He is not unable to sympathise when we grieve

This year I've been working on a big goal that I wrote about here in May last year when I was at the writer's retreat I organised, and then again in my first blog post this year. 

I took a big break in the middle of the year, but much of the rest of the year I've been trying to set aside some time on Friday mornings to think about and write chapters of a book that I'd like to see published. We'll see if publishing ends up happening, but I've discovered that if I literally write "Writing" on my calendar for a Friday morning and avoid having other meetings or outings that morning, I can usually settle down to write fairly well. However, if I don't do any of that, then I usually don't get anything done.

This morning I ended up with a 9 am meeting and I have not been able to settle to any book writing after that! But maybe I can write a blog post instead?

I'm in my 50s and have been living in Japan for about half my life! Life has changed greatly over that time, but there are still themes that keep coming back again and again. One of them is grief and loss. It's something I've written about many times here because it's something that keeps coming up. Everyone who has lived on this earth for more than a few years deals with loss and grief, but the cross-cultural life we live has a tendency to bring more of it into our daily lives than many people deal with.

I'm thinking about it at this time because a friend and colleague who has become very close in the last few years is leaving Japan permanently in February. It's a long, sad goodbye. Yesterday we had lunch together over a video call (we live on opposite sides of Tokyo), and finished with prayer for each other, and tears.

This is a reminder to me
of the time five years ago
when we had a picnic with
my friend and her family
on my birthday and she
baked me a cake :D

After our call finished I couldn't settle to my regular work. I don't know if it's true for others, but it's pretty normal that straight after a video call I can't just jump back into whatever is next on my list—especially if it is editing or a creative task like writing, and if the meeting or conversation was emotional, it's even harder. Yesterday I struggled to figure out what I could do to get myself back into the place where I could get things on my to do list done.

So, instead of ignoring the elephant in the room, I pondered grief. I looked at some of the things that I'd written about it in the past. I remembered talking to a psychologist about the grief I have accumulated over the years as I've said goodbye to many, many friends and colleagues. She mentioned the verse in Isaiah 53 that says Jesus was "acquainted with grief". So I looked that up.

I usually use the NIV version and it doesn't use those words, its translation is that Jesus "was despised and rejected by mankind, a man of suffering, and familiar with pain" (Isa. 53:3 NIV).

"Familar with pain" is the phrase they've used for "acquainted with grief".

ESV, RSV, and KJV use "a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief".

NLT "a man of sorrows, acquainted with deepest grief".

But what does "acquainted with grief" actually mean? "Acquainted" means to have personal knowledge of experience. It's stunning to think on this. Jesus knows about grief personally. 

He knew about grief before he came to earth as a man, actually, so I shouldn't be so surprised. The Old Testament tells us that God was grieved so many times by his people. One story of a conversation between Moses and God in Exodus 32 tells us how angry God was about Israel's disobedience when they made for themselves a golden calf and worshipped that instead of God.

The Lord said, “I have seen how stubborn and rebellious these people are. Now leave me alone so my fierce anger can blaze against them, and I will destroy them. Then I will make you, Moses, into a great nation.” But Moses tried to pacify the Lord his God. “O Lord!” he said. “Why are you so angry with your own people whom you brought from the land of Egypt with such great power and such a strong hand? (Ex. 11:9–10 NLT)

But we also see evidence of Jesus's grief in the New Testament. Of course when he wept at Lazarus's tomb and we know he lost John the Baptist to violent death (Matt. 14:13 says when he heard he immediately left in a boat to a remote area to be alone). But also in a larger sense we see his heart when he said "O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones God's messengers! How often I have wanted to gather your children together as a hen protects her chicks beneath her wings, but you wouldn't let me" (Matt. 23:37). Jesus also endured the pain of betrayal in Judas, something that must have been more painful because he knew it was coming?

