An Air Canada Express jet collided with a fire truck while landing at New York’s LaGuardia Airport late last night. Both pilots were killed, dozens of people were injured, and the airport will remain closed until at least 2 p.m. ET today.
Earlier in the day, I received news that my spiritual mother had passed away.
In August 1973, two men knocked on my apartment door in Houston, Texas, inviting my brother and me to ride their bus to church. When we did, I was assigned to the tenth-grade Sunday school class taught by Sharon Sewell, the pastor’s wife.
She made me her project, inviting me to youth ministry events and calling me each Saturday to encourage me to come to church the next morning. On September 9, 1973, she led me to faith in Christ. I will be grateful for her forever, literally.
Mrs. Sewell had been declining rapidly in recent weeks. Her son told me yesterday that her last words to him were, “I want to go to heaven.” She is now reunited with her husband, my first pastor, and we are celebrating her homegoing.
Some deaths, like those that occurred in NYC last night, are tragic. Others are cause for gratitude.
Chadwick Boseman’s widow on “the weight of grief”
When acclaimed actor Chadwick Boseman died from colon cancer in August 2020 at the age of forty-three, many were shocked to hear that he had cancer. His widow, Simone Ledward Boseman, told Today last Friday that his symptoms began just weeks before his diagnosis and that he chose to fight the disease privately.
When asked if grieving gets easier over time, her response was poignant and profound.
“The edges get less sharp, I think, is the best way to put it,” she said. “There are still edges and there are still a lot of painful moments. But I think it becomes easier to find the love in those moments as well. You become more accustomed to carrying the weight of grief. But it doesn’t go away.”
Most of us who have experienced significant loss would agree with her, I think.
My father died in 1979 at the age of fifty-five. To this day, my greatest grief is that he never met my sons. He would have been a wonderful grandfather. Over these many years, I have “become more accustomed to carrying the weight of grief,” but it is still there.
“People are shoved to the left side of their brains”
In the years since, however, I have come to believe that God redeems all he allows and to look for such redemption with my father’s passing. In this regard, Arthur Brooks’s latest article for the Free Press is insightful.
He writes that many of the young people he has taught at Harvard and met in other settings are “undeniably, desperately, incorrigibly unhappy.” When he started asking their stories, he discovered a common thread: their lives are busy but not meaningful.
Wealth and achievement are insufficient in this regard. In fact, Brooks reports that the wealthier and more technologically advanced the country, the greater the percentage of the population that answers “no” to the question, “Do you feel your life has an important purpose or meaning?”
He explains this paradox in a way I had not seen. Most of us are familiar with the hypothesis that the left side of our brain is logical while the right side is creative. Brooks notes that this is not accurate: both hemispheres deal with just about everything our brains do. But they do so in consistently different ways.
Brooks cites the work of the British neuroscientist and psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist, who shows that the right side of our brain is the “master,” asking big, transcendent questions such as “Why am I alive?” The left side, which McGilchrist calls the “emissary,” addresses such practical questions as “How do I get food so I can keep being alive?”
Here’s the problem, as Brooks explains:
In our increasingly complicated, technology-dominated, and endlessly distracting world, people are shoved to the left side of their brains. They are stuck in a complicated simulation where there is a lot going on, but which is bereft of mystery and meaning.
A gateway into a life of purpose
With regard to “carrying the weight of grief”: Our left-side, secularized culture processes death in practical, present-tense terms. We make arrangements for the funeral, manage the financial and practical aftermath, and seek ways to move on with our daily lives.
But the right-side, transcendent questions remain: What does my grief say about God? About me? About my purpose in life?
In my case, God has used my father’s early death to lead me into what has become my lifelong vocation: to engage the ultimate questions of life with biblical truth. I have focused on innocent suffering and other deep issues as a philosophy professor, a pastor, and now as a cultural apologist. My father’s death has become my gateway into a life of purpose as I seek to help others find purpose in their questions and challenges.
None of this makes my father’s early death any less painful. I still miss him and still wish he could know my children and now my grandchildren. But I find peace in the purpose his death has forged for me.
And I am grateful beyond words for the presence of my Father as he has grieved with me over these many years and we have walked together through “the valley of the shadow of death” (Psalm 23:4).
Why God “comforts us in all our affliction”
If you’re “carrying the weight of grief” today, could I encourage you to seek God’s purpose in your pain? To ask him to show you how you can partner with him in redeeming your loss? To look for ways to be what Henri Nouwen called a “wounded healer,” someone whose pain enables you to help others with theirs?
If you’re not carrying such weight today, do you know someone who is? Will you pray for them to find meaning in their grief and walk with them toward hope?
The Apostle Paul was no stranger to suffering (cf. 2 Corinthians 11:23–29), but he testified that our Lord is “the Father of mercies and God of all comfort” (2 Corinthians 1:3). And he discovered a purpose in such grace, adding that God “comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God” (v. 4).
How will you pay forward such grace today?
Quote for the day:
“Our infirmities become the black velvet on which the diamond of God’s love glitters all the more brightly.” —Charles Spurgeon
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