Sadness
Each Tuesday, we invite you to pray for our city or yourself in different ways. Each Tuesday, we invite you to fast for our city, to do without something you depend on so you can foster a dependency on Jesus. Our hope is to form a greater attachment to Jesus so that we can speak as he spoke when he said in John 5, “I only do what I see my Father doing.” How could Jesus say this? He spent intentional time in prayer and fasting.
Introduction:
Scripture is full of language about feelings. The writers of Scripture are very in touch with who they are and comfortable expressing their emotions to their audience or to God. Many of the Psalms are of David speaking to God about his feelings. He is so relationally secure that he is unafraid to tell God exactly how he feels. This is certainly true of Jesus.
Whether He is at the tomb of His close friend Lazarus, looking over Jerusalem weeping for the city, or on the cross crying out in fear that His Father has forsaken Him, Jesus understands and communicates His feelings. In a few of our prayer guides this year, we will explore some of our emotions. The more proficient we become in recognizing what we are feeling and speaking the truth about that to our Father, the more proficient we will be in attaching to Him and others.
Movement 1: Recalling our Sadness
Reflect:
Chip Dodd, author of Voice of the Heart, writes these words:
If you wish to experience life to the fullest, your heart requires that you be willing to feel sadness. Sadness is the feeling that speaks to how much you value what is missed, what is gone, and what is lost. It also speaks of how deeply you value what you love, what you have, and what you live...The more you live an openhearted life of fullness, the more you lose. Sadness gives us the gift of valuing and honoring life.
Respond:
Perhaps this understanding of sadness is new to you. Stop here for a moment. Get out a notebook, journal, or open a new document and write or type out what you think about sadness. Were you told to “get over it” when you felt sad as a child? Were you conditioned to “sweep hard things under the rug” and just “move on?” Did you have a parent that modeled how to grieve well, or did your family of origin dismiss the feeling of sadness? Journal the thoughts that come to mind as you answer these questions.
Reflect:
This next step will be more difficult. Sit in silence for a few moments and invite the Holy Spirit to bring to mind three to six significant losses from your life. No need to manufacture anything here. Do not feel pressured to linger too long on these moments. Just recall what these moments were in your mind and write them down in your journal.
Respond:
Look back at each of the losses you wrote down and consider how you dealt with or grieved these losses. Did you grieve well? Did you ignore the pain? Have you experienced healing from the pain you experienced? Write down your thoughts to these questions.
Movement 2: Grieving Like Jesus
Read: John 11:17-37
When Jesus arrived at Bethany, he was told that Lazarus had already been in his grave for four days. Bethany was only a few miles down the road from Jerusalem, and many of the people had come to console Martha and Mary in their loss. When Martha got word that Jesus was coming, she went to meet him. But Mary stayed in the house. Martha said to Jesus, “Lord, if only you had been here, my brother would not have died. But even now I know that God will give you whatever you ask.”
Jesus told her, “Your brother will rise again.”
“Yes,” Martha said, “he will rise when everyone else rises, at the last day.”
Jesus told her, “I am the resurrection and the life. Anyone who believes in me will live, even after dying. Everyone who lives in me and believes in me will never ever die. Do you believe this, Martha?”
“Yes, Lord,” she told him. “I have always believed you are the Messiah, the Son of God, the one who has come into the world from God.” Then she returned to Mary. She called Mary aside from the mourners and told her, “The Teacher is here and wants to see you.” So Mary immediately went to him.
Jesus had stayed outside the village, at the place where Martha met him. When the people who were at the house consoling Mary saw her leave so hastily, they assumed she was going to Lazarus’s grave to weep. So they followed her there. When Mary arrived and saw Jesus, she fell at his feet and said, “Lord, if only you had been here, my brother would not have died.”
When Jesus saw her weeping and saw the other people wailing with her, a deep anger welled up within him, and he was deeply troubled. “Where have you put him?” he asked them.
They told him, “Lord, come and see.” Then Jesus wept. The people who were standing nearby said, “See how much he loved him!” But some said, “This man healed a blind man. Couldn’t he have kept Lazarus from dying?”
Reflect:
Jeff Schulte and Phil Herndon write in The Voice of the Heart Study Guide:
The Scripture continues with, “and troubled.” He was “stirred up” and “agitated. Jesus had a visceral response that came out of his love for this woman, and his own feeling of sadness and grief at the interruption of death that had engulfed his intimate friend. Like a foaming, furious whirlpool, his heart was stirred and agitated.
Jesus knew what he was going to do. He could have just raised Lazarus from the dead immediately upon arrival. He does not. Jesus sees the grief of his friend Mary, he thinks about the loss of his friend Lazarus, and rather than rushing to “fix it,” an option that is most often not available to us in times of tragedy or trauma, he teaches us what to do instead. He weeps with us. He weeps with us because Jesus knows how to grieve well. Jesus knows that if our hearts are experiencing such sorry that tears are breaking through, we have truly lost something beloved in that moment. Jesus knows that accepting and acknowledging that loss is the doorway to healing.
Respond:
If you were to write down how you see Jesus in this moment, what would you say? Does he “ugly cry” with Mary? What is Jesus’s body doing? When you consider the word wept, do you think Jesus’s shoulders were moving violently up and down? Was his nose running? Can you imagine the humanity of Jesus in that moment and not see the domesticated hippy that he often has been portrayed as, but more like the best friend who is willing to have his robe soaked with your tears as you weep in your deepest loss? Not only is he willing to let his robe be soaked with your tears, but he’s soaking yours with his.
Return now to those significant losses you wrote down earlier. If you’ve never grieved those moments well, or at all, would you invite Jesus to sit with you now and weep over them with you? This is no silver bullet to “make it all better.” It might, however, be the beginning of healing as you accept and acknowledge a few of the great losses in your life. As you invite Jesus in, ask him to be very present with you and make himself known. Ask him to hold your heart as you become vulnerable before him.
Note:
The work of addressing our sadness is never easy. Well done if you have opened your heart to invite Jesus into your prayer time today to begin to address your sadness. If you found this exercise difficult, explore more of the story of Jesus through the Gospels to see how often he expresses some form of sadness. Jesus loves deeply. Therefore, he is often open to being hurt and experiencing some form of loss. Jesus never runs from or hides from his pain. He models for us how to feel our feelings. If you recognized during this prayer time today that you need to do more work around these experiences and you want to take a further step with a trusted counselor, please email us at info@kcunderground.org.
*If you need more help developing an emotionally healthy community of 3 to 5 people, check out Hesed Discipleship Network
*This prayer guide is adapted from “The Voice of the Heart Bible Study” by Jeff Shulte and Phil Herndon (2019, Tin Man Ministries). To explore the emotion of sadness further, this is a great resource, along with The Voice of the Heart by Chip Dodd.