The Grinch of Self-pity Can Not Only Ruin Christmas But The Whole New Year – A Man’s Journey Through Grief, #28
Leading up to Christmas and beyond, I open Christmas cards but Mary Helen is not here to share the news of friends near and far. She wasn’t here to help me write a Christmas letter or make our traditional Christmas fudge. I didn’t get to the fudge or to our traditional light shortbread. My life is finished!
I can see my readers throwing up their hands. Oh, Eric, get over it! You’re experiencing what is common to everyone who lives on planet earth. So many have it so much worse. Totally true. Time to make a New Year’s resolution. No more self-pity.
I go out for a walk in the mall. I see a couple laughing together as they walk hand in hand. I’m walking alone. My home is an empty condo where I cook a succession of meals which I eat alone. I stare into a shop window. Maybe I need a new shirt. Why? A New Year is ahead…a succession of days and weeks and months…alone. So much for my resolution.
To distract myself I return home, make a coffee and settle into my recliner. I avoid looking at the couch where I carefully propped her up with cushions. I turn away from her portrait on the wall. I pick up the book and start reading. What? It’s set in South Carolina! No. My thoughts immediately turn to the familiar places where I met Mary Helen and fell in love. The tears begin to fall. Will I ever be able to do anything without grief?
The Christmas season is a time to celebrate, to lift up our hearts in worship and thanksgiving. Jesus has come to save us from our sins. It’s a time gather around the family table and enjoy a sumptuous Christmas meal with loved ones. But Grandma is missing. I’m feeling self-pity again.
During the last ten months I’ve often felt sorry for myself. Why couldn’t we have gone home together? How can I navigate these twilight years without her company? I’ve struggled to put together a new life. I know it must be done. Smarten up Eric.
‘“A Christian needs to take himself by the scruff of the neck and begin thinking as God thinks and cut out the self-pity,” says Elisabeth Elliot.
Self-pity is a dangerous emotion—”a dead-end street that you are choosing for yourself,” continues Elliot. “If you decide that the whole world needs to feel sorry for you, and you need to be surrounded and hovered over and propped up, that is certainly what you would call self-isolation.
“It doesn’t have to be. If you offer yourself to Jesus Christ as an instrument of peace, He is very likely to make you an instrument of peace to someone else.”’ (Quoted by the daily Griefshare devotionals. See www.griefshare.org.)
The problem is that I often feel as if I’m stranded in the Azores while the whole world keeps revolving west. Or I look around and see young people with their whole lives ahead of them, careers, marriage, kids. Or people in their fifties with trips planned to Greece or Mexico.
Such thoughts are all so short-sighted, so earthbound when I have ahead of me an eternity of unfolding delights. I will see the Son of God as he is. Heaven is ahead and then a new heaven and a new earth in which dwells righteousness. The sunsets will be even brighter, flowers more beautiful and friends will gather beside the river that flows from the throne of God.
This is not an ending nor a time to look back, back, always back into the past. It is time to look to a heavenly future, a future that will become brighter and brighter.
Fortunately, I spent Christmas with family. I gathered on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day with the people of God in a church that I pastored in the eighties. Then I sat down in my son’s house around a huge table for a sumptuous Christmas dinner. They had invited not only family, but several other people who were alone on that day. A hilarious game followed in the evening.
I think God has helped me turn a corner. Oh, I know tears will still come. I know I will still grieve. I will still review the memories of my life with Mary Helen. But I will see her again and with her a multitude of saints. Our eyes will be on Jesus as our minds expand with wonder at the perfection of how his plan unfolds. All the problems and puzzlement about Jesus’ return in glory will be solved. No more pre-trib, post-trib, amillennial. Just Jesus. And we will be there as he creates a new heaven and a new earth.
“Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, …I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, ‘Now the dwelling of God is with men, and he will live with then. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of thing has passed away…I am making everything new’…Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, as clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb” (Rev. 21:1-5; 22,1)
I see more clearly that my focus needs to be on the future not the past; to realize that heaven (and the new earth) are much more ultimate, much more real than the passing fancies of this life. Like the snow outside my condo, everything I see is passing away to be replaced my something unimaginably new.
God helping me, from this point on I will look upon myself as a member of the heaven-bound band. Heaven and the New Earth is my destiny.
For almost the first time, I’m able to look at Mary Helen’s photo on the wall beside my recliner and say, “See you later, honey.” Until that day, I want to commit myself to extend the company of the heaven-bound and to live and pray in hope that every member of my family will gather with Mary Helen and me beside the river of life that flows from the throne.
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