Miscellaneous
It All Comes Down to Choice
Today’s guest post is written by Alece Ronzino and was originally hosted by A Deeper Story.
Alece is a New Yorker changed by Africa. She is the founder of One Word 365 and a communications coach for non-profits. She blogs candidly about searching for God in the question marks of life and faith.
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Someone asked me the other day where I’m at in my journey. She was talking about the traumatic loss and transition I’ve endured in just about every single area of my life over the past few years. “Do you feel like you’re on the other side of it?”
I didn’t really know how to answer that question because I don’t think she fully understood what she was asking (though I know she certainly meant well.)
I’m in a much better place than I’ve been in a long time. Although I’m painfully aware of how fragile it all is, life feels good right now. And I haven’t been able to say that truthfully in years.
But that doesn’t mean I’ve gotten over—or even through—my loss.
I think the idea of “recovery” from loss is a harmful and misleading mirage. It’s unrealistic to expect that life could ever go back to normal after catastrophic loss of any kind. In a way, life will be forever divided by before and after. And to strive to go back to normal—to return to how things were and how you felt before your loss—is like trying to get somewhere on a treadmill: exhausting and impossible.
I don’t know if I’m meant to come out on the other side of my heartache. At least not in the usual sense.
I’m discovering what it’s like to live in the delicate tension of sorrow and joy. What we deem to be opposites are not actually mutually exclusive. They can be—and maybe they should be—embraced together. We don’t move out of sorrow into joy, as if we’ve recovered from our heartache. Instead we learn to choose joy even when that seed of sorrow remains ever present.
Jerry Sittser, in A Grace Disguised, said it so beautifully:
“I did not go through pain and come out the other side; instead, I lived in it and found within that pain the grace to survive and eventually grow. I did not get over the loss of my loved ones; rather, I absorbed the loss into my life, like soil receives decaying matter, until it became a part of who I am.”
What happens in me matters far more than what happens to me. It’s not my experiences that define me, but my responses to them.
So instead of making it my aim to get through what’s happened to me, I am learning to focus on my response to what’s happened to me. As with most things, it all comes down to choice.
That’s the reason “choose” is my One Word for this year. Because I need constant reminding that even when I have nothing else, I always have the power to choose.
While I can’t control what’s going on in this world or in my life, I do have control over my responses to those things. So today—same as yesterday and the day before—it’s entirely up to me to choose how I will respond to pain and sorrow and loss. I need to continue to choose to face, feel, and work through it, rather than to avoid it. And I need to continue to choose joy and trust right here, right now.
So if you’re wondering where I’m at in my journey, know this: You can always find me right here, in the middle of the tension between joy and sorrow, grief and gratitude, weakness and strength, questions and faith.
Join me here, won’t you?
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Connect with Alece via the following:
Visit Alece’s blog | Follow her on Twitter | Join One Word 365
What I Do at Night
Aside from picking up the dead at night, I also attempt to raise broken youth at The Parkesburg Point Youth Center.
Right now I’m working with a young girl who was raped by her father when she was eleven. Raped by her father. At the age of eleven. And — with these young people — crimes of this severity committed against them aren’t abnormal. Some have been prostituted by their parents for drugs. Let me say that again: their parents allowed grown men to rape their children in exchange for a temporary high. Others live with their cousins, grandmothers, aunts because their parents simply didn’t want them.
Broken.
And on Tuesdays and Thursdays I am there for them. Whether it’s playing them in ping-pong or listening to their story, I’m there … practicing the ministry of presence.
This past week I talked to the young girl who had been raped. She’s under professional care. And I’m not a professional councilor. But, I like to listen.
“How far ahead can you imagine your future?”, I asked.
“Not far.”, she said.
“What do you see in your future?” I asked.
“I see suicide.”
“Do you see college, a career, a family … ?”
“No.”, she said. “All I see is death.”
And I just sat in the quiet of her answer, letting it fill the room with it’s darkness and my soul with it’s pain.
I finally responded, “I see more than death.”
