When Grief Has Nowhere to Go

As a TCK, grief is a given. If you’ve read anything about Third Culture Kids, you’ll know that grief is part and parcel of the global life. It’s not about if a TCK experiences grief, but when.

Growing up as a TCK, grief felt easy to leave behind. Almost all my grief related experiences were localised to certain places. I could board a plane, disconnect from that version of self who felt the deep, overwhelming pain, and move on.

The jet bridge to board the plane was not unlike the elevator in Severance, a measured distance that separated one version of existence from the other, distorting one self from the other. The pain and grief of the outside world simply couldn’t board the plane with me – that would be ridiculously overweight emotional baggage. It was much more prudent, and even saintly stoic, to simply shift into an unfeeling self, find my allotted seat and wait for the great engines of aircraft to rush me away from unsavoury experiences.

Time and time again airplanes were my escape, moving was my relief. Friends left Angola and I never saw them again. No worries, I left too. Heartbroken by a breakup? Not a problem, an international flight stood on the tarmac to whisk me over the ocean for the Christmas holidays, far away from the dorm room scene of crying and confusion. Overwhelmed by exams, new cities, lost friends, and clinicals? Easy to escape to another continent for three months and ignore it. Over and over again, grief happened, and I could simply pack a bag and move, even temporarily, to displace it.

This isn’t to say I didn’t suffer the consequences of grief and loss, I certainly did, but there is a definite lack of reconciliation with pain when one can fly thousands of miles away from it.

And then, suddenly, I was faced with a grief that I could not run away from, no matter how many airplanes I boarded. Unexpectedly, my husband and I had a miscarriage at the end of last year.

This piece is not about the terrible pain of losing a child, or the grotesquely barbaric ways human bodies have to labour in brokenness and death, those are both topics for another time. Suffice it to say that the loss of a child and the subsequent physical act of miscarriage are dire proof we are on the wrong side of Eden. We desperately need the New Creation.

Rather, this piece is about reconciling with grief when it has no place to go. I couldn’t run from the miscarriage. The loss was trapped inside me. The grief was stitched into my very womb, my skin, my cells, my body. There was no airplane, no train, no long-distance car journey that would take me beyond myself and into another existence.

Also, I didn’t want to run. We have made Cambridge home. Our church, our friends, our life is here and then suddenly, our grief was here too, sitting with us, unwilling to leave. There was no bag I wanted to pack, no trip I wanted to take, I didn’t want to escape. I didn’t want to sever into a split existence. But I didn’t want to exist alongside the grief either.

I had to sit with my broken heart and my broken body, crying out to God and asking him to come into the brokenness with me.

It's easy in our modern Christian culture to dismiss suffering as a lack of trusting God when in reality we’re taught over and over again through Scripture how to lament, how to grieve, and how to grieve with the purpose of returning to hope again and again.

We know that suffering produces endurance, character, and hope that does not disappoint (Romans 5:3-5) but we also know that process is not completed in an hour. We don’t go from immediate tragedy to unmoveable hope in 60 minutes. We move through suffering with painstaking honesty, grappling with the reality of loss and brokenness while begging Christ to endure it for us.

How do we sit with our loss, our disappointment, our broken spirits and mislaid plans? How do we sit in our human misery and ask God to come and redeem it for His glory? How do we humble ourselves to the point of weeping at the foot of the cross, unloading our burdens onto the only One who can carry them? How do we uncover our deep, festering wounds so that the Great Physician can heal them, rather than covering them up and allowing them to seep into bitterness and callousness?

Of course, I cannot speak to every situation or even how to do this well. But I can say that lament is necessary. I have not only watched those around me not lament, and the consequences of carrying disappointment in their hearts for decades leads not to stoic hope, but to misery. I have known it in my own heart – a tendency to sever myself too quickly from grief, because I believe my body to frail and too weak to cope with the crushing weight of it all.

And indeed, I AM too weak to carry my grief. I am too weak to bear my own heartache, to look on the consequences of sin, both in the world and in my heart, overwhelms me; to look upon my own loss and pain crushes me.

