What Do You Do When Your Worst Nightmare Comes True?
Special guest post by Daniel Yang, and an invitation to the next Louder Song Community online gathering...
Join me on Wednesday, March 13 from 7:30-8:30pm CT for our next monthly Louder Song Community Gathering. Go here to find out details and register for this free online event - for grievers and those walking with the grieving. This month, I’ll be joined by my good friend Daniel Yang, to talk about hope that heals.
Today, I have invited Daniel to share something from an early life experience that has defined how he understands grief and lament.
If you don’t know Daniel, he is National Director of Churches of Welcome at World Relief, has pastored and helped plant churches in Detroit, Dallas-Fort Worth, Toronto, and Chicago. He is a missiologist and co-author of Inalienable. Most importantly, Daniel is a husband to his amazing wife, Linda, and dad to some incredible kiddos. I know you’ll be encouraged by his thoughts on grief and hope, below.
What do you do when your worst nightmare comes true?
It was July 2000. Linda and I were riding in a minivan with our best friends on I-94. We were headed back to Detroit from Minneapolis - pumped, full of excitement and awe. I was on a leadership team that successfully planned and executed a youth conference for over 2000 youth! I remember so many details from that week. We were married a little over a year. Linda was a few months pregnant. Mid-conference, I broke my foot and during the worship time, a close musician friend of mine prayed for me - releasing God’s overwhelming healing presence. I was only 20 years-old. Nothing about life at that point prepared me for the news we were about to discover.
About three-fourths of the way home, we pulled over for gas and bumped into some other conference attendees, also traveling home. We greeted one another and reminisced about the event.
Mid-conversation, they dropped a bomb, “Did you guys hear about the accident this morning?”
“No, what accident?”
“Well, this morning a youth group was headed back home from the conference. One of their 15-passenger vans rolled over. They were from Detroit.”
My heart sank. What if that was my church?
Lips quivering, I managed to ask, “How bad was it?”
They replied somberly, “Two people died.”
At that moment, life went out of me - the gas station and my mind began spinning.
My close friend and his wife, John and Susan, were the drivers. My younger brother, Dave, was with them. I had spent eight years of my life mentoring and loving these youth. What was going on? Could it be my church? A different church? Did someone I love die?
My cellphone was dead so I dug up some change and used a payphone to call home to find out what happened. When I finally reached someone, they confirmed the nightmare; it was indeed our youth group that had the accident.
Dave, my brother was on the passenger side of the van. He was safe but injured. Apparently, the whole ride he hadn’t worn his seatbelt, but just a few minutes before the accident, he woke up, put it on and fell back asleep.
Susan, John’s wife was killed, along with one of the prettiest and sweetest girls we knew - Esther. She was sixteen. She became a Christian that week at the conference.
I began hyperventilating and got lightheaded. While the person on the phone continued talking, all I heard was silence.
After the call, I grabbed Linda and held her to me, and just wept and wept. The rest of the way home I slept on and off with my head in her lap, sobbing. We drove straight to John’s house, who had already arrived home from the hospital, still covered in his wife’s blood, and holding their daughter. I ran to him, giving him the tightest bearhug I’d ever given anyone.
I can still hear him sobbing in my ear, “My wife’s gone. My wife’s gone. How am I supposed to go on?”
The worst nightmares aren’t about monsters; they’re about loss.
Any kind of grief makes you ask this question, “Who am I now without you?”
Because grief is about losing a loved one and losing yourself.
In his book Four Loves, CS Lewis explains that there are things we’ll never see again in people who are still alive because they could only be brought out by those who have died:
“Now that Charles is dead, I shall never again see Ronald's (JRR Tolkien’s) reaction to a specifically Caroline joke. Far from having more of Ronald, having him 'to myself' now that Charles is away, I have less of Ronald.”
This is so true. In fact, one of my favorite things about my wife Linda was seeing her around her dad before he died. She was like a little child in his presence. There was an instinctive trust that she had in him - a trust that I’m not sure if I’ve even earned yet. He brought out her childlike faith. I haven’t seen it since her dad was alive.
When we lose loved ones, we lose parts of ourselves as well, and that feeling is multiplied throughout our families, friend groups, and communities.
But this kind of loss isn’t limited to death.
Maybe you’ve experienced the loss of a dream - you lost your job, your health, your status, your father walked away, your parents became like your children. Or maybe you made huge mistakes and continue to do so.
What do you do when your worst nightmare comes true?
In these losses, we are invited to weep boldly and simultaneously cling to God.
Weep over lost relationships.
Let the tears flow.
Cry over the brokenness of this world.
Grieve over violence and injustice.
Mourn your losses, deeply.
And at the same time, remember your God and cling to him.
Worship in your weeping.
Take a look at the second half of the Psalm 126:
4 Restore our fortunes, O Lord, like streams in the Negev! 5 Those who sow in tears shall reap with shouts of joy! 6 He who goes out weeping, bearing the seed for sowing, shall come home with shouts of joy, bringing his sheaves with him.
The Israelites, in this song, are asking God to “restore” their fortunes, which is a big, bold, daring ask, because at this point in history, they had lived a nightmare. A nightmare of suffering, captivity, displacement, even genocide. Yet somehow, they’re taking their tears and investing them. It’s hard to imagine, but their nightmare became the seed for their harvest.
Your greatest place of pain is often your greatest place of ministry.
Grief is like sinking. It’s a cement block tied to your feet, and you’re thrown into the ocean. In order not to hit the bottom, you need something to keep you afloat. Something powerful enough to pull you and the cement block back to the surface.
That something is hope in Christ.
In Christ Jesus, we have a God who weeps and grieves. In both his suffering and his resurrection, we find the hope that keeps us floating in the midst of our ocean of grief and our nightmares.
In fact, something we have to stop saying to each other in loss is, “Don’t be sad. You’ll see them again in heaven.” That’s not only insensitive, it’s also entirely incomplete. Jesus’s resurrection is more than just about seeing each other again in heaven one day.
In Resurrection, death is overcome.
In Resurrection, failures become successes.
In Resurrection, lost dreams and lost health and lost relationships are fulfilled.
In Resurrection, bitterness turns into joy.
In Resurrection, misery can be transformed into ministry.
In Christ, in Resurrection, the nightmare becomes untrue.
You may feel like you have lost yourself while grieving the loss of your loved one. You may be living a nightmare. Even as you weep, you can worship. You can trust in God’s goodness, in Jesus’s resurrection. One day your hope will be renewed. Your fortunes will be restored. Your tears will become a harvest.
Daniel Yang has a new course out about church planting with Seminary Now. Use the code AUBREY25 for a Seminary Now discount. And be sure to join us on March 13th for the next monthly Louder Song online Gathering.