Week 12: Sad
Weekly Chapters:
Judges 18-I Samuel 9
Passage of the Week: I Samuel 1:8
Adjective:
1. Affected by unhappiness or grief
2. Expressive of sorrow
3. Causing sorrow
Thesaurus:·
Bitter
Mournful
Dismal
Somber
Heartbroken
Sorry
Melancholy
Father God,
Guide me today. Give me the strength to know more about You and the strength to apply it to my life. Let the desire for knowledge wash over me and bring understanding to my ways. Let me see what in my past shapes my future.
Amen
Authentic vulnerability:
Sad, sadness, feeling sorrow can engulf our lives. We need to feel our feelings and we will go through times of sorrow, which are necessary. God gives us sorrow to grieve for people who have gone by, for loss, for disappointment. We all feel this, some more than others. Our worlds are framed by so much of our past, past loss, past love, past misunderstandings, past hardships. Most of the time we can feel our sadness and then bounce back from it, learn from it, feel it, let it shape us into who we are. And then there are other times that sadness overtakes us. Sadness becomes a major driving part of our lives and directs our decisions. We cannot get away from it as it engulfs our lives and will not let us loose. We get to the point where the sadness is in us and we become the sadness. No longer are we mom, dad, son, daughter, we have become a shell who instead of experiencing life, we become a bystander, a watcher, an observer, caged by stress or sadness or grief. Daily we relive the saddest moments and disappointments but life keeps going. We become captive, no longer free, but on autopilot, cruise control.
So many of us feel a great sadness in our lives. God’s plan does not include our missing out on living or sadness taking over our lives.
What is your Authentic Truth?
Study:
In these passages, we see four women consumed by sorrow for very legitimate reasons.
Naomi, in the passages of Ruth, loses both her husband and sons leaving her with no one except her two daughters-in-law. Her daughter-in-law’s lost their husbands. All three women were faced with great loss and sorrow. This deep sorrow could overtake them, swallow them, engulf them. However, each woman leaned on each other in the grief and shared their strength.
In chapter 1 of Ruth, Naomi instructs her daughters-in-law to go back to their families for support and so that they may find new husbands. Orpah, not Oprah, goes back home with her family while Ruth stays with Naomi and insists on standing by Naomi and sharing strength. Ruth and Naomi go back to Naomi’s homeland for registration, which was away from Ruth’s family. Naomi continues to support Ruth and encourages her to find Boaz as a husband and benefactor creating the lineage to Christ Jesus.
In I Samuel 1, we see the jealousy and bullying of two wives: Peninnah who can bear sons for her husband, and Hannah who is not.
Because Hannah cannot bear children she is filled with loss and grief. Her grief is also filled with shame for not bearing children. Today we have means and methods to overcome through artificial insemination or adoption, yet the sorrow still exists for us as we see mothers who easily conceive, who have womb excited for children, whose body is willing and able. Hannah felt this pain, the pain of a woman who feels incomplete without a child, the one thing man cannot do, the one thing that sets her apart from her husband. We know that Hannah had great sorrow over her feeling of childlessness. In I Samuel 1:10, Hannah feels deep anguish. She was so devastated she could not eat (I Samuel 1:7). Her recourse was to go to the temple in her mournful state and pray. She was so disheveled in her grief that Eli thought she was a drunk.
How many times have we felt as if our world was falling apart, full of ugly crying, just letting it all out? Was that Hannah? Did she full out ugly cry in grief? I am sure that’s exactly what she did.
But sorrow and sadness are gifts that we cannot see at the time. Crying is a release, you see this with babies and it’s no different in us. Sorrow helps us process our feelings. Through the process of grief, sadness guides us from where we are to where we want to be.
Without sadness, how do you define joy? Ying and yang, you cannot have one without the other so this is a gift of healing, meant for retrospection. And on the other side of healing is growth and acceptance.
Father God,
Thank You for the blessings You have given me. Thank You for Your guidance and Your grace. Thank You for the downtime so that I can fully appreciate the good times. Allow me to gain an understanding of the feeling of grief so that I can learn and grow. Thank You, Lord, I love You.
Amen.
Homework:
Do you have sadness or grief in your life that is too strong for you? Find a counselor to guide you through your grief, a friend, your pastor. But feel your feelings, do not cover them, they were a gift to allow you to enjoy the beauty on the other side.