As I pondered these things, I plucked my copy of Gentle and Lowly: The Heart of Christ for Sinners and Sufferers (by Dane Ortlund) off my bookshelf and scanned through some of the chapter titles and then text. Here are some snippets:

Whatever it means to be human (and to be human without sin), Jesus was, and is. And emotions are an essential part of being human. . . . Jesus experienced the full range of emotions that we do (p. 104).

He ponders Hebrews 4:15: "For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin" (ESV). Ortlund says:

The burden of this . . . verse is Jesus Christ's sheer solidarity with his people. . . . it is in "our weaknesses" that Jesus sympathizes with us. . . In our pain, Jesus is pained; in our suffering, he feels the suffering as his own even though it isn't—not that his invincible divinity is threatened, but in the sense that his heart is feelingly drawn into our distress." (p. 46). . . 

If you are in Christ, you have a Friend who, in your sorrow, will never lob down a pep talk from heaven. He cannot bear to hold himself at a distance. Nothing can hold him back. His heart is too bound up with yours (p. 51).

In Chapter 12 Ortlund considers again what it means for Jesus to be a tender friend. I think that was the most comforting thought in all this pondering. That, even when my close friend is no longer close, Jesus never leaves me. That my location is irrelevant in my relationship with him.

Christ's heart for us means that he will be our never-failing friend no matter what friends we do or do not enjoy on earth. He offers us a friendship that gets underneath the pain of our loneliness. While that pain does not go away, its sting is made fully bearable by the far deeper friendship of Jesus (p. 120).

None of this is especially new to me. I remember praying this in 2000, with tears, over my toddler, when we were grieving as we left Australia for the first time:

7 I can never escape from your Spirit!
I can never get away from your presence!
If I go up to heaven, you are there;
if I go down to the grave, you are there.
If I ride the wings of the morning,
if I dwell by the farthest oceans,
even there your hand will guide me,
and your strength will support me (Ps 139:7–10).

Nonetheless, we are forgetful beings, or at least I am! It's good to stop when things like this make us stumble, and remember in our hearts the truths we know in our heads.

An overflowing week

Last week was huge—such a contrast to a usual work at my desk at home. I'm glad for all the people I interacted with, though, so thankful.

Monday

Monday was the monthly missionary gathering of OMF missionaries in our area, involving around 50 or more people. This is held at our Japan headquarters on the other side of Tokyo and typically I spend between three and four hours on six or more trains to get there and back. Once I'm there, it's encouraging, but the train journeys can be a bit fraught if you get stuck on heavily populated trains.

The morning's schedule was:

9.30–10.00 arriving, chatting, and coffee/tea

10.00 singing, devotional, announcements, welcomes and farewells.

11.00 morning tea

11.30 prayer time

12.30 BYO lunch

From 1.30 we had a working bee (cleaning/gardening to tidy up the Japan headquarters building).

I got home after 4 pm feeling pretty weary.

Tuesday

At 8.30 I met a friend I said goodbye to in 2016 when she moved back to the US. She's part of my magazine team, so I haven't lost touch with her, but having 1½ hours to sit and talk one-on-one with her at a cafe was such a joy and encouragement. In the few years that she lived in Japan we spent many hours together at prayer meetings and volunteering at school. She's just one of the multitude of friends who have passed through my life in this cross-cultural life. It felt like a redeeming moment to reconnect last week.

The rest of Tuesday was spent working hard at my computer to ensure I could be away from my desk for the rest of the week.

I climbed into a hammock leaning
over a stream!

In the evening I picked up a young Australian friend from the train station who'd be staying with us that night. She'd travelled a long way from western Japan and then gotten a bit lost on Tokyo trains. We were all pretty tired by the time she arrived, so we fed her and then went to bed.

Wednesday – Friday

I did some more desk work in the morning before gathering a carload of ladies around midday to travel to the annual Women in Ministry retreat. Our houseguest was one of my passengers, as well as a missionary neighbour and a friend from church (these days I drive a small car with only four seatbelts).

I also climbed into a tree (with help
from a taller friend)

From then on it was almost constant interaction and activity until Saturday! But, as usual the retreat was a great blessing. 

