He was despised and rejected by men: a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief; and as one from whom men hide their faces. He was despised, and we esteemed him not. Surely he has borne our griefs and carried out sorrows; yet. we esteemed him stricken, smitten by God ,and afflicted.

Isaiah 53: 3-4

I wish I could get away from the fact that being a christian is hard. I see in myself a grief I have come to know, and not truly comprehend. I write not as a call for help, but more as a process of my own healing journey. This will not be the joyful side of my walk with Christ. Instead, I will share how I relate to Jesus as the man of sorrows as written in Isaiah 53. It’s not comfortable thinking of Jesus as a man of sorrows. I like the healing Jesus. I like the joyful Jesus. I appreciate the clear-out the temple Jesus. I admire the loving Jesus and the resurrected messiah. I am comfortable with anything but a grieving Jesus. And yet, that’s exactly as Isaiah predicted He would be. And the reality is I relate the most to this Jesus. The Jesus who asks His Father, take this cup from me. Grief is something, I have lodged deep in my chest but never wanted that gift. I didn’t want to share how I felt because it seemed to contradict everything I heard about him. despite the verse above or the ones about him weeping or being abandoned by his friends. I thought JOY was the hallmark of my faith. While it is a gift of the Spirit, there’s more to the story.

Sorrow and Gladness meet in Grief

Initially, I believed that when I became a christian, God would direct my life as I imagined it. I would get married in my early twenties, have 3, 5 or 7 kids and enjoy having my own family. I thought God would bless me because “I waited”. I thought if I do what I feel God has called me to do, it must lead to good right? I guess good as I defined it. I find myself at 32 years old stuck because I haven’t reconciled with my grief. When I first read the book of Ecclesiastes, I loved it! And I don’t mean that jokingly. I loved it because it was honest and real and relatable. Ecclesiastes is not known for being many of people’s favorite book of the Bible. There’s a heaviness and sadness to it that feels almost uncomfortable to read as Solomon often says everything is meaningless. But when I read Ecclesiastes 7:3, it told me there was a connection between grief/ sorrow and joy/ gladness. It states “ Sorrow is better than laughter, for by sadness of face the heart is made glad.” I had never heard this verse preached on a pulpit. I had never heard anyone talk about how sorrow can make the heart glad. I had no life experiences, telling me what that meant. But as I continued to lived my life I have found this to be true. I have seen that deep sorrow, can beget deep joy like opposite sides of the same deep well. It can is the choice word and I think if it will is defined by us and our response. I have learned that the capacity to experience and feel deep sorrow is the same capacity to experience and feel deep love. If only we were willing to grieve to allow that love to shine. Queen Elizabeth, spoke about this relationship in her profound quote after 9/11, “Grief is the price we pay for love”. So what love am I paying the price for?

Does Love Cause Grief?

My grief is connected to loving God. To love someone is to love them the way they want to be loved. According to John 14:15, Jesus says if you love me, keep my commandments. If I am honest I am grieved by one particular act of obedience. My sophomore year of College, I felt God leading me to move to Colorado to help with a church plant. Despite, Colorado’s beautiful landscapes, its the last place I wanted to be.Moving away meant leaving behind everything & everyone I knew. It meant embracing a new life in a small town with people I barely knew. All because I felt called. I wrestled with going to Colorado. I did a summer internship in 2013 and I had never felt such a battle between my flesh and Spirit. I felt my flesh begging me to go home to Fl and my Spirit saying you will come back. I was terrified but wanted to be like those written in Hebrews 11 who had great faith. A faith that God would be proud of; faith that could only make sense looking back. So I moved to Colorado and experienced the hardest 4 years of my life. My plan was to move May 2018. Our lead pastors were the only full- time leaders. They shared with us that they needed to work on their marriage and were stepping away in January of 2018. I commended them for taking time to focus on their marriage. But what happened next has left an indelible mark. Our lead pastor, was a woman and her husband was the executive pastor. They took time off but the truth started rolling in. Long story short, our lead pastor ended up divorcing her husband and marrying a young man she was discipling. Their marriage was a sham, not what they posted about on Facebook or preached on pulpits. They had not been happy for years. So many hidden things I learned about the leaders who I followed and trusted. They would preach at church and recruit volunteers, while they themselves were not on the same page about being in Colorado honestly. My former pastors were now acting as enemies, revealing a truth I was not ready to face. Being asked would you fight for my kids in court because the other partner wants to take them away; luckily it didn’t come that. Trying to listen as the other partner who preached the sanctity of marriage was now breaking it to marry one of her disciples. It was something I could not comprehend. Neither would I understand this experience’s profound effects on me. My last act as apart of Elements Church was voting whether the church would be absorbed by another, have different leadership or cease to exist. Why would God send me to a church plant that would fail?

Why God?

Why would God send me to this place? Why would God knowing how it would end allow me to experience such heartbreak? He knew I now would go through deconstruction. He knew I would struggle going to the one place I loved and I thought I had figured out? How did he think I could walk into what was once sacred and hate it? How, when everyone had their head bowed in worship and I could only question incessantly? Lord, why me? Why did I sit in a million services and only hear all the same things? Why did church seem to be some cookie cutter organization replicated time after time? Where was the life? Where was the living?

Church Hurt & Us

I remember One Sunday after about 8 months of looking for a church amidst my own pain, I sat in this large church. The pastor preached but wasn’t proud or trying to rouse the crowd with mere emotion. He preached the word of God, no more and no less. I wept; because it was the simplicity of the gospel I craved. In the midst of the church hurt, deconstruction and questioning, I just wanted truth. While I did have questions for God and why He allowed me to go through this particular situation, I found myself not wanting to leave Him. I more so questioned the human traditions & practices that have become common place in church. I understood why Jesus so often called out the religious leaders. In Mark 7:8, Jesus says ” You leave the commandment of God and hold to the tradition of men. And he said to them, you have a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God in order to establish your tradition.” The word of God became more true about Him and about us. There is no one righteous, no not one. I once thought there were; and I once thought I was.I have spent so much of my life thinking perfection was the prize or afraid I didn’t have it right. When God knew none of us would, so he sent perfection in the form of His Son. it doesn’t erase the hurt or current pain but one day it will. I can write a novel on church hurt & deconstruction and maybe one day I will. One day I hope to share about my story fully but for now I want to share a few things I have learned on this journey.

A Word for US

The current state of the church is our fault, both congregants and pastors and teachers. Many false teachers have crept in and sadly we cannot tell ( Jude 1:3-4). We are content to lift up men on pedestals and have a low view of God. there is so much hope & grace for us; but as this time I lament, I yearn for the purity of the gospel. I hate the misuse of authority on pulpits. I hate false teachers. I hate that some churches care more about numbers than discipleship. My grief is a call to action to myself and others. I speak to Christians, when I say we have put the weight of making disciples on pastors without making our own. We are looking to get fed, without feeding and learning to eat.

I have learned the wicked will not always prosper even if they are now. They will have their day. But what if the wicked is us? I feel a deep call to repentance in my own relationship with God and for the church. I long to see us wake up. Cause one day we will all have our day and he will judge every action and word we say. Will we lean on our own actions ? Cause the only righteousness is His. Repent for the Kingdom of God is near. He is coming.

Maybe my grief, me going through the church hurt & questions was to make me see how clearly I need Him? How clearly we need Him!