As a youth pastor/professor/pastor/itinerant something or other, I have studied the Bible for 45 years of ministry. Events in the Bible often separate around catalytic events like the fall in the Garden of Eden, the flood, the exile...and most importantly the birth, life, teaching, death, burial resurrection and ascension of Jesus. Our time is organized around BC and AD and no matter how the revisionist time police tries to reframe what the letters stand for, they represent "Before Christ" and "After Death" in the minds of most of us. Before and After. Like a rite of passage, one day everything is one way and the next day everything is changed.
After Katrina, the seminary, my family, my colleagues, and my students lived with a grief that comes from loss. For many, it was their first real grief. And it was a widespread grief. The people who might offer comfort were hurting just as much.
After Katrina, there were increasingly "new" people who did not have the shared trauma and it created people groups and while there was not animosity, there was an underlying current of "you just don't understand." And that is the point of my post.
When we experience a catastrophic, life-shaking event--the death of a family member, a fire, a flood, a cancer diagnosis, job change, we grieve. We don't just "move on." The ripple effects of Katrina are still felt as we look back and wonder what mental health issues, relocation issues, academic disruption issues came out of the BK/AK paradigm. The same is true for any before and after in our lives.
As many of you know, the last several years have been as traumatic for me as Katrina was. Disruption of relationships that I thought were friendships, death of my son, diagnosis of cancer, and now retirement--lots of change. Lots of grief.
But I am not grieving alone. After Katrina, a community of shared loss and and a string of "God showed up" stories slowly brought me out of the funk. After these other events, I have also had a community and a string of "God showed up" circumstances (but you will have to buy me a cup of coffee to hear them) have been slowly showing me the light at the end of the tunnel.
Maybe that is what it means when Paul says, "we grieve with hope." (1 Thessalonians 4:13). The context of the passage is that as Jesus-followers, the way we deal with the awful moments in life is observed by persons who are not following Jesus. When we grieve authentically, but demonstrate a belief in God's goodness when the evidence seems to indicate otherwise, we proclaim the power, authority, love, grace, mercy and presence of our Heavenly Father. For me, that has allowed me to put one step in front of the other. After Katrina. After grief. After loss. Before faith. Before hope. Before belief. I am not saying that faith, hope and belief were absents before, but they move from black and white to color when God shows up in our pain. We aren't the first to have "an event" and we won't be the last. Let us run the "hope relay" and tell our God stories.
Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. For by it the men of old gained approval. Hebrews 11:1, NASB
