“In this world, you will have trouble…” (John 16:33, NIV)
-Jesus of Nazareth
“In this world you will have trouble…” That might be the most understated sentence in the English language. We can only imagine that as Jesus said that, He felt the trouble personally, taking on the hurt of a broken and lost world, taking it on enough to crush Him. Trouble puts it mildly.
As of this writing, there have been a confirmed 150 lives lost due to Hurricane Helene. It’s easy to read through a sentence like that and catch the sterilized fact that lives were lost, but miss the tragedy contained within that number. One loss is life-shattering. It lurches the world off its axis for many people, forever shattering their lives. After he lost his 28 year-old son in a climbing accident, Nicholas Wolterstorff wrote, “There’s a hole in the world now . . . A center, like no other, of memory and hope and knowledge and affection which once inhabited this earth is gone. Only a gap remains. A perspective in this world unique in this world which once moved about in this world has been rubbed out . . . There’s nobody who saw just what he saw, knows what he knew, remembers what he remembered, loves what he loved . . . Questions I have can never now get answers. The world is emptier.”
Multiply that by 150.
As if that were not tragic enough, countless more lives have been upended, with loss to property, livelihoods, and ways of life that are multiplied by the tens of thousands.
And this from a single natural disaster.
We know loss, don’t we? We can hardly turn on the news these days without hearing an anchor regaling us with the list of natural or sociopolitical ills befalling our world. Wars and rumors of wars, accidents, deaths. We turn off the TV or exit the web page only to hear the haunting echoes of the loss occurring, if not “over there” in some other part of the country or the world, then even “right here” at home, in our city, our neighborhood, even of own house or in the mirror staring back at us.
And it’s not only the shock of death that we count as loss, the major strike against our souls; it is also the thousand stabs of smaller shocks to the system, the disappointments and disillusionments that haunt us daily, the hopes that we have for life to come through for us in a myriad of ways when instead we find frustration or pain. It happens in our search for meaning and purpose, when we find in those times the disappointment of futility and the voice of failure and meaninglessness. It happens in our search for the connection and security we need through relationships, when in those times we find instead moments of profound isolation and rejection, especially when we are most vulnerable to the lies that we are worthless and unloved.
For most of us, we can hardly get to young adulthood without facing multiple losses, multiple cuts that cause our hearts to bleed. For some of us, childhood itself is a precarious journey riddled with sharp, pointy daggers. Tragedy and trouble abound. Our hearts do not only grieve in the face of loss, for loss is but one form of change that we are not ready to make. Rather, our hearts grieve in the face of change, of expectations jolted, of longings unmet. “Hope deferred,” as the Proverb reminds us of longing that goes unseen and unfulfilled “makes the heart sick…” (Proverbs 13:12, NIV).
Where does that leave us? There’s more to the story!
Author Info
Dr. Brian Fidler
Dr. Brian Fidler is an assistant professor of counseling at Colorado Christian University and a psychotherapist in private practice, helping couples for more than a decade. He has worked with hundreds of couples through the years who wish to work through their marriage struggles and deepen their intimate connection. Dr. Fidler and his wife have been married for 20 years and enjoy spending time with their family, reading, and exploring the outdoors.