Lecture

Hello, and thank you for joining us for this series of lessons on loss. My name is Dr. Ron Welch. I’m the Associate Dean of the Counseling Division at Denver Seminary. I’ve being working clinical practice for somewhere around twenty-five years as a clinical psychologist, and I also have worked in a variety of settings, including outpatient mental health centers and counseling centers. So over the years, I’ve come to learn that people have all sorts of different ways of dealing with loss, and when Our Daily Bread University asked about this video series, we realized that it would be helpful to talk to you about different types of loss and different types of experiences you may have. So I’m going to incorporate a lot of information from the counseling field, as well as information from biblical and theological teaching, to be able to offer some guidance and some thoughts related to how you might be able to cope with the losses that have been occurring over this very difficult period of time, throughout COVID, which appears to be continuing on for quite a while longer, and as that goes on, our need to understand loss continues to be important.

What we’re going do is talk a lot about what kinds of loss people experience, and I want to start with some information from someone that I’ve studied for many years, C. S. Lewis. C. S. started by saying that, “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear,” and one of the things I want you to know, as we go through these lessons, is that there is an awful lot to talk about related to fear and anxiety and worry in loss, similar to how important it is to be able to trust God in those situations. And, you know, if you think about it, if God has our back, why are we so afraid of death? Why are we afraid of the things that are so challenging to us? If we trust God in those situations, it would seem that maybe Christians would have lower levels of anxiety disorders and not worry so much, but we know that actually that’s not true, and we worry a lot about things and we’re concerned about things, and loss is really, really hard to deal with.

We’re going have five lessons in this area. These are the five general areas that we’ll be talking about. I’m going talk, in this first lesson, some about the types of losses. We’re going talk, in the second lesson, about grieving after death, then a lesson on loss of relationships. We’ll talk about loss in COVID times, and then hope for those who have suffered loss. So as you go through these lessons, I’m hoping you’ll be able to develop some skills and some understanding of the types of losses that occur.

Here are some of the types of losses that you may end up experiencing and how they may make you feel. In some situations, we have, over the COVID period of time, we’ve had people who have ended up being extremely ill in hospitals, and maybe you haven’t even been able to go in to see them, because of what’s happened. We’ll talk about that in more depth in lesson 2, about how it is to deal with the loss of a loved one.

We’re going talk about loss of relationships as well, and what it feels like when you thought you knew what the next few years of your life or the next season of your life might look like, and then it turns out that person that you loved and cared for isn’t going be there anymore. And sometimes, of course, in the death of a loved one, you’re losing both the relationship and the experience, and suffering grief and loss, all together, and we’ll discuss more about the loss of a relationship in lesson 3.

And then we’ll talk a little bit right now about losses, some other types of losses. For instance, sometimes you may have a loss of material possessions. You may have been a victim of a crime, or you may experience a loss of safety and security. And believe it or not, that’s one of the biggest challenges people are facing in the world today with COVID is that, just like we experienced on 9/11, when what we thought was a safe world wasn’t safe . . . we thought that maybe the world was safe in ways [that] an illness or a plague couldn’t overtake us, in terms of some way, and yet, now we have a pandemic with illness that is so overwhelming, and people just don’t feel safe now, and you may not feel safe as you’re listening to this lesson. The world doesn’t seem to be the way you thought it was going be, and that’s very hard.

Sometimes we have loss of freedom, and I want to talk with you in some of these lessons about what it’s like when maybe you’re not able to have the freedoms you had before. I spent a lot of time in the prison system, as a psychologist, not as an inmate, but I spent a lot of time working in the prison system for many years, and there’s something about progressively losing your freedom, whether it’s people who may suffer from problems with alcohol and drugs and lose some of their freedoms, people who end up losing freedom and being in a prison setting, people who are unable to have the freedom, physically, to do the things they used to, and that type of loss can be very difficult, and a lot of what we’ll talk about in these lessons will be related to that, as well. What do you do when the world isn’t the same place you thought it was going be?

