So close and yet so far

There's a recent article on CNN discussing a Church program that counsels victims of loss. The article was sparked by the disappearance and death of pregnant Jessie Davis whose funeral was at the Church last Saturday.

Church trained to help

The article starts out asking some good questions.

What would you say to Patty Porter? What comfort can you offer someone whose pregnant daughter has been murdered, the body left for a week in an open field?

That's the task that has befallen The House of the Lord, Porter's church in Akron, Ohio. Porter is the mother of Jessie Marie Davis, the pregnant 26-year-old Lake Township, Ohio, woman whose body was found June 23, 10 days after she disappeared.

At this point, I was expecting a bunch of pablum about Heaven, sin, etc. but was surprised to find that I was agreeing with the Church's approach.

The kind of trauma Porter and the rest of Davis' family have experienced goes beyond grief and enters the realm of post-traumatic stress disorder, requiring a higher level of care, he said. But there are some basic tenets for dealing with grief.

"In order to work through it, you have to face it," [Pastor] Johnson said. "You have to face the fact that there's a loss, face the fact of what you feel. And it's in facing it that you begin to move toward forsaking the pain of it.

"You don't lose the event, you don't lose the relationships that are tied into it -- relationships are eternal," he continued. "But you can move beyond the immediate and the long-term pain that is associated with that particular loss. That's where the Grief Recovery process begins to help people work their way through it, by working through that pain."

Frankly, I don't think I could handle that kind of pain, and I hope never to be tested. But I can't disagree with anything here except the line that "relationships are eternal." The article goes on to describe the 12 week program and the Pastor says some more smart things.

"One of the things we [people] say a lot is, 'Time will heal all wounds.' And time really does not heal anything," Johnson said. "We give the example in Grief Recovery that if we believe time heals things, then when you get a flat tire, just go out and get a chair and sit by it and see whether the flat fixes itself. It's not going to do that. You have to make informed decisions and choices in order to be able to heal certain things."

At that point, the article kind of peters out as to the specifics of the program. Is it all about facing your loss and learning to live with it? I kept waiting for the platitudes to start.

Finally, the article reaches its conclusion with this.

And although he says we often bring grief upon ourselves by making poor decisions that have bad consequences, Johnson acknowledges that bad things happen to good people.

"The redeeming factor is that God is going to redeem the world one day, and nothing that happens to us in this life is final in terms of where we're going to spend eternity," he said.

"God will redeem those things. He will one day right every wrong. But in the meantime, we are facing still some of the things that are going on because in the fall, the devil himself, now understanding that he is not going to win, is more active than he has ever been."

Johnson doesn't say whether or not the redemption of God, as he discusses above, is the final piece to the grief counseling program, but it seems incredibly likely. And that bothers me. Not because a church would use religion to comfort its grieving members, but because it contradicts everything he said before.

Working through loss, learning to face the loss and move forward with your life is the only way to survive such grief. But saying "What happens in this life is unimportant, and God will eventually right this wrong," is the ultimate cop-out. Pastor Johnson said that to heal you have to "face the grief", an idea inconsistent with the notion that your loved one is still alive, awaiting you with open arms inside the Pearly Gates.