At this point she looked up and made eye contact with me. I was about to speak life into her death and she knew it.
“I see freedom. I see you living and overcoming your darkness. I see you graduating high school. I see you going to college. I see you finding someone who will treat you like a princess … a man who will encourage you and love you for who you are.” And then (because this organization believes that God has something to say to these situations), I said, “I believe God is dreaming you a future.”
That conversation was the first of many that I’ll have with her over the next couple months.
As she left, I asked her to re imagine her future. To create a different future and be ready to tell me an alternate story in our next conversation.
This is what I do at night. In addition to being a funeral director, I’m also the part-time associate director at The Point, where I work with my best bud, Dwayne Walton (he’s the executive director).
Anyways, we just bought a building … a new building where our ability to provide educational and career opportunities for these youth will greatly expand.
If you’re interested in what we do, here’s a link to a video about our vision. Here’s a link to our blog, which I manage.
And here’s the video about our new building.
The Day We Helped Out a Widow
As many of you know, my wife and I are in the process of adopting our three and one half month old Jeremiah. We were there on the day of his birth and have been with him ever since.
We have an open adoption with Jeremiah’s birth mom and we love her immensely.
The process of adoption is incredibly beautiful, but it isn’t cheap. My sister Leah organized a fundraiser for us through “Both Hands”. Both Hands’ purpose is to help people raise funds for orphans (adoptive children) while serving widows through home improvement projects.
A couple weeks ago, a team of our family and friends tackled a number of projects at Jane Rudewick’s home. My amazing friend, Andrew Hostetler, put countless hours into capturing the day on video and editing it down to an inspiring five minutes.
So, here’s a full 10 hours of pure goodness concentrated down into five minutes of unadulterated smile inspiring footage:
Unmet Expectations and Grief
The problem is that you, the grieving person, don’t know what you need and your loved ones don’t know how to help. This disparity often leads to a lot of conflict and unmet expectations, on both sides.
Throughout our experiences with my cancer and our child-loss, we have experienced a lot of unmet expectations and conflict in our relationships with others. We have wrongly expected that people should only use the words that are helpful and encouraging, while providing the exact support that we need from them, even though we, ourselves, had no clue what we needed.
Part of the struggle is that when people are in the middle of processing grief, their emotions are all over the place. And sometimes, the very last discussion we ever want to have is to confront someone on how they have hurt us through their words, actions, or inactions. Imagine how much more difficult this is for the grieving person. The reality is that all too often, a grieving person will allow these hurts to build up because these issues become secondary to the pain that caused their grief to begin with. When this happens, it can take weeks, months, even years, to sort through the myriad of pain and hurt caused from the lack of support they felt while they were grieving!
My encouragement to anyone who is grieving is that when you are hurt by words, action, or inaction, to discuss your hurt as soon as you can with the person who hurt you. If your loved one doesn’t know how you are feeling, they will likely continue using similar words, actions, or inactions, which will likely lead to more conflict in your relationship, and cause a bigger divide.
To help you do this, here are 4 steps I use to communicate my hurt with others because of unmet expectations:
1. Discuss what the unknown expectation was to begin with. I didn’t realize how important it was for me to have people acknowledge the first year of our daughter’s Birth and Death Day, until only a few people contacted us on “Kylie’s Day” to let us know they were thinking about our family.
2. Get to the heart of why the expectation was unmet. I was hurt because it seemed like people either didn’t remember this day that was so tragic for our family, or didn’t care, neither of which felt very good.
3. Figure out if the expectation needs to be adjusted or if the unmet expectation was simply a learning experience. For me, in this circumstance, I needed to do both – adjust my expectation and learn from it. When we brought up our hurt with people we thought would have remembered to call or write to us on Kylie’s Day, some of them remembered, but were afraid to call for fear of bringing up a hurtful memory. They didn’t know if we wanted people to call, if we wanted to be left alone, if we wanted to talk, or if we wanted to be reminded. We were able to talk immediately about our hurt and move forward in our relationships with a better understanding of where the other person was coming from.
