Grieving With Hope

"Brothers, we do not want you to be ignorant about those who fall asleep, or to grieve like the rest of men, who have no hope." -Apostle Paul, Letter to the Thessalonians (1.4.13)

Over the years I have heard many things about grief and Christianity. Probably the biggest shocker was the one that said Christians shouldn't grieve because doing so would be showing a lack of faith. What I want to do in this article is talk about what difference hope makes to grief and in grieving.
Our resident counselors and psychologists may get me for this definition, but grieving is the emotional trauma caused by losing something of emotional significance. All ages of people can lose things, people, or places and grieve. Just because a little one loses a favorite toy somewhere doesn't mean that their grief is any less painful or real even if an adult knows that losing a toy is really not a big deal in the great scheme of things. Grief is also proportional; as we grow emotionally older, the things that would have grieved us as children no longer do. We can take bigger losses without suffering emotional trauma.
If you read the rest of the passage quoted above, you will see that Paul no where says that Christians do not grieve. However, he does say that we grieve (at least about dead Christian loved ones) in hope. That hope is based upon what God did and will do in Christ. Hope, for Paul, comes from the God who will raise our loved ones up from the dead and reunite us with them when Jesus comes back to make an end of the creation. We will see them again thanks to God.
The Bible says three times that the Christian dead go to be with Jesus (Luke 23.43, 2 Corinthians 5.8, and Philippians 1.23). God gives us hope through the promises He makes in Scripture, and it is this hope that takes the edge of our emotional trauma of losing something emotionally significant to us.
One way I envision this hope is to think about my dead loved ones as on a trip. When the trip is over, they will return. I know this is backwards. Those of us who are alive on the earth are the ones actually on the trip! My dead loved ones are the ones who have finally gone home. Thinking about this has helped me a lot.
Another thing that has helped me deal with emotional trauma has been remembering the things I loved about that person, thing, or place. My forgetter works better than my rememberer. But the more attached I am or was to that person, the better my rememberer works.
One last thing that helps me is acceptance. Losing loved ones is not the way it's supposed to be. God did not create us for death. However, death is a byproduct of sin. Just like cancer can be the byproduct of pollutants, death is a byproduct of sin. Death is in the world. That is just the way it is. It will happen to my closest loved ones. It will happen to me. But even here God has given me hope.
So we can and will grieve as Christians. But our grief, no matter how traumatic, will always be tinged with a hope unavailable to anyone else.

~Shawn