And then, in some cases, it’s kind of what we might call a loss of capacity. Maybe you’ve had a loss of the ability to travel or move around in the world the way you used to, or maybe you’ve had a loss of some cognitive or physical abilities that used to be very strong for you, and now they’re not the same as they were anymore. I’ve worked with athletes who have had their ability taken away to perform at an athletic level, maybe an Olympic athlete, for some reason, who thought, “Gosh, I’m gonna be able to go to the Olympics and participate in gymnastics” or something else, and then something happens, and suddenly that dream is gone. And so sometimes loss is a matter of understanding that the things we thought would be true aren’t true.

And the question I want you to think about is, why do bad things happen to good people? This is a question that C. S. Lewis has talked about . . . Job certainly talked about. A resource for you, if you’re interested, C. S. Lewis wrote a book back in ’62 called The Problem of Pain, and I’ve found it very helpful over my career and my life in understanding what it might be like to think through, theologically and intellectually, why do bad things happen to good people? Because we think, well, if . . . the way Lewis states this . . . he says, this is his statement of the problem, “If God were good, He would wish to make His creatures perfectly happy, and if God were almighty, well, then He’d be able to do what He wished, but the creatures aren’t happy, so therefore God must either lack goodness or power or both,” and that’s how he describes that, and you’ve seen that in Job. The comments that Job’s friends made to him when they said, “Well, does God not care, or is He incapable of preventing bad things?” And this is what loss brings up for us, is this challenge to say, how do we understand where God is amid that storm?

And most of these lessons today, that we’re going be talking about in these next few lessons, are related to the idea of understanding how we can praise God in the midst of the storm. How can we grow our relationship with God and get closer to God, rather than becoming angry or distant or sad or disconnected from God because of loss? It’s okay to struggle with these questions. I want you to hear that this is normal, not understanding why this person you loved and cared for is gone, or why this thing that happened in your life happened. That’s normal, and it’s something that we expect to happen after a loss. What you have to be careful of is making certain that you don’t end up being disconnected from God.

One of my colleagues here at this seminary [Denver Seminary], Eva Bleeker, who’s a teaching fellow here, teaches a class in grief and loss, and her study in Lamentations has taught her that sometimes people even feel guilty about loss, I should feel a certain way, or they feel like they caused it in some way. And the good thing about God is that God shows up and is equally present whether you’re guilty or innocent or whether maybe you think you did something to connect to the loss or create the loss or maybe you feel totally helpless, and it happened to you. Lamentations is a chapter you can read that will give you a . . . and we’ll talk about this more in later lessons, it can really be comforting and just give you some transcendent truths about what God can do, even in the times when we don’t feel His presence as clearly.

What I want you to remember from this lesson is that there are lots of different ways people experience loss, and during this COVID time, that these particular lessons are being filmed during, there has been an extended experience of loss that has gone way beyond what many people have experienced before. And even more so, we’ve been isolated from the people we love and care for, we’ve been isolated from our support systems, we’ve been unable to access even some of the things that help us feel safe in these times. And I want you to know, and I want you to hear and remember, that God is with us, Emmanuel, regardless of what happens, regardless of the loss in your life or regardless of the challenges you’re facing.

As we move through these lessons, trying to look at specific types of losses, looking a grief after death, looking at grief of relationships, looking at COVID, specifically, and ending with a lesson that will focus on hope, I want you to remember that the goal of these lessons is to help provide some skills and some understanding of the way it feels to go through loss and to keep in mind that it’s normal to grieve in whatever way you grieve. There is no right way to grieve, and I’ll talk about, throughout some of these lessons, don’t let someone else tell you, “You should be doing this” or “You should be doing that,” or “Why don’t you feel better by now?” I remember, after my dad died, people kept asking my mom, “So when are you gonna travel? It’s been a year. When are you gonna travel?” And she never did travel. She maintained sadness and loss because her life partner was gone, and she didn’t feel like traveling. And people would say, “Well, don’t you . . . haven’t you gotten over it yet?” And she would say, “I lost my husband. I don’t know why you keep wanting me to get over it.” And it was part of her story and her journey for the rest of her life.

So I want you to know and hear that, however you grieve, whatever your experience is with loss, it’s normal, it’s okay, and God is with you during that time. And then we’ll move on, now, to lesson number 2.