4. Adjust your actions in the future. This is where I took what I learned from this unmet expectation. I now do my best to make sure that when someone I know experiences the death of a child that I write down important dates for them on my calendar. Sometimes, there are separate birth and death days, sometimes what is important is the original due date of their child, the day they miscarried, the day they had to give back a child they were intending to adopt, or the day the family buried their child. Then, I do my best to connect with these family and friends on these days, because the truth is that families hurting over the loss of a child, DO want family and friends to remember and acknowledge these milestones because it helps them feel like their child is loved.
Question: When you were grieving, did you have expectations of other people that were unmet? If so, how did you deal with this hurt?
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Author of Good Grief!, Erica McNeal is a three-time cancer survivor, who has also experienced the loss of five children. With sixteen years of experience in Youth, Marriage, and Women’s Ministries, Erica is passionate about equipping people to love others well through difficult times. She uses her experiences to teach people what not to say, what to say, and how to help when people are hurting. You can follow her on twitter: @toddanderica, or visit her website: www.ericamcneal.com.
Hello, My Daughter Died
Since Elli slipped into eternity 730 days ago, my daily reflections on her life have not faded. I still fold her pink pajamas and her flowery dresses, now worn by her little sister, some still slightly discolored around the neck from Elli’s drool. I love to watch Anna run and play in those clothes. They never moved that way with Elli in them.
The photos on the walls in our house, some taken weeks or months before she died, are of an 8-year-old Elli. It is strange to think that when we are 80, we will still have an 8-year-old Elli framed on our wall. We will not know a 10 or 12 or 25-year-old Elli. Her face is frozen at eight. I’m sure that is something all grieving parents have to come to grips with, and I still am.
I still dream about Elli. Often. In all of my dreams about her, she is active, able-bodied and full of life — more so than she was while on earth. I am not one to spiritualize dreams, but I have awakened many mornings with a smile on my face, because the dreams remind me that she is in that spiritual reality now. Heaven is hers.
Oh sure, tears can creep back in, in some scattered private moments when I least expect it. A speeding ambulance. A uniformed paramedic in line at Subway. A potato chip bag or a gallon of milk with the expiration date OCT 19. Small unexpected artifacts bring memories of the day, the morning she died, rushing back in.
Until the day I die, I will be a father of four. In my frequent “join-ups” with new colleagues at work, I will tell them about Elli because there is no other way I know. I cannot, with a good conscience, say, “I have 3 children.” I always say, “I have 3 children now. We lost our fourth, who was our oldest, at age 8 in 2008.” That feels right to me. And it has also opened up countless opportunities to share my faith that would have never otherwise emerged in a boring, get-to-know-you business lunch.
God has never stopped being good and gracious and kind in these 730 days. He has done much to mature each of us through what is often described as a parent’s worst nightmare. Her physical death has had a ripple effect of new spiritual life, both in our immediate family and beyond. Therefore, I cannot bring myself to call it a nightmare as I look back on it. All I see is beautiful grace budding up out of the ashes.
As Joy and I were making the short drive from the funeral home to the gravesite to bury Elli’s body, I remember turning to her and saying, “Time is going to go by so fast.” I was sensing the brevity of life at that moment, and how short a time we all spend from cradle to grave. Elli’s was especially short, but ours is not much longer, no matter how long we live.
I still sense that brevity — a bittersweet reminder that life is short, but heaven awaits. And today I am one year closer to seeing my little peanut again in the presence of the One I most long to see — the One who orchestrated it all the way He did, for my good and His glory.
We miss you, pumpkin.
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Today’s guest post if from Scott Bennett. Scott is a full-time writer for a global consumer goods company, currently specializing in social media. His daily bus commute became the canvas for his blog—Moving Bus Meditations—where he opens up about real life as a Christian husband and father. Scott is married to his best friend, Joy, author of the long-running blog Joy in This Journey. He tweets at @ScottB3nn3tt.
