Living Phoenix

Author: Robert Wayne Rhoades

  • If Grief Is the Price We Pay for Love, Who Covers the Cost: Good Mourning

    If Grief Is the Price We Pay for Love, Who Covers the Cost: Good Mourning

    “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the same yawning. I keep on swallowing.” C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

    A shocking truth about grief and mourning is that it is a chronic disease. That mourning resembles the time of day only as a heterograph, but better approximates eternity as a synonym, is undesired irony. The clinical picture is constant aching pain with fluctuating intensity described as waives of aching and stabbing pain, nausea, lightheadedness, and emotional lability. There is the inability to eat or sleep despite the oppressive weight of fatigue and sudden loss of motivation to get off the couch. And yet, we are expected to wake up each morning, go to work, take care of our family, maintain our health, concentrate amidst constant uncontrollable waves of memories that tear at the edges of our gaping wound of loss. This is the misery of grief, that in moments as time progresses we try to convince ourselves that we will be okay and that life will move on. We will string together, at first, a few minutes to hours of emotional reconciliation: only to, unprepared and unaware, be speared into pieces by a sudden fleeting memory. Sometimes it is triggered by something you shared together. Sometimes it arrives like a thief in the night to rob you of your will to live. There is no good mourning. There is no sensible mourning. Grief is the most painful human emotion, but is the least human experience.

    Perhaps it feels the least human because it is the emotion that brings us closest to God. Or, as we often feel in the moment, the absence of God. Either way, whichever side of the spectrum you find yourself from one minute to the next in these volatile circumstances, it is when one cannot help but at least desire a divine presence. Help. Comfort. Peace. Deliverance. Forgiveness. Healing. Resurrection. Death. I am wary to offer the word blessing behind any intention of grief, for blessings are unwelcome in a cloud of darkness so thick. However, perhaps the mechanism behind the pain could be an eventual choice of blessing rather than immediate gratification of death. It is during the early moments of grief and mourning that we tend to underestimate our worth in this world the most. We made enough mistakes, don’t make that one.

    There is one constant in our mourning during grief. A deep void, or absence, left in our entire being. By entire being I mean this sensation of a missing piece is experienced physically, emotionally, spiritually, mentally. As the primary result of the massive portion of our being ripped from our chest, we experience indescribable pain. I believe that is why denial, the first phase of grief we will soon explore, is the most logical and desperate starting point in a rush to self preserve. Our whole world construct, the entire reality of the life we created, has just collapsed into the ashes in a single moment. If our reality ceases to exist, so does our acceptance of the circumstances. We deny that reality exists, after all it no longer does as we conceived it, and we rush to fill that void desperate to stop the hurt.

    I was told by someone the fastest way to get over someone is to get under another. What a desperate false hope. Adding a poison to an open wound. Taking the few remaining pieces of your soul and giving them away until the void covers you in entirety and you are unrecognizable as a person. I have felt, myself, the desire to use alcohol or drugs to manage the pain. A liars crutch. Adding more chaos to chaos. Pouring gasoline onto a raging fire. No, there is nothing that is big enough to fill that void, that undesired painful emptiness, except something greater than our human experience. There is nothing big enough to fill that void but God. And perhaps that is evident, at our lowest, when we first feel the unimaginable pain of loss and we rush to pull ourselves from the fire that we so often think, God help me. Perhaps it is the spark of the divine that is written in our very DNA that points us to the only real answer. Perhaps, when everyone you loved has turned away and all is lost, God is the only one left beside you. And perhaps it is because He is reaching for you, pulling you in, because this terror is real but so is He.

    God is not the absence of mourning. “I dress the skies in darkness, covering them with clothes of mourning.” Isaiah 50:3. He is the hopeful presence among it and the pathway beyond it. “You have turned my mourning into joyful dancing. You have taken away my clothes of mourning and clothed me with joy.” Psalms 30:11. There is no doubt that this pain will be remembered for a lifetime. But a life is both too short to remain in our darkest moments and too long to be defined by it. God understands this is the most severe and complex human emotion. He understands this pain is more than we can bear. Sometimes, the severity of the pain is unnecessary and if only the other person involved would look to God in the same way it could be healed and joyous. But their will is not yours and their needs are their own. Sometimes, the other person is no longer living and you are left to heal without the hope of their return. Whatever it is, however it came about, our first lifeline is that despite our greatest loss God will continue to write our story. Take comfort in that He is an author who only writes happy endings for those characters that choose His pages.

    There is no good mourning. The pain that comes with grief will dissipate, but even now as I write, memories and fears of the person I lost come and go and feel as real and painful as the day it occurred. They may be dead, or they may have moved on, they may have patched their void with another person, place, or thing. But your hurt is uniquely yours. And it is going to show itself for a longtime to come. So our focus belongs not on the fears but on the only hope we have in the person of Jesus Christ. If we gain anything from the ashes of this fire it is that we are not our few mistakes. We are the children of God who have loved deeply, cared freely, grown immensely, and are of the highest value to the Kingdom of our creator. Why else would he be the only one there in our minds when we look up from our greatest tragedy.