As it should – because we are not meant to walk through grief alone. We are not meant to encounter challenges in this world and glibly say “Well, this is what the Lord has, and I must trust Him, but I won’t reveal this deep pain to anyone, not even my Saviour.” No. Not at all. We are meant to cry out to the Lord and beg him to hear our voices (Psalm 28).

David Powlinson described the phenomenon of hardened Christians avoiding grief like this “Hard people justify themselves as ‘realists.’ In fact, they are dehumanised. Jesus is far more realistic, and he chose to enter into weakness and affliction in order to love needy people… Honest [faith] is able to feel the weight of things that arouse fear and dismay. The problem is not that we feel troubled by trouble and pained by pain. Something hurtful should hurt. The problem is that God slides away into irrelevance when we obsess over suffering or compulsively avoid it” (Powlison, 2018).

Running away from pain, physically or mentally or spiritually, is not glorifying or honouring to God. It’s removing ourselves from the only One who can bring comfort and peace to our distress. Minimising our pain dismisses the power of God when He does relieve it. Denouncing our need for community and vulnerability in our suffering denies our very being, mirrored after God’s own character, that requires relationship with others.

We need to reconcile with our suffering – it is part of being human.

We need to bring our suffering to God – it his delight to comfort us.

We need to unveil our brokenness before Him and weep for comfort – He is the only one who makes us whole.

We need to open our hearts to our fellow Christian and humbly ask for prayer, ask for support, ask for compassion.

We need to look our suffering straight in the face, recognise the deep brokenness that afflicts us on this side of eternity, mourn, and then turn to Christ, our Everlasting, Living Hope, and rejoice.

Clearly, this applies to all, not just the TCK community. TCKs, like myself, are particularly good at compartmentalising grief, and it takes intentional time and effort and support to draw the experiences of suffering together into one box that can be offered to God and redeemed. But I know many non TCKs who are adept at this as well.

Perhaps you are not a TCK, or an expat, and you are facing a disappointment of a different kind. Miscarriage is not the only loss that resides in the body. Perhaps you are facing a long-term chronic illness, a disability, an addiction, a mental illness that brings discouragement day in and day out. Perhaps you have been newly diagnosed with a degenerative disease, and your remaining years loom ahead with uncertainty and confusion. Perhaps you have a terrible job, or a painful marriage, or a fraught family situation. Perhaps you are facing an unforeseen change of plan, and the disappointment of dreams and expectations unmet are overwhelming.

These are no small sufferings. These are the great pains that make it necessary for our frail and broken spirits to rely on Christ, who endured all for us. These are all examples of suffering with no easy solution, that cannot be dismissed, and that may never be healed in this lifetime. And, of course, there are a thousand more examples we could give.

Whatever you are facing, whatever grief exists in your life, whether it is recent or 60 years old, whether it is brought on by sin or circumstance, you are not alone.

Whatever you are facing, as you feel entrenched by sorrow and discouragement, you are not alone.

Grief may not leave. You may always battle mental illness. Your body may never recover. You may never find the job you desired. Your relationship may never be redeemed. Your children may never know Christ. You may hobble in weariness of mind and spirit toward the end of your days. We walk in a world filled with brokenness and it will only be made new when Christ returns.

But he will return.

Grief may have nowhere else to go in this lifetime, but it does not have the last word.

Grief will not outlast the Living Hope we have in Christ.

Grief indeed needs to be met head on, it needs to be recognised, addressed, and comforted, but grief will never have the final say.

And from that, I draw deep comfort.

“You need to hear what God says and to experience thar he does what he says. You need to feel with weight and significance of what he is about. He never lies. He never disappoints. Though you walk through the valley of the shadow of death, you need fear no evil, for he is with you. Goodness and mercy will follow you.

This is what he is doing. God’s voice speaks deeper than what hurts, brighter than what is dark, more enduring than what is lost, truer than what happened… What he does – had done, is doing, will do – alters the impact and outcome of everything happening to you. Your faith grows up into honest and intelligent humanness, no longer murky and inarticulate. You grow more like Jesus: the man of sorrows acquainted with grief, the man after God’s own heart, who having loved his own loved them to the end” (Powlison, 2018).

Citation

Powlison, David. God’s Grace in Your Suffering. Crossway, 2018.