Austin's Blog

Church isn’t easy. Where it once was a safe space where you felt truly alive, after deep loss, it can become a dangerous and daunting location full of ever-intruding emotions. Sometimes instead of finding the balm of Gilead, a grieving person finds that Church rips off the bandage on an already fragile wound. You have to choose to remain with the Church. Jerry Sittser writes in A Grace Disguised: How the Soul Grows through Loss that “Community does not simply happen spontaneously … When people who suffer loss do find community, it comes as a result of conscious choices they and other people make.”

We should persevere with the Church despite the difficulty because fellow believers can help us believe. Suffering naturally and inevitably knocks the wind out of us and causes us to question everything we’ve ever believed or been taught. Sittser agrees saying, “Suffering forces us to make up our minds about the very nature of reality. No one can put it off forever. Suffering demands it of us. What do you believe? How do you know? Where will you go from here? How will you choose to live?” We often can’t breathe, let alone reconcile our new reality with the big truths of Scripture.

Sittser describes his experience again, “For a long time I was too tired to believe much of anything. I remember attending worship, unable to sing or pray or listen. I remember sitting in silence night after night, incapable of thinking a rational thought about God. I remember crying every day. I remember walking forward to receive Communion, my three children fixed to my side, hoping against hope that somehow God was imparting grace to my broken, weary, unbelieving heart. I was as tired as a prizefighter in the twelfth round, as routed as an army in full retreat. I could not muster any faith. Mere survival seemed hard enough.” We are tired, torn, and often tormented by our new reality.

What then was his response? Did he simply avoid going forever and close that door? No. “So I let the church believe for me. I let the church pray and sing and listen for me. I could only find God in the Eucharist. Or better put, in the Eucharist God found me. I was the prodigal who had forgotten the way home. The Father came looking for me. He found me with the people of God in church. It was in the stability and security of that setting that I eventually reconsidered and returned to faith.”

Sometimes we don’t have the strength to pray, sing, receive communion, listen to the Word, and believe. Let the church do those things for you. “I have observed churches fail, as many people have. Many churches are full of hypocrites, bigots, and lukewarm Christians, which should surprise no one. Still, I found my church community sympathetic and loyal. I risked giving the church a chance, and the church came through for me and my family.”