Ministry with the grieving
Twenty of us gathered to talk about having a job that requires us to weep with those who weep.
Christian pastors are more than acquainted with grief. They’re steeped in it. First responders and emergency room personnel meet grief that accompanies trauma, but they don’t usually have to minister to it. Pastors do. Their day job is to weep with those who weep.
And not just when a congregant gets injured or dies. Grief arises from a host of causes. People grieve job loss, with all its anxieties. They lament their poverty. They grieve over the diminishments of aging, over their poor judgment that led to a tragic mistake, over family estrangements. They grieve over the disturbance or loss of their faith—often itself caused by grief. Congregants rejoice when their child graduates or gets married, but they also grieve because while we want our children to grow, when they do grow we ache. Some folks lament a normalcy they never had: “I so wish I had loved my mother and that she had loved me.” A fair number of congregants feel sad that their lives haven’t turned out as they had hoped. Their lives seem to them flat and insignificant, a wounding rebuke of their youthful dreams.
These are only some of the familiar personal griefs, and they are bad enough. If you add trouble in church, trouble on the job, trouble with neighborhood bigotry, and trouble in a bitterly divided nation, you get a small mountain of grief. And people have trouble getting over it.
