonders to perform.


He plants his footsteps in the sea


and rides upon the storm.


His purposes will ripen fast,


unfolding every hour. 


The bud may have a bitter taste, 


but sweet will be the flower. 


Blind unbelief is sure to err 


and scan his work in vain. 


God is his own interpreter 


and he will make it plain.

I do not want God to "make it plain." If God could show us that there was a good and necessary reason for such a bad thing to have happened, it must not have been a bad thing after all. And I cannot accommodate that thought. In fact, I have given up asking why such bad things happen. Instead, I look to the future and ask,

When is God going to come and purge evil from God’s world? When will God come to make God’s original dream for the world come true?

For me, there was no mystery about where God was and what God was up to on the morning of September 11, 2001. God was right there doing what God always does in the presence of evil that is willed by humans -- fighting it, resisting it, battling it, trying God’s best to keep it from happening. This time evil won. God, we hope, will one day emerge triumphant over evil -- though, on the way to that glad day, God sometimes takes a beating.

http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=2716

beautiful-nature-photographs.jpeg

Thursday's Therapy - Ways We Grieve, Part Three: 5 Stages of Grief + Debunking the 5 Stages of Grief

Thursday's Therapy

Ways We Grieve

Part Three

5 Stages of Grief

+

Debunking Stages of Grief

The following are two articles, Article One describing Kubler-Ross' 5 stages of grief and Article Two describing debunking the stages of grief:

Article One:

Stage of Grief Models: Kubler-Ross

Mark Dombeck, Ph.D. Updated: Dec 15th 2006

Kubler-Ross's Stages

Probably the most famous formulation of the stages of grief was developed by Dr. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross in her book "On Death and Dying."

Dr. Kubler-Ross actually wrote about the stages that dying people tend to go through as they come to terms with the realization that they will soon be dead. However, her stages have since been borrowed by the larger grief community as a means of describing the grief process more generally.

Coming to terms with dying is certainly a loss experience and an occasion for grief, so there is merit to this borrowing and reason to become familiar with Dr. Kubler-Ross' stages.

Again, not everyone will experience all of these stages, or, if all are experienced, they won't necessarily occur in this particular order.

• Kubler-Ross' first stage is Denial. In this stage, grieving people are unable or unwilling to accept that the loss has taken (or will shortly take) place. It can feel as though they are experiencing a bad dream, that the loss is unreal, and they are waiting to "wake up" as though from a dream, expecting that things will be normal.

• After people have passed through denial and accepted that the loss has occurred (or will shortly occur), they may begin to feel Anger at the loss and the unfairness of it. They may become angry at the person who has been lost (or is dying). Feelings of abandonment may also occur.

• Next comes Bargaining. In this stage, people beg their "higher power" to undo the loss, saying things along the lines of, "I'll change if you bring her (or him) back to me". This phase usually involves promises of better behavior or significant life change which will be made in exchange for the reversal of the loss.

• Once it becomes clear that Anger and Bargaining are not going to reverse the loss, people may then sink into a Depression stage where they confront the inevitability and reality of the loss and their own helplessness to change it. During this period, grieving people may may cry, experience sleep or eating habit changes, or withdraw from other relationships and activities while they process the loss they have sustained. People may also blame themselves for having caused or in some way contributed to their loss, whether or not this is justified.

• Finally (if all goes according to Dr. Kubler-Ross's plan), people enter a stage of Acceptance where they have processed their initial grief emotions, are able to accept that the loss has occurred and cannot be undone, and are once again able to plan for their futures and re-engage in daily life.

******

From November 2008 Scientific American Magazine

Article Two:

Five Fallacies of Grief: Debunking Psychological Stages

From the stages of grief to the stages of moral development, stage theories have little evidentiary support

by Michael Shermer

Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance.

So annealed into pop culture are the five stages of grief—introduced in the 1960s by Swiss-born psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross based on her studies of the emotional state of dying patients—that they are regularly referenced without explication.

There appears to be no evidence, however, that most people most of the time go through most of the stages in this or any other order.

According to Russell P. Friedman, executive director of the Grief Recovery Institute in Sherman Oaks, Calif. (www.grief-recovery.com), and co-author, with John W. James, of The Grief Recovery Handbook (HarperCollins, 1998),

“No study has ever established that stages of grief actually exist, and what are defined as such can’t be called stages. Grief is the normal and natural emotional response to loss.... No matter how much people want to create simple, bullet-point guidelines for the human emotions of grief, there are no stages of grief that fit any two people or relationships.”

Friedman’s assessment comes from daily encounters with people experiencing grief in his practice. University of Memphis psychologist Robert A. Neimeyer confirms this analysis. He concluded in his scholarly book Meaning Reconstruction and the Experience of Loss (American Psychological Association, 2001):

“At the most obvious level, scientific studies have failed to support any discernible sequence of emotional phases of adaptation to loss or to identify any clear end point to grieving that would designate a state of ‘recovery.’”

Nevertheless, the urge to compress the complexities of life into neat and tidy stages is irresistible. Psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud insisted that we moved through five stages of psychosexual development: oral, anal, phallic, latency and genital. Developmental psychologist Erik H. Erikson countered with eight stages: trust vs. mistrust (infant); autonomy vs. doubt (toddler); initiative vs. guilt (preschooler); industry vs. inferiority (school-age period); identity vs. role confusion (adolescent); intimacy vs. isolation (young adult); generativity vs. stagnation (middle age); and integrity vs. despair (older adult). Harvard University psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg postulated that our moral development progresses through six stages: parental punishment, selfish hedonism, peer pressure, law and order, social contract and principled conscience.

Why stages? We are pattern-seeking, storytelling primates trying to make sense of an often chaotic and unpredictable world. A stage theory works in a manner similar to a species-classification heuristic or an evolutionary-sequence schema. Stages also fit well into a chronological sequence where stories have set narrative patterns.

Stage theories “impose order on chaos, offer predictability over uncertainty, and optimism over despair,”

explained social psychologist Carol Tavris, author of The Mismeasure of Woman (Touchstone, 1993) and co-author, with Elliot Aronson, of Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me) (Harcourt, 2007), in an interview with me. “One appeal of stage theories is that they tell a story—they give us a narrative to live by (‘you feel this now, but soon ...’). In cognitive psychology and also in ‘narrative psychotherapy,’ there has been a lot of work on the importance of storytelling. Some therapists now make this idea explicit, helping clients change a negative, self-defeating narrative (‘look at all I suffered’) into a positive one (‘I not only survived but triumphed’).”

What’s wrong with stages?

First, Tavris noted, “in developmental psychology, the notion of predictable life stages is toast."

"Those stage theories reflected a time when most people marched through life predictably: marrying at an early age; then having children when young; then work, work, work; then maybe a midlife crisis; then retirement; then death. Those ‘passages’ theories evaporated with changing social and economic conditions that blew the predictability of our lives to hell.”

Second, Tavris continued, “is the guilt and pressure the theories impose on people who are not feeling what they think they should. This is why consumers of any kind of psychotherapy or posttraumatic intervention that promulgates the notion of ‘inevitable’ stages should be skeptical and cautious.”

Stages are stories that may be true for the storyteller, but that does not make them valid for the narrative known as science.

Note: This story was originally printed with the title, "Stage Fright".

Five Stages article: http://bit.ly/7ki9ZZ

Debunking Stages article: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=five-fallacies-of-grief