    The cost of love is grief. The cost of anything worth having is great. And when we realize that cost it is only natural to feel bankrupt because we don’t have the resources to manage this type of transaction. But that high cost of pain can be covered on our loving Father’s account. No strings attached. No interest. Paid in full before you were ever born.

  • Which author would you love to have dinner with?

    Who else but the elusive and mystical Donna Tart? Would I be able to eat despite my excitement is the real question.

  • If your future self could send you one sentence, what do you hope it would say?

    Thank you, your sacrifice made it all worthwhile. P.S. you shouldn’t skip leg day in the gym anymore.

  • At the Foot of the Sirens Rock: A good place to start is the bottom

    At the Foot of the Sirens Rock: A good place to start is the bottom

    “It told me what you most want is what you most can’t have. What you most can’t have is what you already had and lost. And most, it was the song of all the promises I failed to keep.” The Odyssey

    Perhaps no person has penned words more true outside the written scripture than Homer when Ulysses describes the song of the sirens. The sirens do not age with time, nor does their song need to change with the advancement of society or the changes in our culture. When The Odyssey was revived and portrayed recently on the big screen, the film captured the torment of the enchantment of false hope in hearing their song with the disenchantment the truth delivered. The opening quote above, midway through the movie, landed heavy on the hearts of many viewers. We can understand why, because we have lived it. That moment where we expected our lives to continue to deliver the ultimate that ultimately let us down is the loneliest place on earth. Before we can biopsy our past and point fingers or take ownership, before we can discuss our phases of grief and recovery, we must start right here at our lowest point. That point where we no longer know how to exist and overwhelmed with pain becomes an understatement. That point where the last thing you want to hear is that it will get better, it’s okay to move on, God has a plan. That point where what you most want is what you most cannot have. Let’s validate that you are feeling the greatest pain imaginable.

    The difference between expectations and reality is often disappointment. When we suffer a traumatic loss, a great failure, an unnecessary public judgement of shame, there exists no reality in the present to stand upon. There is no thermostat to control our emotions. Reality feels relative and expectations seem out of your control. The difference created equals a great deal of disappointment. As we pile disappointment on top of our fear, and our loss, and growing anger, well, we are left with hopelessness. Hopelessness creates disappointment, fear, loss, anger…we get the cycle. But today isn’t about how to break the cycle or even survive the cycle. It’s about proclaiming that this cycle hurts and I am not okay! And that is okay.

    In my suffering I feel myself disappearing: as if I am bleeding out onto the floor my soul, my heart, my will to live. Self preservation becomes selfishness for survival sake. It was difficult during this time to hear that God cared and more difficult to hear that he understood my pain. For if he understood my pain, and loved me so, held the covenant to which I had belonged so high, then surely he would save me. Surely, he would say suffer no more, I am busy fixing your loss right now. Rewinding time and rewriting my script. Erasing the mistakes and the damage. Surely. But my wound would not close, the bleeding would not cease, my pain grew. Eventually, amidst the pleading and arguing with God he allowed enough space in my thoughts to offer me a point of insight: a glimpse into the prophecy of the past and the silence of the garden where he suffered the greatest grief.

    “He was despised and rejected- a man of sorrows, acquainted with the DEEPEST GRIEF. We turned our backs on him and looked the other way. He was despised, and we did not care” Isaiah 53: 3. He suffered grief. Not just physical pain. The agony of the deepest grief. Loss. Hopelessness. Fear. Regret. Bloody grief!

    “He prayed more fervently, and he was in such agony of spirit that his sweat fell to the ground like great drops of blood.” Luke 22:44. “He told them, My soul is crushed with GRIEF to the point of DEATH.” Matthew 26:38.

    He prayed in his grief and all the pain that accompanies it and asked God to take it from him. Grief even to the point of death. That was all I needed to hear in that moment. I didn’t need someone to tell me to read on and hear “but your will be done”. I didn’t need to hear “the Lord is close to the brokenhearted”. No, stop, I don’t need to hear about the hope I can’t feel right now. And God knew that. That’s why he showed me only his worse moment of grief. He let me sit there, alone with him, in the garden, and just hurt. I cried then, and I cannot speak of it now without crying even as I write. To sit there covered in all of my grief, my mistakes, my just punishment, my unjust or unfair losses. Silence. Pain. Shared with the Son of God. No promises in that moment. No questions or answers. Just a shared moment where his garden and the jagged rocks of my siren’s island met.

    The pain is real. The grief is more than is relatable. This is the worse moment of your life. Now, when you are ready, there is someone in the garden that would like to share a moment with you.

