When Grief Attends Us

Confessions of a Successful Church Planter, Chapter Four

Joseph Lear

and

Heather Weber (Dear Exiles)

Oct 31, 2022

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This is Confessions of a Successful Church Planter.

Heather Weber is an ordained minister in the Assemblies of God, coach, and the founding pastor of CityChurch, Iowa City.

CityChurch was planted in 2016, and it closed in August of this year.

I have asked Heather to write a series of posts under the title “Confessions of a Successful Church Planter.” The title is intended to poke at, deconstruct, and contradict prevailing, unreflective (and indeed unChristian) narratives of church success. We invite readers to catch up on Chapter One, Chapter Two, and Chapter Three.

A murder of faceless henchmen is hot on our trail; we have to find a way out, fast. We hurry our way down a staircase and into the bowels of the old building, but I stop short in a darkened hallway, realizing that my friend, Mr. Otter, is not with us. We cannot leave him behind.
I loop back, running toward the bathroom with its brown-tiled floors and parchment-colored walls, and stop short just as Mr. Otter stumbles through the doorway. I gape in surprise because my friend, while very much a human being, has grown the nose and tusks of a warthog. What happened to change his face?! I wonder, but don’t have time for answers. I warn him of the danger, urge him to get out of the building, and hope he will take heed.
Turning on a heel, I race back down the hallway, find a ground-level exit, and run with all the speed I can muster, soon catching up to my husband as he and the others run to safety, too. Adrenaline pumping, I look back at the building of our momentary imprisonment, and I read the old sign that was posted in the ground decades before.
“Oh!” I exclaim as if the sign explains everything. “Mark, did you know where we were!? We were in the Museum of Bereaved Animals!”

I woke from this Narnia-esque dream the morning after an inland hurricane decimated central Iowa. I am an Iowan long-practiced with storms and tornadoes, but the Derecho of 2020 blew in with 126-mile-per-hour winds, wrecking homes, power lines, and ancient trees faster than any storm I’d witnessed before. Cedar Rapids, the community 30 minutes north of us (and where a couple of our online CityChurchers lived), suffered the worst damage, with outages lasting weeks in some places and half the city’s tree canopy demolished.

Three months before the derecho, our friend Brian died. A beloved member of CityChurch, he was missing from a CityChurch Dungeons and Dragons online game night. Brian–a passionate gamer, faithful friend to my family, and the most gentle person I knew-–never missed an opportunity to play. Late that Friday evening, as I was preparing for bed, I got the call from his mom: Brian was found in a local state park on a trail where he’d collapsed and died in the presence of the hikers who found him. He was 32 years old.

It was only three days after Brian died that George Floyd was murdered, and the country watched replays in horror. The streets erupted with the grief and outrage of (by conservative counts) 15 million Americans.1 That week, the worldwide COVID-19 death toll numbered almost four hundred thousand. By the time the derecho flew through the Midwest in August, the death count had doubled.2

Do you know where you are? The Holy Spirit whispered as I woke up, echoing the question I asked in my dream. Did I understand the context in which I had been trying to navigate, both personally and pastorally, the losses of the pandemic, the derecho, and Brian, as well as the pain of my Black friends and Black Americans at large? Did I know where I was in the context of all this collective grief?

Not fully. But, I got the Spirit’s point that day—we were living through a time of disfiguring grief, and we were becoming bereaved “animals,” like my disfigured dream-friend Mr. Otter. The unprocessed grief was changing people before my eyes. They were living with chronic levels of anger, anxiety, or depression that were additions to their baseline constitutions. I include myself in that observation: While I typically don’t experience long seasons of depression, by December of that year, my grief was so large and consuming that I lay on my bedroom floor, suffocated by gloom, and contemplated death as preferable to the world I was living in. (Reader, I was appropriately sobered; I sought support immediately.) In lighter moments, I’d simply quip that the entire world should be diagnosed with a severe adjustment disorder.

Grieving people are oft-times fearful people; loss inspires fear of more loss. If grief disfigures, then fear, like Lewis’s White Witch, turns us to stone and freezes us in place.3 We, like Mr. Otter in the musty museum, were conceivably on our way to calcification and preservation because of our unprocessed grief.

The closest biblical advice I can find for preventing these long-term side-effects of grief (and subsequent fear) is that we give expression to it—with others. There is no salve, pill, confession, or to-do list that gets us to the other side. But weeping gets us there. The psalm celebrating the Israelites’ exile from and return to Zion takes us from the images of weeping to joyful shouting,4 a story of redemption. However, their weeping and subsequent laughter make obvious sense: they suffer loss, and what is lost is restored. Why wouldn’t they shout for joy? However, Jesus pronounces a universal blessing over the downtrodden who weep:5 like a law of physics, laughter follows weeping. And then, the Apostle Paul underscores the necessity of togetherness in grief’s expression: “weep with those who weep.”6

Until the last two years, I’d withheld tears on a regular basis. Weeping by myself seemed impractical at best. Tony, my former associate pastor, was and still is much better than I am at togetherness in grief. Thirty minutes after I learned the news about Brian, Tony showed up on my back patio. One of my daughters needed togetherness too, so the three of us cried and told stories about Brian into the night, and my daughter caught our stories on camera as she filmed the journey of a nine-inch-long earthworm puddling its way across the concrete.

Togetherness was the one thing that had been almost impossible to accomplish for our congregation in the eight weeks prior. Yet, as the days crept slowly forward from Brian’s death, we were able to ever-so-carefully arrange a local memorial service for our friend in a borrowed church building (assigned seats, invitation-only, masks required except when you had the mic in hand). One by one, Brian’s friends and family held the floor; my daughter performed a song she wrote for him. With each unique articulation of grief, a crop of tears sprung up and out of us.

So how does laughter come? Lauren Winner writes, “In the here and now, the kind of laughter that friends of God pursue is proleptic—laughter that hints at or partakes of the world to come.”7 Toward the end of the service, after I’d laid a theological framework for the hope we have in Christ and after Brian’s people stood one after another to honor him, Tony—the D&D dungeon master on Friday game nights—took the floor:

“He wanted to play a wizard, but a wizard that was mute—that could only talk to you by passing you notes.” The mourners giggled with each unfolding detail of Brian’s elaborate character, whose family scammed innocent people out of their gold by burying fake treasure, creating fake treasure maps, and charging people for guidance on (fake) treasure hunts. “Everything I’m telling you is what he literally told me,” Tony insisted as laughter filled the room.

I can’t pinpoint a timeframe for the laughter that comes after weeping. Yet, a faithful endeavor to mourn fully when we come to the losses in our stories seems to be the only way forward. Then, and only then, should we watch attentively for the laughter that comes after a relationship, good health, the life of a loved one, or a season of ministry comes to an end. Indeed, I am watching for this laughter after the closing of CityChurch.

How did laughter arrive at Brian’s funeral? I’m not sure. But that laughter was in some ways fueled by our imaginations—and Brian’s. I think the laughter of God’s friends must be imaginative, too—joy that conceives, at least in part, of “the world to come.” Imagination, like heaven, lives in our hearts, enabling us to sojourn hopefully within the bitter middle of a story that ends well.

When Grief Attends Us

Confessions of a Successful Church Planter, Chapter Four

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