New and normal are words that do not belong together. But that is precisely what step eight is all about, establishing a new normal. For most of us, at this stage in our journey, we still do not want a new normal. The residual grief in our heart still longs for the old normal. If this conflict exists within you, do not let it pull you backwards on your journey. It is not hypocritical to pursue a new normal against your heart’s desire when reality insists that you must.

Even if you are optimistic about this new normal, a new normal is scary. It is unknown. It is relatively permanent. It soon will be the part of your life that occurs without thought or reflection. The disruption of this new normal will be what triggers your next pilgrimage through grief. If you are intimidated by this step, do not let that convince you that you have not completed the prior steps adequately.

The phrase “new normal” seems to imply more intentionality than it actually requires. You do not need a spreadsheet with seven columns and twenty-four rows to itemize and color-code what your expectations of life will be by activity, relationship, and season. As you grieve well and clean, a new normal will happen. A big part of this chapter will be devoted to identifying the defining marks of this new normal so you can be comforted as this occurs.

The chapter will also include two other sections. First, we will look at how this new normal assimilates into your life story. This will be a place for you to summarize what you learned and how you have grown over the course of this study.

Second, guidance will be provided to help you think through how to prepare to transition from your current Freedom Group, counseling relationship, or mentor relationship into general small group ministry of the church for continued encouragement and growth. You are about to enter a new season of transition: from healing to living. These materials are meant to provide guidance on what “healthy” looks like after grief.

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Goals and grief can be hard concepts to mesh. We wish they got along better. We want to be able to say, “I have Saturday open so I plan to get half my grief out by journaling, looking at pictures, having an extended time of candid prayer, crying several times, and then updating my good-bye letter to capture the progress I’ve made during the day.” But thinking of goal setting as a time table or schedule, will become extremely frustrating and ineffective.

Also, if we think of goal setting as “overcoming” grief, then we will have a sense of failure whenever grief returns around special occasions, triggered by a song or quote, or randomly interrupts our day. This is why we say we are identifying goals to “combat the impact of my suffering.” Grief is something we experience rather than conquer. Therefore, we will grow from it rather than eliminate it.

We did not cause grief, so we cannot “uncause” it. Grief is not a character defect or sin, so we cannot “put off” grief. Grief is part of our story and because of that there will be times when its significance continues to impact our life. Our goal in this chapter is to further understand what healthy grief is, what healthy grief looks like, and what we can do to “grieve well” during some of the difficult times ahead.

The material for this chapter will be divided into three sections: (1) What does it mean to “progress”? (2) How to prepare for predictably hard times? (3) How to respond to unpredictably hard moments?

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There are two competing narratives for our grief: God’s and Satan’s. Every experience surrenders to an interpretation. Our interpretation of grief will influence how we understand past, present, and future events. It reinterprets the past when we think things like, “Maybe God is not who I thought he was. Maybe life does not operate the way I thought. If I had [blank] to do over again, I would do it differently.” It reinterprets the future as we apply what we learned (accurately or inaccurately) from our grief experience to make “wise” or “common sense” choices.

As we enter into this chapter, however, we have to be careful to understand what we are seeking to accomplish. Challenging wrong interpretations of grief will not end grief or make it go away. In this case, right “answers” will not necessarily result in pleasant emotions of relief and joy. It will allow for a clean grief preventing your loss from becoming an entry point for foundational lies that change your identity, definition of safety, or sense of purpose in unhealthy ways. These are the changes that would result in a residual disruption of life after the sorrow of grief has passed.

In this chapter we will look at five questions that shape our suffering story: who am I, who is God, what is death, is love worth grief, and what am I living for? We will look at them in light of grief. Our goal is not to provide a comprehensive theological answer, but to provide the foundational framework for a healthy understanding of grief.

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No matter how “clean” our interpretations or how pure our story, the sadness of grief will remain. It will hurt because someone precious is missing. Mourning (which has been happening before we named it as “step five” and will continue to happen through step nine) simply acknowledges that we will never “master grief” to the point that it does not hurt.

