When Do I Get To Grieve?

by Peggy Haymes, Pinnacle Associate

After attending the funeral of one of her church friends, my mother came home talking about what a wonderful job her friend’s daughter had done in speaking about her mom at the funeral.

“Will you speak at my funeral?” she asked. She was shocked when I said, “No.” I went on to explain that speaking at funerals was what I did in my professional life. When the time came for her service, however, I wanted to be there as just a daughter and to allow myself to feel whatever I was feeling in the moment.

As I did.

You may have made a different choice, and it may have been very meaningful to you. What’s important is that we have a choice.

It’s a somewhat unique part of the role we embrace as clergy.

We have the sacred gift of standing with families on the holy ground of grief, sharing with them those moments they will never, ever forget. The price it demands, however, is that we put our own grief at least a bit to the side.

In a perfect world, we have time to tend to that grief, but that’s a world where many of us seldom live. The losses can have a way of piling up.

It’s not just grief over deaths, of course. It’s the weary grief of pastoring a declining congregation, or the broken hearted grief of watching your denomination struggle or splinter.

Sometimes it’s the grief for what you never got to have, like having to live out Plan B because the doors to the ministry you loved most stayed shut. It’s the grief of never being able to do the ministry you dreamed of, the work you envisioned.

What do you do with such grief?

When Do I Get To Grieve? Is a new webinar I’m offering to deal with some of these losses. I’m offering it at three different times, but if none of those work a replay will be available.

Just because we may know many things about helping grieving people doesn't mean we don't have to walk through our own grief.

Find out more and register HERE.