The worship times were a highlight for me. There's something about singing God's truth into our hearts that is very precious. The worship leader didn't mess around by talking: she lead us through song after song, so the flow wasn't interrupted. I found that it gave me helpful contemplation time. This retreat has been a big "lily pad" in my life over the last 20 years. It's a notable "memory handle" when I think back over those years—I remember various times in my life that this retreat has coincided with other challenging events. 

For example, the retreat in 2011, just days before our lives were sent into turmoil (on this actual day, 11th March) with the triple disaster north of of here. 

I remember the retreat in March 2020 when the magnitude of the pandemic was just starting to dawn on us. I arrived at that particular retreat with the heavy weight of one of my best friend's son who was terminally ill (at 13 years of age) and straight after that women's retreat I hosted a writing retreat that was both incredibly fulfilling as well as incredibly taxing and exhausting. 

Speaker, worship leader with two
visiting Biblical counsellors

I remember the 2021 retreat held online, just a couple of weeks after some devastating news in our family and in the midst of our middle son's traumatic last year of high school.

And 2022, when I was numb after a couple of years of almost no in-person time with people, and when a friend confronted me after noticing my unusual demeanour, I fell apart in her room as I told her about some very heavy stuff within my own family.

That's a sampling of the memories that were coursing through my brain as we worshipped. It was actually pretty therapeutic to reflect on those things as I sang about the goodness and faithfulness of God. Annual events like these nowadays are reminders to me of the friends who are no longer there (usually moved away) and the underlying grief that accompanies me now through life. Remembering, though, that God is still with me and has walked with me through all of the above, and more, was very special.

My other take-away from the retreat is diving into Ephesians 3:17–19. It's a rich passage where Paul's words start to run away from him a bit. Here it is from the Amplified version (not one I usually use, but it was helpful in thinking this through):

And may you, having been [deeply] rooted and [securely] grounded in love, be fully capable of comprehending with all the saints (God’s people) the width and length and height and depth of His love [fully experiencing that amazing, endless love]; and [that you may come] to know [practically, through personal experience]

Meals were plain Japanese-style.

 the love of Christ which far surpasses [mere] knowledge [without experience], that you may be filled up [throughout your being] to all the fullness of God [so that you may have the richest experience of God’s presence in your lives, completely filled and flooded with God Himself]. (Eph. 3:17-19 AMP).

I was particularly noticing that my head knowledge of Christ's love is far surpassed by his actual love for me. I come from a theological background that doesn't emphasis personal experience of God's love, but I think that that is only part of the story in the life of a Christian, a part that I'm still growing in my understanding of and desperately need when I have doubts about my own worthiness and value.

Friday

On Friday at noon, we headed back to Tokyo, and ordinary life. But those in my car got another three hours of enjoyable fellowship in my car. I wasn't the most reliable of drivers, though, because I was tired. I pour myself into interacting people when I get the chance and it wears me out. It was actually hard to concentrate on driving as well as talking with those in the car and I took two wrong turns and one "dodgy" last minute turn! Two stops for caffeine later and I was pleased to finally park my car outside our apartment without any serious incident.

Our Australian guest's flight wasn't until the next day, so she stayed one more night with us. We were a little sad, because, though she'd physically been present at the retreat, she'd missed the entire programme on Thursday as she stayed in bed with a cold. Thankfully she was feeling a bit better by Friday and even able to play card games with us that evening (taught me a new game too—not easy when I was so tired).

Saturday

After we said farewell to our guest and had lunch, we rode our bikes to do a small errand for some other OMF missionaries at the mission's storage facility about 2.5 km from here, and then got groceries on our way home. It wasn't a fun ride: the wind was horribly strong and cold. But this was actually a much needed rest day, so we spent the rest of afternoon and evening lounging in front of the cricket (a rare women's multi-day cricket match, Aust. vs India).

