Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

My eyes have grown dim with grief;
    my whole frame is but a shadow.

• Job 17:7

But you, God, see the trouble of the afflicted;
    you consider their grief and take it in hand.
The victims commit themselves to you;
    you are the helper of the fatherless.

• Psalm 10:14

I went about mourning
    as though for my friend or brother.
I bowed my head in grief
    as though weeping for my mother.

• Psalm 35:14

Very truly I tell you, you will weep and mourn while the world rejoices. You will grieve, but your grief will turn to joy. A woman giving birth to a child has pain because her time has come; but when her baby is born she forgets the anguish because of her joy that a child is born into the world. So with you: Now is your time of grief, but I will see you again and you will rejoice, and no one will take away your joy.

• John 16:20-22

There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.

• Galatians 3:28

That is why a man leaves his father and mother and is united to his wife, and they become one flesh.

• Genesis 2:24

I’m Harold Dykstra.  I’m retired, but I go to food bank distributions all over Tracy and talk to people that need someone who will listen to their story.  My time is well spent.  A police lieutenant suggested that I write down the conversations that I had with an angel.  I did not know she was an angel at the time.  The angel, for a little over a year indwelled a life-sized posable action figure my children bought me, so that I would not be perceived as travelling alone.  And in a way, she was training me for what I do while talking to the needy.  She probed my heart to find out what I believed and how I express love for others.  She changed my life.  Oh, excuse me, angels have no gender, but the angel indwelled a doll named Bountiful Babs.  After seeing the angel in that form for over a year, I cannot see her in my mind in any other form.

In the last episode, we recapped something that was in the police report, but I recorded the conversation and Bible study.  But in that story, I said, “Good Grief!”  On the drive to Cleveland, Ohio the next day, she reminded me that I had not talked about turning the other cheek, but she had this to say about the phrase “Good Grief!”

“Harold, why do you keep saying ‘Good Grief’?  I see nothing good in grief.  What does the phrase mean and is it just a saying, or does it relate to Christianity?”

I laughed, “I think most people that say, ‘Good Grief’ are fans of the Peanuts comic strips in the newspaper.  When I was young, I read them every Sunday without fail and whenever I could during the week.  I bought some of the books that were reprints, and I watched all the Charlie Brown television specials.  Charlie Brown was this character in the Peanuts strips that never had good fortune.  His baseball team that he managed and pitched for never won a game.  He tried to get Lucy to hold the football so he could kick it, but she always pulled the ball away and Charlie Brown went flying, and his kite would always get caught in the kite eating tree.”

Babs asked, “I have never heard of that type of tree.  Is it in the oak family?”

I shrugged, “I have no idea.  Maybe.  But the term has come to mean an exclamation of surprise relating to things that are generally a negative emotion, like dismay.  Charlie Brown almost won a game, but then the other team came from behind when his outfielders got distracted and did not catch the ball.  Get the idea?  You expect one outcome, but then you are surprised and dismayed.  Good Grief!”

Babs nodded and smiled.  I expected she would look up Peanuts on the internet and read as many comic strips as she could when we arrived at the hotel.  But then she surprised me.  “Is comic strip anything like strip poker?”

I nearly lost control of the car at internet speed.  “No!  Where did you hear that mentioned?”

She said, “At the last hotel.  A guy saw me going in my room and he invited me to his room to play strip poker.  I said I had some reading to do.  What is strip poker?”

I groaned, “I will add it to my list of things to teach you, but if you get invited to do that again, do not accept the offer.  The man had no intention of being nice.”

“Oh!”

But I continued, “I love how you asked if ‘Good Grief’ was something a Christian should have.  As you know, I am grieving the loss of my wife.  I did not like the idea of you in the car, but since you started talking and you keep me company, you have taken the place of my wife going with me on these trips.  So, you distract me from my grief.  And grief can be good and bad.”

“So, you are saying I help you?”  she said eagerly, maybe a little too eagerly.

“Just a little.  C. S. Lewis wrote in the Silver Chair, one of the Narnian books, ‘Crying is all right in its way while it lasts. But you have to stop sooner or later, and then you still have to decide what to do.’  In other words, that kind of grief is necessary to clear the cobwebs from the corners of your soul, but then life goes on.  We should never stay in our grief.  Our grief teaches us some hard lessons, and those lessons might differ from one person to the next.  But then God teaches us through grief that we can endure the grief.  He gives us strength to endure it.  C. S. Lewis also wrote in Letters to an American Lady, “The great thing with unhappy times is to take them bit by bit, hour by hour, like an illness. It is seldom the present, the exact present, that is unbearable.”  We can handle this moment and then we let the next moment handle itself.  I think one form of bad grief is to stay sorrowful for an extended period of time.  I knew a woman who visited her husband’s grave daily for years and years, talking to him, asking him what she should do.  She only stopped when dementia set in.  But she never really talked to him.  He wasn’t there.  Others insisted on the church praying for them, by name, daily for two or three years.  Finally, the pastor insisted on removing the request from the bulletin.  Enough was enough.  You need to move on.  You will never be the same, but with God’s help through the grief, you can be better than you were before.  Thus, good grief.  In that way, you have helped me.  I love having these little Bible studies on the road.  But let’s get to what the Bible says about grief.  What does Job say in chapter 17, verse seven?”