Sometimes Christians can believe (or at least feel) as if any negative emotional experience is a lack of confidence in God or a violation of the command to rejoice always (Phil. 4:4). We know this is not true because the sinless Son of God wept at the death of his good friend Lazarus (John 11:35). In addition to Jesus’ example we have commands to weep with those who weep (Rom. 12:15).

In this chapter we are going to examine the sadness of grief, the painful sense of unchanging absence. In this step, we are going to explore what it means to walk through this sadness (Psalm 23:4) rather than around or away from it. In many ways the first four chapters have prepared you to mourn your loss in its entirety (both physical and symbolic aspects of the loss) with less emotional distractions from unhealthy themes. But even “clean grief” is not a muted grief.

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At several points in the study you have probably begun to question God, doubt Him, be angry at Him, or wonder if what you think about Him really makes any difference. We’ve brought many painful pieces of grief to mind. When we look at it, we naturally ask, “Where does ‘the buck’ stop?” It stops with God (or whoever, whatever is in control… if anything is).

It has been said that animals divide between herbivores (those eating plants) and carnivores (those eating meat), but the humans are verbivores – we live off of words, or, more accurately, off of the meaning we give to life through words. This is why we’ve emphasized the themes of story, journey, and identity so much. They are how we “digest” life.

We are now going to explore how we give meaning to all the facts, experiences, influences, and changes we have unpacked in the first three chapters. It is by giving meaning to these things that we will “process” our grief – for better or worse, healthily or unhealthily. Trying to make meaning of death requires that we wrestle with things beyond this life. Just as making sense of a tadpole becoming a frog requires considering things outside the pond.

But we must not think that this requires us to think only “nice,” theologically precise thoughts about life, death, and God. We do not approach this search for meaning as an academic exercise – like a scientist looking for the cure for cancer – but in an intensely personal way – like a cancer patient asking, “Isn’t there anything that can be done?” In order for the meaning to be satisfying or healthy it must emerge from asking the question as we are living the question – raw.

With this in mind, this chapter will ask dark questions; questions for which there are no “good” answers, only honest answers. Recognize that it is not irreverent to ask God painful questions full of honest emotion when a storm of suffering engulfs us. The fact that we bring God our questions honors Him. God knows the limitation of our mind, heart, and body. God hears them like a parent whose child is screaming because of a doctor’s shot – while the scream may sound and be meant as defiance and doubt it is an expression of faith in the parent’s love and the parent’s willingness to help if something could be done.

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The most common way to “understand” grief is to think of it in terms of stages (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance) developed from the research of Elizabeth Kubler-Ross. While useful, stages miss much of the personal significance that is present in grief. Stages may prepare us for what is probable (which means not everyone will follow the same path), but they do not help “me” understand or process that pain of “my grief.”

In this study we will focus more on story and journey than stages. These concepts are meant to capture more of the personal, messy, and non-sequential nature of grief. Grief changes the way we view life, interact with people, the meaning we attach to things, our levels of trust or security, and our sense of identity. When people or things that we love and rely on can be removed from our life, we can begin to question everything.

This changes the way we commonly classify grief. Grief is more than an emotional struggle (like depression, anxiety, guilt, etc..). Grief contains so many changing emotions that the experience itself has to be more than an emotion. Grief is more foundationally a struggle of identity. Who am I now? How has my loss changed me? How will I relate to other people? What is different about me and what is the same? Notice how Winston Smith describes one element of the story-change that occurs during the grief of a divorce.

“Your marriage gave you a roadmap for the future. Your life seemed predictable (p. 6).” Winston Smith in Divorce Recovery: Growing and Healing God’s Way

As you seek to understand the impact of your grief in this chapter, the discussion will focus upon how different factors can influence the meaning you place on your grief. In chapter four we will examine common ways these factors can be tailored into a destructive story—one that is emotionally or relationally crippling and makes God seem mean, powerless, or irrelevant. In chapter six we will examine how the Gospel gives healthy meaning to your grief without minimizing its pain.

It is here we will begin to introduce a phrase that will capture much of our objective in this study: clean grief. With this language we are comparing grief with a physical injury comparable to a cut. We cannot make such a wound heal, but we can keep it from becoming infected and, thereby, assist the natural, God-ordained healing process. The “infections” that can come with grief are the destructive interpretations we place on the experience. In this chapter we will begin to ask the kind of questions from which we make these interpretations.