Sunday

This was a pretty usual Sunday: left for church on our bikes at 10 am, ate lunch there, and got home by 3 pm—in time to hang-out online for a couple of hours with our kids.

I'm glad every week isn't like that, but also glad that some weeks are!

Grief...again

Right now my head is a little bit all over the place. The last couple of weeks have been fairly quiet at my desk, but all of a sudden this week my work has exploded and there's plenty to do. So it's not very helpful that I'm having trouble mustering my brain this morning. But I think the main reason would be grief.

Image by Michaela 💗 from Pixabay

Sometimes it's getting hard to write here because there are themes that just keep coming up and I wonder if I've said all I can say on them? Or if I'm boring my audience?

But then I run into a new-ish missionary who asks questions about the same themes I've experienced and I remember that they are also on a journey of learning, though perhaps not as far along as me, and that perhaps I can continue to speak on these themes helpfully...

This week it's grief. On Tuesday, part of my job was to write a short obituary-like piece that was used in our mission's social media yesterday. Just doing my job, but it's about someone about my age who I knew, someone I had lunch with in Brisbane last home assignment, someone whose daughter is around the age of my kids, someone who comes from the same part of the world that I do, and who was a missionary like me. Last night we attended his funeral (online). [Link to the post I wrote is here.]

In 25+ years of service more than half-a-dozen of our missionary colleagues have died (i.e. pre-retirement age, currently in ministry when they first became ill), mostly because of cancer. It's always a shock and the questions arise: Why Lord? Why now Lord?

Even if we didn't know some of those colleagues really well, it's still a shock and a grief, and I'm often surprised by how much I get affected by each one.

But I've come to understand that the missionary life is laden with a lot of other grief, so many goodbyes and losses, many more than most people encounter this early in their lives. And that grief piles up.

This week I Googled "missionary grief" and this nine-page article came up in my browser: https://www.emsweb.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/OB_Winter_2014.pdf I've yet to steel myself to read the whole thing (I'm pretty busy this week and also not good at reading longer articles on my computer), but these points from it grabbed my attention:

"HIDDEN LOSSES are crippling many on the missionary field and they don’t even know how to identify where it all began."

The article lists typical losses missionaries experience when they first go to the field, and, I would argue, ongoing losses:

• language (the ability to communicate)
• identity
• a place in society
• life skills
• sense of safety (less in Japan)
• family (knowing the wider family and seeing them regularly, and these goodbyes happen again and again)
• friends
• intellectual and professional peers
• places (e.g. favourite places in home country)
• things (e.g. favourite foods, familiar furniture, house)
• pets
• smells (familiar scents from home country)

Many of the above are "hidden" losses, many of these we often don't identify or notice. 

The difficulty with many of the losses of a missionary life is that there is no funeral, no socially acceptable way to acknowledge our loss. And indeed, it might even seem that we don't have permission to admit that we are grieving these things.

I am attentive when a younger colleague mentions a sadness that is in the list above, because I know that it is not going to get any easier, if they continue to work as a missionary. 

Life happens at a fast pace and missionaries make massive transitions that involve multiple griefs all at once, there is often simply a lack of time and emotional energy to process. As well as that, we live life amidst other missionaries who are also experience more transition than the average person. We build a friendship with a colleague at language school and they graduate and move to another part of the country. We build another friendship with a colleague who lives near our place of service and they go on home assignment, or we do and when we get back, they have moved somewhere else. No one is having a "funeral" about these losses; we sometimes get to say goodbyes, but they are hard to do again and again and again.

Another quote from the article, sorry it's a bit long:

“Ambiguous grief” is a response to “an unclear loss that defies closure.” This barrier stems . . . hidden losses. The losses are hard to acknowledge and therefore the response of grief is muted.  The groundbreaking work of Dr. Pauline Boss in her book entitled Loss, Trauma, and Resilience; Therapeutic Work with Ambiguous Loss is very helpful in understanding this barrier. Dr. Boss explains, “…ambiguous loss is the most stressful kind of loss. It defies resolution and creates long-term confusion…. With death there is an official certification of loss, and mourning rituals allow one to say goodbye. With ambiguous loss, none of these markers exists. The persisting ambiguity blocks cognition, coping, and meaning making and freezes the grief process.” Ambiguous grief is born from a loss that is often hard to recognize, therefore it is also hard to resolve. In order to overcome this barrier to grief we must make a concerted effort to name these hidden losses so that the grief process can be experienced.

