A Grace Disguised Revised and Expanded: How the Soul Grows through Loss

by Jerry Sittser

They said it had to be personal; it had to have heart; it had to speak to loss as people actually experience it. Their advice prevailed and changed the nature of the book into something more like a memoir.

I discovered then that once a book makes its way into print, it no longer belongs to the author. It becomes like a child who has left home.

It is how we respond to loss that matters. That response will largely determine the quality, the direction, and the impact of our lives.

Living means changing, and change requires that we lose one thing before we gain something else.

Loss is loss, whatever the circumstances. All losses are bad, only bad in different ways. No two losses are ever the same. Each loss stands on its own and inflicts a unique kind of pain. What makes each loss so catastrophic is its

devastating, cumulative, and irreversible nature.

“What meaning can be gained from suffering, and how can we

grow through suffering?” That is the question I want to explore in the rest of this book.

the quickest way for anyone to reach the sun and the light of day is not to run west, chasing after the setting sun, but to head east, plunging into the darkness until one comes to the sunrise.

either to run from the loss or to face it as best I could.

My decision to enter the darkness had far-reaching consequences, both positive and negative. It was the first step I took toward growth, but it was also the first step I took toward pain.

My world was as fragile as the lives of the loved ones whom I had lost.

The decision to face the darkness, even if it led to

overwhelming pain, showed me that the experience of loss itself does not have to be the defining moment of our lives. Instead, the defining moment can be our response to the loss. It is not what happens to us that matters as much as what happens in us.

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.

We do not always have the freedom to choose the roles we must play in life, but we can choose how we are going to play the roles we have been given.

In other words, they refused to yield ultimate power to their captors and circumstances. Though the world was horrible to them, they identified with another world—a world inside themselves, over which they had some control.

Loss requires that we live in a delicate tension. We must mourn, but we also must go on living.

In choosing to face the night, I took my first steps toward the sunrise.

Pain is a gift because it shows we have a capacity to feel, whether pain in the body or pain in the soul.

Denial puts off what should be faced. People in denial refuse to see loss for what it is—something terrible that cannot be reversed. They dodge pain rather than confront it. But their unwillingness to face pain comes at a price. Ultimately it diminishes the capacity of their souls to grow bigger in response to pain.

Pain will have its day because loss is undeniably, devastatingly real.

One enters the abyss of emptiness—with the perverse twist that one is not empty of the tortured feeling of emptiness. If anything, this kind of emptiness fills one with dread and despair.

Loss creates a barren present, as if one is sailing on a vast sea of nothingness.

Memories of the past only remind them of what they have lost; hope for the future only taunts them with an unknown too remote even to imagine.

cannot live with the memories, and I cannot live without them.

Recovery is a misleading and empty expectation. We recover from broken limbs, not amputations.

Loss provides an opportunity to take inventory of our lives, to reconsider priorities, and to determine new directions.

Even in loss and grief, we can choose to embrace the miracle of each moment and receive the gifts of grace that come to us all the time.

Gifts of grace come to all of us. But we must be ready to see and willing to receive these gifts. It will require a kind of sacrifice, the sacrifice of believing that, however painful our losses, life can still be good—good in a different way than before, but nevertheless good.

I lost the world I loved, but I gained a deeper awareness of grace.

Catastrophic loss is like undergoing an amputation of our identity.

Loss thus leads to a confusion of identity.

Loss forces us to see the dominant role our environment plays in determining our happiness. Loss strips us of the props we rely on for our well-being. It knocks us off our feet and puts us on our backs. In the experience of loss, we come to the end of ourselves.

We need someone greater than ourselves to help us forge a new identity.

“You can never say ‘I love you’ too much, because you never know when you won’t be able to say it anymore,”

Regret keeps the wounds of loss from healing, putting us in a perpetual state of guilt.

The first kind of death happens to us; the second kind of death happens in us. It is a death we bring on ourselves if we refuse to be transformed by the first death.

The feeling self is not the center of reality; God is the center of reality.

Loss forces us to see ourselves for what we are.

This period of self-examination was both demanding and rewarding.

We will not be delivered from suffering, but with God’s help we can be transformed by it.

The Joseph story helps us see that our own tragedies can be a very bad chapter in a very good book.

Loss may appear to be random, but that does not mean it is. It may fit into a scheme that surpasses even what our imaginations dare to think.

Why me? seems to be the wrong question to ask. Why not me? is closer to the mark, once we consider how most people live.

So, God spare us a life of fairness! To live in a world with grace is better by far than to live in a world of absolute fairness. A fair world may make life nice for us, but only as nice as we are. We may get what we deserve, but I wonder how much that is and whether we would really be satisfied. A world with grace will give us more than we deserve. It will give us life, even in our suffering.

And so I discovered that it is not on our forgiveness any more than on our goodness that the world’s healing hinges, but on God’s. When He tells us to love our enemies, He gives, along with the command, the love itself. Corrie ten Boom, The Hiding Place

we insist life be fair, we will be disappointed. People will fail us and will not pay for it. Systems will fail us and will successfully resist efforts to reform them. Then what will we do?

More destruction has been done from unforgiveness than from all the wrongdoing in the world that created the conditions for it.