“Thank you for the hope.”
At the end of each meeting, one participant of Grief Share offers these words to the group and their facilitators. To those that have attended Grief Share that farewell of gratitude shouldn’t be a surprise. Rooted in the Gospel, Grief Share offers a safe place for the grieving to support one another as they heal and move forward following a loss. Several times a year, PCTR volunteers facilitate the 13-week Grief Share program.
Just a few years ago, Nadia, one of the group’s facilitators, had been praying that God would open the door to a new opportunity to serve. “I had lost my husband a year and a half prior. The Lord said I will not waste your pain,” she said about joining the facilitating team. “I’m able to share the pain that I’ve gone through to help comfort others and the group has also brought comfort to me,” she continued.
Each Grief Share gathering includes a video message and a group discussion. Everything is rooted in scripture, but not everyone that attends has an existing relationship with Christ. “Some of the people are Christian. Some are not. And some are even fighting God a little bit,” explained Terry Lynn, another GriefShare facilitator at PCTR. “Some people share their own journey with God, but not everybody because not everybody is on that same page. One of the things that has inspired me is how everybody listens carefully to others.”
Annie was one of those individuals who would not have identified herself as a Christian when she began to attend a previous session of Grief Share following the 2019 death of her husband Todd. “I was never really very religious,” explained Annie. “I never identified myself as any particular religion. Grief Share was definitely Bible-based and Christian-oriented. At first, I was like, ‘I’m not really sure about this,’ but as it went on I was like ‘Yeah, this is good.'”
Those weekly meetings sparked a curiosity in Annie. She began to attend worship with us on Saturday evenings. At a Saturday service in January 2021, Annie was baptized and later that year she joined the church as a member. For her, coming to church was a quest for answers. “I knew I would never get an answer to the question ‘why?’ I wanted to join the church because maybe it would help me find some inner peace,” she shared “Maybe it would help me come to terms with what happened. Maybe it would help me understand what God’s plan is.”
Annie has found a measure of peace through faith. “I have sat in church when I did feel the Spirit come over me and I did feel a sense of peace. I have felt that outside the church,” Annie said. In addition to her Grief Share group, which continued to meet up with one another over Zoom during the months of pandemic-related lockdowns, she also attends our Monday Night Sermon Discussion Groups.
Annie’s experience wouldn’t surprise our Grief Share facilitators. As Nadia explained, “The common thread through all of this is faith in God. God is our greatest comforter. God is the one on the journey with us. His love, his compassion. His presence. Even though it’s difficult, God is always with us.” Terry Lynn agreed, “No matter how we rail against God, He does not walk away.”
Grief Share meets people where they are in their grief. There is no pressure to say anything during the discussion component of each meeting, but there is an opportunity to share. There is healing by just being in a group of others who are going through what you are. In fact, when Annie first began to attend Grief Share meetings she didn’t speak up. “I was very quiet the first couple of weeks, but then one session really hit on a nerve. We got back in our group after the video and I unloaded, and I screamed, and I ranted. I was so angry, but I got it out and it was a safe space to do that.”
Today, Annie can look at her life and see God at work. He’s there in the quiet spaces. He’s there in the trying times. “I feel the presence of the Holy Spirit come over me when I’m very troubled or I’m thinking about something. . . and then I just feel that sense of peace and I think ‘Yeah, just let go. It’s okay. I’m not in control. God is in control and He’s letting me know he’s in control.’” There was one sermon series in particular that opened the door to peace through God’s healing for Annie. “The sermon on the Lord Who Heals spoke to me on a whole level that I can never describe,” she said, “God will heal in His time and it may be in our lifetime and it may not be. I was praying so hard when Todd lay dying, ‘Please help him. Please heal him.’ Todd is healed now because of where he is, but it happened in God’s time, not in my time. I think going through Grief Share and coming to the Sermon Discussion group, the two in conjunction is very powerful because you can more fully understand how God is working in your life.”
And this brings us back to “Thank you for the hope.” It’s that promise of hope and God’s gift of peace that encourages everyone – the bereaved and their facilitators – to come back each week. As one former facilitator once said, “It’s the amazing presence of God, really. Without His presence, it wouldn’t be the same.” And it’s a sentiment Terry Lynn agrees with, adding, “It wouldn’t be, because it can’t.”