As you get older you accumulate grief. I see this in older people—they're gradually losing their friends, parents and siblings, their professions, and their strength and health—it takes a toll. Missionaries accumulate grief at a faster pace, though:

 Accumulated grief is usually a result of ignoring many small losses and allowing them to build up. . . . Although the losses many missionaries experience may seem trivial and small, much like the paper cut, their accumulated effect cannot and should not be ignored.  (also from the above linked article)

Hence, I'm writing here today about grief. Because I have accumulated a lot of small paper cuts, and larger grief-wounds over the years and a death like we experienced in our community last week hits deeply. It's easy to rush into the next thing (my work on the magazine and in social media hasn't stopped, the emails coming across my desk haven't stopped, I still have a dental check up today and a seminar to attend this evening). But I'm instead taking a moment today to stop and process my thoughts by writing.

To newer missionaries and those who are headed that way: I don't want to discourage you. This calling we've received is hard, but it's not impossible. Indeed, the text that Steve chose for his funeral was Joshua 1:1–11. These are a bunch of instructions from God to Joshua, just after the death of Moses. He uses this phrase, or similar words three number of times: "be strong and courageous". Why? Because "I [God] will never leave you nor forsake you" (said explicitly twice in the passage, but also implied in other words multiple times). Because our God is great and has promised to be with us wherever we are, because he's called us into this work—he will provide all we need, he will be all we need. Fix your eyes on him, again, and again.

To those who have been around longer and are feeling this deeply. Take some time. Reach out to someone to talk it through. Journal. Take a walk. Acknowledge this accumulated grief.

To people who pray for missionaries: Keep praying. Let them know you are praying for them. See if there's anything practical you can do to help one of them. Remember when you see them that they are carrying some accumulated grief, and ask God how you can help. Ask good questions.

Change and farewells…again

On Thursday I said another farewell. This one was a bit smaller than many, but still another farewell that stacks on top of the dozens and dozens we’ve said over the years.

Here’s a glimpse into (mostly) just the last three months:

Just three months ago I met a short-term worker in the city to welcome her to Japan and to our social media team. She had a three-month visa, and we didn’t know if she’d stay only three months, or if she’d be able to stay longer. Turns out that three months was all we had her for, despite trying for a visa extension. She’s the first short-termer I’ve had the privilege of working so closely with, and it’s been an enjoyable experience. She’s the same age as our eldest son, which made me feel old, but her age and energy was very suited to this ministry (in which I often feel like a dinosaur). We talked for a couple of hours on Thursday about various things, including emotional stuff that she’s facing as she returns to the Philippines. I feel privileged to have been a small part of her life at this time and pray that God would continue to lead her for the future.

Rachel, the short-term worker who was here
for three months

Earlier last week I said farewell to another social media team member. I’ve worked with this colleague for about three years and it is sad to see her go, but it's also has been a pleasure to work alongside her and see her grow. I’m not sure if I’ll ever see either of these ladies again.

A couple of months ago one of my magazine team members told me that due to family reasons he would be leaving Japan in the middle of 2025. He’s only been with the team a couple of years and originally joined to fill some of the gaps I left to go on home assignment. We’ve worked quite closely on one portion of the magazine process in the last 10 months and I really have appreciated his industry knowledge (he used to work as a journalist). It was a shock to hear he was leaving, but I’m getting better at my poker face when I hear news like this. We’ve been praying for a replacement for him. Just the other day I had a conversation with another team member who’s thankfully willing to take this specialist role on for a while and also heard the same day of someone else who's been on the edge of our team for several years who might be willing to share that role. 

