Change and Grief

Experiencing Joy and Tears

I haven’t written a lot of personal things here, except as it pertains to my past leadership roles. Today I’m going to crack open some painful things, recent and distant, in hopes that I can help some of you have a better understanding of the ways changes break your groove.

My mom died last week. Last week was also the fifth anniversary of leaving a job I’d served in for over 20 years, a leavetaking that ended or changed a lot of deep friendships. Also last week, one of my daughters got married, which required a trip back to the city where the aforementioned job existed.

It was an emotionally full week. I won’t even mention the house that we’re trying to get ready to sell and running into continual setbacks. Oh wait, I did now. Ignore that.

Over time here, we’ll talk extensively about transitions. Transitions are times of change that require careful thought.

It's a time when it is often helpful for someone else to help navigate through uncharted waters for us.

At Diadem, I offer coaching under three headings: teams, leadership and transitions. My vision for the last one is quite broad. Transition coaching is always a short term package (2-3 months) for someone facing a crisis or decision point or major change in her or his life. It can be anything from a high school senior trying to discern what sort of calling God has designed them for, to a person who is retiring and examining what that means for their identity.

It also applies to those who have lost a job and are trying to understand what’s next.

Life is stable sometimes. When it’s stable, we have comfortable ways that we handle it and usually the habits and skills we’ve built just continue the way they have. But sometimes God throws a new plan out there as if to say “Oh that five year plan you have? I replaced it with something completely different. And…you don’t get to know anything but the first part yet.”

It is usually not fun when God changes the map on you. You might be tempted to argue with Him and avoid the transition altogether, or at least delay overhauling the plan. We like to hang on to our illusions of stability, even when the foundations are obviously shaking.

Over six years ago, our family entered a long season of what still feels like an ongoing transition. Multiple job changes, moves, deaths, estrangements of friends and family, a cornucopia of health issues, hospitalization, a car accident…it feels like we never reach equilibrium. Before, it felt sort of certain, with a solid 5-10 year plan for the future built on the stability of what had transpired in the previous years.

I “knew” where we’d be living, where I’d work, the hobbies and recreational things we’d budget for, and life was stable for the "foreseeable future.”

Did you ever stop to think about that phrase we toss about? Foreseeable future? As if there’s a part of the future, even your next breath, that you can “foresee” as a human being? I asked my AI assistant Claude to define the term and he ended with this:

What makes something "foreseeable" is having enough information about current conditions and trends to make educated predictions. Beyond the foreseeable future lies uncertainty - where too many variables, potential disruptions, or unknowns make prediction unreliable.

I laughed at that last sentence, “Beyond the foreseeable future lies uncertainty...” What we call “foreseeable” is in fact all uncertainty.

God systematically unraveled every single part of my 5 year plan. I believe we might now have an idea of where He’s leading, but that’s after dozens of false starts and redirects. What plans we have currently feel anything but certain or foreseeable.

I’ll have more to say about planning (and why it’s important even though we can’t see the future!) but that’s not the purpose of this post. What I want you to see is that when God at some point tells you that His plan is different than yours, you’ll be embarking on one that is murkier than you’d like. And you need to trust Him that His plan is better.

One of the most common book recommendations/gifts I give is for a book that someone else told me about during the big murky plan change from five years ago. Necessary Endings by Dr. Henry Cloud. I keep copies lying around just to give to friends and clients in similar circumstances. It’s a crazy good book. So many people need to read it because we tend to hang on to things longer than we should, or we end things that we shouldn’t. The book is about how to see whether or not you are pursuing the right course of action, and then how to process endings in your life.

Common transitions:

• Lost job

• Graduating (college/high school)

• Marriage

• Marriage of your offspring

• Retirement

• Career change (forced or volitional)

• Divorce

• Death of a family member or someone else close

• Moving (even if staying “local”)

• Promotion at work

That’s not an exhaustive list by any means but over half of them will happen to every single person reading this.

Some of the transitions (divorce, death, lost job) carry with them obvious loss and sadness. But a promotion? Getting married? Graduating? Retirement? We look at those transitions as happy events.

And they are.

But there is still loss with each of these transitions. Married people are no longer single. Graduates are no longer students. Getting promoted means you have lost peers. Often retirement includes losing or heavily modifying relationships that have been built over years.

The problem is that we look at joy and grief as if they are opposites and never concurrent. That’s wrong. It is fine to look at them like sun and rain, but realize that it is normal to be looking up at a mostly sunny sky while being drenched by summer rain.

Joy and grief often live in the same moments of life. I got to walk my daughter down the aisle recently and that moment is filled with both. I am so very happy for her new marriage and partner in life, but I do miss having her as my little girl. Things will never be the same as they once were. It’s wonderful! But also sad.

My mom went to be with Jesus. I can’t be happier for her- but I can’t call her and talk to her about her great-grandchildren and what they’re doing anymore. I no longer have a parent on this earth. That hurts, and will crop up in sad ways for the rest of my life.

Grief is necessary. Mourning is crucial as a part of transition: you need to mourn what you’ve lost. The house you left, the job you lost, the child who grew up, the spouse who isn’t there for whatever reason: those losses need to be mourned even if there are wonderfully happy things about the very same transition. We often want to squash those sad feelings down, as if we aren’t allowed to have them. Grieving brings closure. Give yourself permission to mourn even in the midst of joy.

There is a day coming when sorrow and mourning will flee away (Isaiah 35:10). That day is not today. Life under the sun changes and moves and is unstable and that means joy and grief are intertwined as long as we call it today. Embrace that reality. Rejoice and grieve as appropriate. And when uncomfortable change comes into your life, lean on the others around you in your community. That’s part of why we’re here.