  • “Nero fiddled while Rome burned”: Brace For Impact
  • “Nero fiddled while Rome burned”: Brace For Impact

    “Nero fiddled while Rome burned”: Brace For Impact

    In my younger years, I had a climbing partner who had a unique way of phrasing his encouragement when I would voice my trepidation of exposure on any of the routes he would inevitably be excited about. “It’s not the fall that kills you, it’s hitting the ground”, he would say confidently. In our formidable years of perceived invincibility the lack of connection to our frontal lobe unfortunately protects us from reason, and for some reason I would hear his mantra and think, “you’re right, lets go”. He is right, though, it is not the fall that ends our disastrous momentum downward, it is hitting the ground. With it comes great pain, disfigurement, death of our dreams, loss of our loved ones, panic, and fear. How about loss of identity? Is there a man who hasn’t heard the whispers of the devil attacking his identity? The compounding problem is that when we feel ourselves falling we reach everywhere to arrest our decent and control our outcome, grasping in desperation. Those things we think we can control, however, are untethered and we simply bring them down with us: ultimately, delivering the same impact to those we dragged along the way to lay in our wreckage. It wasn’t the fall that caused you all that pain, it was hitting the ground. But the further we fall, the greater the impact. Open your eyes if you are falling. Brace for impact. This is going to hurt.

    I was molded from the same ingredients as every one else. I had parts of my childhood that were beautiful and pure. There were other parts that were dark and traumatic. I lived life with an unprotected heart and threw myself into adventure, love, family, and every dream that promised me the fairytale ending. Men are not immune to the fairy tale complex. With every princess a fearless knight in shining armor is found nearby. I lived my ups and downs and took my valleys with my peaks in the same way as we all do. My undoing came much later in life. After a series of mistakes and unfortunate events I found myself in a place I didn’t want to exist. A marriage I didn’t want to be in and soon would leave. A career that brought more problems than the money seemed to fix. But I was a fighter and I put myself back together. If you read that last sentence carefully you will see where I am going with all this. The truth that alluded me in action, though I knew otherwise in my heart, is that I didn’t do anything for myself. Not a single one of us can pick ourselves up by our own boot straps and finish the war, perhaps only a few battles at best.

    No sooner than I had found myself in the valleys of my own doing had I climbed to the highest next peak. I found exercise, adventure, health, sobriety, my children, my family, and…her. The woman that stopped time the moment I walked through the door on that first date- a real life scene from Big Fish where everything froze, the popcorn mid air that I pushed to the side, as I made my way toward her smile. Sometimes, God makes it clear that this person was meant for you all along. For the first time in my life, I not only felt that, I knew that. That is a great height to find yourself navigating among the cliffs. And I only climbed higher. Sharing dogs, our children, a home, marriage, adventures that would make Huck Finn feel ashamed. Higher and higher I climbed. Don’t look down.

    I acquired everything I ever wanted. But I never acquired a sense of worthiness of her love and intimacy. My insecurities grew as my excitement over the decision to have another child came. My fears grew as the excitement over finding a new house came. My finances needed attention but how could I divert my attention from trying to be perfect and say yes to everything. Keep her safe from my ugly parts. After all, these were my dreams, too. Why was my fear and insecurity growing? Why did a simple angry response from her turn into the absolute rejection in my mind? Why was I craving self destruction again? The more I tried to pull the hidden pieces together to avoid her seeing the weaker me, the weaker I became- the more exposed I felt. I climbed, reaching higher and higher, while each hold became smaller and smaller. Until, suddenly- nothing, falling, grasping, desperation, loss of control. Faster and faster I fell with my eyes closed tight until bam- I hit the ground. I burst open wide, mangled and unrecognizable by the time I came too. Everything around me was from a perspective thousands of feet below my only recent reality. She wasn’t there. Nothing was there. Just pain. A pain of loss that with this series and ministry I will only barely be able to describe in the slightest bit. That would be a problem, if most of you hadn’t experienced it, too.

    When you find yourself in that place of impact you experience loneliness and pain that is only comparable to the biblical description of hell. It is a vortex, that sudden void in your soul, that cannot be filled by anything short of God. And even God is not done with you in that moment- the pain of all your useless parts burning away is on his clock and your desperation for control is the problem. It takes time to let go. It takes so much pain that you give up your own will and submit yourself to His. You are mourning the loss of your dreams, the person that was literally a part of you, the death of a love one, loss of your children, financial ruin, disgrace- whatever it is, your reality is gone and you are mourning loss. And if you were the conductor of that loss, then God be with you. Brace for impact. This is going to hurt.

    There is hope. There is peace. We don’t feel it right now, but like the gravity that pulled us back to the earth as we fell out of control, we feel it’s force around us now holding us together. To move on and ignore the destruction and pain is to play the fiddle while the city around you burns. That fire will consume you again. This journey doesn’t require you to submit to God up front and it doesn’t require you to feel hopeful or healed. It requires candid and honest conversation. Start with God. Cry. Yell. Scream. Beg. Sit in silence. But direct it toward God until his hope becomes a reality. Start where you are at and lets put one foot in front of the other until we can look up and see the hope that God has promised us that will never fail. There is unconditional love in a world that loves you conditionally. There is a God who celebrates your second chances in a world that condemns you.

    So begins our journey from ashes to soaring phoenix.

    “…he will give a crown of beauty for ashes, a joyous blessing instead of mourning, festive praise instead of despair. In their righteousness, they will be like great oaks that the LORD has planted for his own glory.” Isaiah 61