“Understand”: It is important to clarify what “understanding the impact of my suffering” does and does not mean at this point. Understanding will not mean knowing “why” you experienced this loss. It does mean that you can see the number of ways that this loss is affecting you, grasp how those influences are connected with your loss, and continue to trust God as you see how He will bring comfort and redemption in the midst of your grief.

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Even though it is only the beginning of this study, thank you for getting this far. It is a testimony to your strength and courage that in the midst of your loss and pain you have not abandoned the search for hope. You may not feel strong or courageous at this point. In reality, you probably feel numb, weak, afraid, intimidated, or overwhelmed. But the mark of courage is not the absence of fear, but continuing on in the face of fear. That is what you are doing. It is commendable and good. We are praying for you and trust that God will bless this step of courageous faith with the hope and peace you desire.

The fact that you are at this point is also a testimony to God’s faithfulness and presence. You feel like your loss and circumstances could crush you, and you are right. It is an interesting study to consider how the phrase “my strength” is used in the Psalms (18:1, 22:15, 28:7, 31:10, 32:4, 38:10, 59:9, 59:17, 71:9, 102:23, 118:14, 138:3). It is as if they alternate between cries of desperation and pronouncements of praise. Grief is an experience that causes me to find the end of my strength (my abilities or emotional resources) and realize it is only My Strength (God) that can sustain me in the painful moments when death touches my life.

The goal of this study (and the relationships in which you will go through this study) is to help you access Your Strength (the one true God) in the midst of your grief. God loves you (1 John 4:19). God longs to care for you and is not just waiting for you to “get it together (Psalm 147:3).” God is not offended by your tears, but values them (Psalm 56:8). God is not repelled by your questions, even if they are angry ones (Psalm 44:23-26). God does not intend to leave you alone in your pain (Joshua 1:9). God will be patient while you grieve (2 Peter 3:9). 

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If the law of God can be summarized in a positive command, then we must end this study talking about how to “run to” God rather than merely how to “run from” sin. Life is not about what we avoid, but what pursue. How we run to God’s design for our life finds a unique expression in each person’s life. For this reason, you will do most of the writing in this chapter. It is your life that is being stewarded for God’s glory.

The goal for this chapter is that you would find things that you could give yourself in a way that is more emotionally captivating than your depression-anxiety was. But not just temporal, slightly healthier things that would quickly become the next edition of ruling desires; and not things that you give yourself to in private so that they foster selfishness and excess. Rather, eternally significant things that you give yourself to in a community of faith to maintain endurance, temper desire-excess, and become an example to others.

As you read through and answer these nine questions, remember God’s patience and timing. There will be some aspects of God’s design that you can engage in immediately. But there will also be ways you want to serve God that will require you to mature more or be equipped before you are prepared to fulfill them. The main thing is to begin to have a vision for life that involves being God’s servant and actively engaging that vision where you are currently equipped.

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Are you enjoying where you are? Even if you are not “there yet,” can you identify aspects of this part of your journey that make it significantly better than where you’ve been? Unless you can answer “yes” to this question and take delight in that answer, perseverance will be grueling.

Striving without delighting is exhausting.

One of the keys to persevering, especially with a struggle as recurrent as depression-anxiety, is the ability to enjoy an imperfect, in-process life. God does not just delight in you at the culmination of your sanctification. God delights in you right now. He invites you to agree with him; that where he has you in this process is good. This provides the emotional stability and security to engage a struggle like depression-anxiety.

With that as our starting point, let’s ask the question, “What does it look like to continue to follow God from here?” Chances are that you’ve put so much energy into getting “here” that it is not entirely clear how to prepare yourself for life after an intensive focus on change. What do you do when your life is not focused on overcoming depression-anxiety? That is the topic of this chapter and the next.

In this chapter we will look at post-temptation temptations—those temptations that uniquely arise when we’re doing “better.” In order to help you finish strong, we will look at three subjects for this stage in your journey.

1. Common Lies and Distractions
2. Victory Changes Temptation
3. Preparing for Transition

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