God’s Healing for Life’s Losses:
How to Find Hope When You’re Hurting

What about you? We’ve explored how we can journey with others helping them to long deeply for heaven while living passionately on earth. But what about you?

Whether you are reflecting on your past suffering or experiencing current grief, here are a few suggestions and questions. I’ve designed them to help you to move from deadening to groaning—staying alive to life even when it crushes you to death.

Don’t try to address every suggestion. Pick a couple that connect with you.

My Wailing to God Journey

1. When are you most tempted to deaden the pain of life? How do you defeat this temptation so you’re able to groan to God?

2. Groaning exposes us for the needy people we are. How hard is it for you to admit your neediness—to yourself, to others, to God?

3. God made you a longing, thirsting, hungering, desiring being. What are you longing, thirsting, hungering for and desiring?

4. How do you stay alive to life when it crushes you to death?

5. Reread and meditate upon Philippians 1:23-25. What would it look like in your grieving to apply this passage to your life? “I am torn between the two: I desire to depart and be with Christ, which is better by far; but it is more necessary for you that I remain in the body. Convinced of this, I know that I will remain, and I will continue with all of your for your progress and joy in the faith.”

6. Wailing says, “I wanna’ go home. This world is so messed up. I ache for Paradise. However, I’m pulling weeds till the day I die!” Write your personal “wailing psalm.”

7. Satan wants life to kill your dreams. What dreams do you want God to resurrect?

8. God calls us to keep longing for Paradise while still pulling weeds even while we live East of Eden. What weeds is God calling you to pull?

9. “If you were to write a thirst Psalm like Psalm 42, how would you word it?”

10. “In Romans 8:17-18, Paul did some spiritual mathematics and reasoned that his current sufferings were not worth comparing to his future glory. As you calculate your earthly suffering and your eternal glory, what conclusions do you make?”

11. “Satan wants to use your suffering to suck the life out of you. How can you connect to Christ’s resurrection power to find new life, new zeal for God? How can you not only survive, but thrive?”

Weaving

Surely we can’t stay forever in the wailing stage. How do we uncover God’s perspective on life? How do we gain the spiritual eyes, the faith eyes to see life with 20/20 spiritual vision again?

We need spiritual laser surgery. It is in the grieving stage of weaving that the Divine Soul Physicians operates on the eyes of our hearts. We visit His office tomorrow to have those cataracts removed . . .

Sample Wailing/Groaning/Longing Trialogues

Consider some sample biblical trialogues to assist people to refuse to long deeply while living passionately.

“The temptation when life beats us down is not to face life anymore. To survive, but not thrive. How are you facing this temptation?”

“What will it look like for you to keep hoping?”

“What God-designed thirst is this situation stirring up in your soul?”

“What are you longing for from God right now?”

“If you were to write a thirst Psalm like Psalm 42, how would you word it?”

“As Paul faced suffering, he groaned for heaven (Romans 8:17-25). What are you groaning for?”

“In Romans 8:17-18, Paul did some spiritual mathematics and reasoned that his current sufferings were not worth comparing to his future glory. As you calculate your earthly suffering and your eternal glory, what conclusions do you make?”

“How is your current suffering causing you to long for heaven?”

“How is this situation helping you to realize that ‘this world is not your home’?”

“What testimony of future hope might spring from your current suffering?”

“In Philippians 1:23-25, Paul says that he longs for heaven, but that he’s passionate about staying on earth in order to glorify God and benefit others. How can you apply his choice to your life?”

“Satan wants to use your suffering to suck the life out of you. How can you connect to Christ’s resurrection power to find new life, new zeal for God? How can you not only survive, but thrive?”

And You?

Tomorrow we explore how you can groan for heaven while growing here on earth.

Is wailing biblical? Is it biblical to long for heaven and live passionately for God and others while still on earth? Is groaning with hope scriptural?

Desperate Desire

Consider Romans 8:18-25 and its support for wailing as a stage of acceptance, as God’s plan for responding to suffering.

“I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us. The creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed. For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay, and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what he already has? But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently.”

Paul couples suffering, frustration, eager waiting, and pregnant groaning. “Frustration” suggests the ache that we feel due to the emptiness and void we experience living in a fallen world. It’s the same Greek word (mataioteti) used in the Septuagint to translate Solomon’s word “vanity”—meaningless, soap bubbles, unsatisfying, pointless, absurd—all of this describes life south of heaven.

“Eager waiting” pictures ferocious, desperate desire. When we wail, we declare how deeply out of the nest we are, how far from home we’ve wandered, and how much we long for heaven.

Paul illustrates our desperate desire using the image of pregnancy. He describes a woman groaning as in labor that lasts not hours, not nine months, but a lifetime. Imagine a pregnant woman in labor for seventy years! That’s groaning. Groaning not only the pain of seemingly unending labor, but groaning the pain of not having the joy of the baby.

East of Eden

That’s our current condition. For our allotted years on this blue planet, we’re pregnant with hope, groaning for Paradise, for Eden, for walking with God in the cool of the day, for being naked and unashamed, for shalom.

When we groan, we admit to ourselves and express to God the pain of our unmet desires, the depth of our fervent longing for heaven’s joy, and our total commitment to remain pregnant with hope—labor for a lifetime.

Thriving

And what’s the result? Weak, mournful surviving? No way. The result is thriving.

In Romans 8:28-39, Paul insists that even in the midst of trouble, hardship, persecution, and suffering, nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus. He teaches that in all our suffering we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us so.

“More than conquerors” comes from the Greek word nikao from which we gain our word “Nike”—victors, Olympic champions, winners. Wailing empowers us to long passionately for heaven and to live victoriously on earth. Wailing moves us from victims to victors in Christ.

So What?

What difference can this make in the lives of others? How can we use these truths to help our grieving friends? Back at ya’ tomorrow!

Yesterday’s journey ended with the Woman at the Well in a dilemma. God told her to wait.

So what would “hope” look like in her immediate context? Hoping in God, she would choose delayed gratification over immediate gratification. She would accept her singleness, clinging to God and trusting His timing.

Hope waits. Hope is the refusal to demand heaven now.

Waiting Defined

If hope leads to waiting, what then is waiting? Waiting is trusting God’s future provision without working to provide for myself. Waiting is refusing to take over while refusing to give up.

Waiting refuses self-rescue.

You’ll never see waiting as one of the stages of grieving in any research study because it is not natural in a fallen world. It is supernatural.

I do a lot of ministry to ministers. A couple of years ago I was working with a pastor and his wife (we’ll call them Tim and Terri) in a situation where the pastor was fired, frankly, without cause. No moral failure. No doctrinal error. This pastor had been at the church for over 20 years. It was the only home his three teenage daughters knew.

We worked through the candor, complaint, cry, and comfort process. When it came time for waiting, he battled. Everything in him wanted, almost desperately needed, to regroup. He was ready to take a church, any church, on the rebound. He was ready to take a job, any job, on the rebound.

However, I counseled him to wait before making any long-term commitments to a new ministry position because I sensed that he was motivated by a desire for self-rescue, for regrouping, not by a desire to wait on God.

Waiting Biblically Supported

Was my counsel godly or ungodly? Wise or foolish? Too heavenly-minded to be of any earthly good? Can we find biblical support for the principle of waiting rather than regrouping?

We’ll be back tomorrow for answers to these important questions.