Walking While Grieving

When I was in my early 20s, I had the opportunity to work a summer job in the interior of New England. As someone who grew up in Central Texas, I was thrilled by the beautiful New Hampshire scenery, the quaint towns, and the many rivers. One of the highlights of the surrounding area was Mt. Washington, the tallest mountain in all of New England. It seemed to me that it was just begging to be hiked, and so I decided to climb it one beautiful, sunny day.

Now, it probably wasn’t the best idea to climb it alone, even though it’s only a little over 6,000 feet tall. You see, Mt. Washington isn’t just famous for its height; it’s also well known for its crazy weather. For decades, it held the world record for the highest recorded wind speed, set in 1934 at 231 mph! The day I climbed it, the wind at the top was only 70 mph, but that wasn’t the only weather challenge I faced that day.

You see, when I reached the timberline about halfway up, I entered a dense cloud bank. So for the second half of my hike, not only was I facing gales of wind, but I could also only see about 50 feet in front of me. I found myself deeply thankful for the people who had built mounds of rocks to serve as trail markers. My challenge that day was complicated: keep walking uphill while fighting the wind and trying to find the next trail marker amidst the fog.

Why share this story? Well, because I think this is where a lot of us are these days. We’re walking in the Pauline sense: living life, trying to keep taking steps in the direction that the Lord is leading us. But we’re trying to do other things while we walk, and for many of us, those other things include grieving. We may be grieving the loss of friends, loved ones, or neighbors to COVID. We may be grieving the loss of congregants from our local churches. We may be grieving the loss of a ministry colleague, or a preacher or staff member whom we have loved. We may be grieving the loss of a ministry program that fell victim to a difficult budget cut. We may be grieving the loss of our ability to make future plans with any level of certainty.

As leaders, we often don’t have the luxury to stop walking, so to speak. Perhaps our organizations require continued attention or our family budgets don’t allow vacation. Maybe sabbaticals are unavailable in our particular ministry situations. We may counsel grieving friends or congregants to take time for themselves or to engage in self-care, all the while feeling like such measures are unavailable to us. How can we continue walking into the fog of the future with our own heads bowed in grief?

I think that part of the answer is something I did not act upon the day I climbed Mt. Washington: we need help. Specifically, we need people who can empathize with us, people with whom we can share, people whose presence reminds us we are not alone, and people who make our burdens lighter. But in order for people to empathize with us, we have to be able and willing to share those burdens. In his book Better Ways to Better Relationships in the Church, Thomas G. Kirkpatrick identifies three primary components in a typical experience of empathy: sharing, understanding, and responding. We want people to respond to us empathetically when we are hurting, but in order to respond, they must understand. In order for them to understand, we must be willing to share.

And, of course, this is something that we see in Jesus. Sometimes he does go off to the mountain alone, but do you remember the Gethsemane story? He tells the disciples to keep their distance while he goes off to pray, but both Matthew and Mark tell us that he also takes his inner circle with him. This doesn’t feel like a teaching moment; it seems much more like a man in need of companionship. Matthew communicates it most clearly: “Couldn’t you men keep watch with me for one hour?” (26:40, emphasis added).

I assume I’m not the only leader out there who sometimes tries to go it alone, attempting to climb a mountain without a traveling companion. I’ll say it to you and to myself: that’s not a sustainable mode of living, and I think the last two years have shown us that. We know that God is always with us, yet sometimes the best way we can experience God’s presence is through the presence of a trusted fellow human.

We’re all grieving something. Let’s take a step forward together by sharing with others. I suspect we’ll find opportunities to receive and give empathy, and that will make our mountains easier to climb.