Babs replied with a smile, “My eyes have grown dim with grief;  my whole frame is but a shadow. (Job 17:7)”

I shook my head, “I wish I could do that, remember Scripture so perfectly.  Your doll body has no brain, but your mind is so amazing.”

She just giggled.

“But do you understand the structure of Job?””

She smiled, “That’s why I ask you questions.  Job is a big book of the Bible that only mentions the word grief once, but that seems to be all they talk about until God shows up.”

I nodded, “Yep, at first, Job is better than okay, but then Satan takes everything away to test Job’s faith.  Satan thinks he can win Job over, but God wants Job’s faith tested.  God wants all of us to go through fire in having our faith tested.  What good is faith in God, when everything we touch turns to gold.  We might just think we are the cause of all the good fortune.  But Job knows that his faith in God is strong, and he wants answers directly from God.  And Job’s friends are, in a way, curious as to the juicy sin Job is guilty of.  ‘Why else would he suffer?’  But that attitude is a worldly attitude, not a God attitude.”

Babs sputtered, “Why did God allow humans to have free will?  Obeying God and doing nothing else but obeying Him solves a lot of problems.  No more suffering!”

“Good Grief!  You ask so many questions.”

She giggled, “Only one at a time.”

“But let me answer one before you pile five more into the inbox.”

Again, she smiled and giggled.

“You giggle a lot.”  I noted.  “But when we first met, you said that you do not know, and I yelled at you to not say that.  You cried.  You said you were broken.”

“I had not had that emotion, and it hurt.” She replied.

“And so, it is with grief.  Due to my sin in raising my voice, you lost a bit of your innocence.  I had made you sad.  In grieving for the loss of my wife, I grieve most in happy times.  Something reminds me of her.  It is not guilt of me having some fun, and she is not here to share it.  She is with Jesus, and she has no more pain, but I feel the pain knowing that we used to enjoy this or laugh at that.  The grief is simply part of the process.  They say there are stages of grief, but sometimes you skip one.  I have never thought of bargaining with God.  Abraham did it, trying to save Sodom and Gomorrah, but who am I to argue that the loss of my wife was unfair when she is in a better place, and she was suffering so much here on earth?  See?  Grief can be good grief.  You miss what you have lost, but you know God is in control.  God protects us.  Psalm 10:14 talks about that.  We persevere through our grief.  And maybe we never fully come out the other side.  God said in Genesis 2 that when a man and woman marry, they become one flesh.  Well, I lost my other half, and at times I feel like half of me is gone.  But then in Galatians, Paul says that we are all one in Christ, but Christ is in us.  When my wife left for a better place, God was already within me to fill that void.  And the grief process helps in coming to that understanding.  So, all things work for the good, even when they do not feel good at the time.”

And she added, “for those who love the Lord and are called according to His purpose.”

“Absolutely.”

Then I looked at her.  Her smile seemed to glow.  And then, she asked, “What’s the next lesson?”

I rephrased her question, “What do you want to do next?”

She sang, “I don’t know” like the three-chime doorbell.

While I once got angry with that answer, I quickly grew to love it.  I asked, “Why do you always sing those three words?”

She sang, “I don’t know.”  But this time I sang along.

Then she laughed, “One more time, but in harmony.  I’ll sing alto.  1, 2, 3…”

We sang, “I don’t know.”

Then she seemed ill at ease.  “Harold, you broke me again.  I am not sad or frightened, but my eyes are leaking.”

I replied, “Those are tears of joy, dear.”

She questioned, “Are you spelling deer, D-E-E-R, or dear, D-E-A-R?”

I replied, “D-E-A-R, dear.  I am not trying to freeze you in the headlights so I can run over you.”

She said, “That’s a relief!”  Then after a few seconds of silence, the laughter began anew.

Credits

Peanuts (1950-2000) and such characters as Charlie Brown and Lucy were created by Charles M. Schulz

And I kept saying “Good Grief!” throughout the editing of this story, each time I would catch a mistake or add a mistake while fixing an old mistake, I would say it.  Or was it due to the few sleepless nights I had about that time? …  I had some CPAP issues, machine messing up, masks breaking, back up masks causing blisters across the bridge of my nose, and then a power outage (no air from the CPAP at all).

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.