We also got a surprising email earlier in the week about one of the OMF Japan field leaders who’s been considered for an international leadership role, which is a vacancy we’d been praying someone would fill (but not someone from our backyard, please God!). If he gets accepted for this, then that will be another loss for OMF Japan leadership that needs filling. This is noteworthy, because our OMF Japan leadership team of seven people is already undergoing a lot of transition: two members have recently left (one of those is yet to be replaced), a third is about to leave next month, and a fourth is leaving this time next year. Most of these leaders are remaining in Japan, but have moved in different roles. One of the leaders I’ve worked with a lot over the last 15 years, but will hardly see when she returns in a couple of months because she's moving to a different part of Japan.

On New Year’s Eve we had dinner with another (non-OMF) couple we’ve known and appreciated for almost 20 years—they’re retiring to the US. 

Another couple we’ve spent a lot of time with are going on home assignment in the middle of this year and are unsure what their future holds as they both have elderly and needy mothers in the UK.

Another colleague I spoke with on Friday also is unsure about her future in Japan after home assignment next year.

Then on Saturday night we heard that a former colleague who's been struggling with cancer for many years passed away in Singapore. 

How well we know/knew each of these colleagues varies greatly, but when I stop and think about it, the number of farewells just keeps piling up, like a relentless drip, drip, drip of a tap that we can't turn off. I tend to push it down and away and try not to think about it too much, but it can be depressing. Being called to “stay” is not easy.

I was unable to finish this blog post when I started it on Friday, and so have spent some time thinking in the meantime. I discovered this article on Missio Nexus. It talks about the accumulated grief and ambiguous grief, especially in relation to missionaries. It's helpful to note that small griefs can build up if they aren't acknowledged, until they really are overwhelming. And in missionary life, ambiguous grief often gets swept under the carpet. It's expected that our lives will contain much that is now being recognised as loss, and not just "hard but normal". I'm glad to be able to speak up about these things. It's starting to become more of a conversation within missionary circles, but I'd like others to know about it too (hence what I said into a microphone in front of 200+ ladies in October 2023).

One thing that I know is important is recognising loss and naming it, so writing about it here is part of grieving these things. I'm tempted to compare, saying that the losses we experience are nothing like the loss of a child, or parent, or spouse. Yet apparently comparison is also unhelpful. I guess it encourages the impulse to not grieve these things and therefore contributing to accumulated grief, so I won't compare.

I was listening to the Bible on Friday and was up to the portion in Acts where Paul is heading back to Jerusalem where it is foretold that he might be killed. I realised that he said a lot of goodbyes in his ministry too. Acts 20 records a long farewell speech he made to the church’s leaders in Ephesus, including these sentences:

“‘Now I know that none of you among whom I have gone about preaching the kingdom will ever see me again.” (Acts 20:25 NIVUK)

“When Paul had finished speaking, he knelt down with all of them and prayed. They all wept as they embraced him and kissed him. What grieved them most was his statement that they would never see his face again. Then they accompanied him to the ship” (vv. 36-38).

Next verse:

 “After we had torn ourselves away from them, we put out to sea and sailed straight to Kos. The next day we went to Rhodes and from there to Patara” (21:1).

“After saying goodbye to each other, we went aboard the ship, and they returned home.” (21:6)

“Then Paul answered, ‘Why are you weeping and breaking my heart? I am ready not only to be bound, but also to die in Jerusalem for the name of the Lord Jesus’” (21:13).

This last verse shows his resolve, despite the pain it must have been causing him.

Ah, once again I find myself longing for heaven where we will have no more tears, no more farewells or uncertain futures. I need to go running back to all those verses about God being my strong tower, my rock, my firm foundation! And be like a tree planted by a stream with my roots deep in him so that my leaves do not wither (Psalm 1). And pray these verses for myself (and others like me who struggle with these constant goodbyes):

“I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge – that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God” (Ephesians‬ ‭3‬:‭16‬-‭19‬).