Tag Archives: Time

Dealing with Loss

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Dealing with Loss.

Bar none, the worst loss I have ever felt was the divorce of my parents.  Not only was the divorce extremely painful, but the absence of my dad only compounded the suffering.  It changed me deep inside and it took a long time for me to come back from that loss.

Over the years since then, I’ve had several people who I’ve known and loved pass away. It’s not something that we can get used to.  It always hurts.  It’s sad to think that, if the Lord tarries His coming, at the end of every one of our relationships, this time bomb is waiting to go off.

Hope for the believer.

The Bible says in 1 Thes 4:13 “But I would not have you ignorant, brothers, concerning those who are asleep, that you be not grieved, even as others who have no hope.”  Our hope is that when our loved one departs, it’s not over.  We will have a reunion again when it’s or turn to pass. 

Jet

My buddy Jet.

The thing that got me thinking about this was the sudden loss of our dog Jet.  Our dogs are inside dogs and they play a prominent part of our everyday life.  I think that’s why it’s bothered me so much.  There were so many things that he would do every day that he’s no longer doing.  He was a sudden loss, and it feels a little like he was ripped out of our hands.  Piper, our female, is getting pretty old and we were more prepared to say good be to her.  In our mind there was supposed to be an order. First her, then him.

For me, it brought death, heartache & time (lack of and not knowing) to the forefront.  I began to think of all the things that happened the day Jet died.  I had no idea that all those things we did together that day were “Lasts”.  The last time we’d play in the yard, the last time I would feed him his chalupa treat.  The last time I would give him his favorite toy.  The last time he would walk along side me and casually lean against my leg.

While I know we will almost never see loss coming, Jet’s loss has made me want to take stock of the things that are important to me.  I want to intentionally appreciate, be present, and fully live the moments with the ones I love.

Stages of Grief.

According to the book “On Grief and Grieving”, by Elisabeth Kublen-Ross, there are five stages of grieving.  They are:

1. Denial.

2. Anger.

3. Depression.

4. Bargaining.

5. Acceptance.

Calling them stages sort of gives the impression that they are steps to a platform, and that once you have completed one, you will be on to the next, until you finally arrive at acceptance and all is well.  The truth is that the process is not linear.  For me, each of these stages seem to just wash over me in no apparent order.  One minute I would be mentally trying to work it out, trying to bend it so that it wasn’t true, while the next minute I would just be sad.

Here are some things that really helped me.

  • Taking time to feel it and grieve.  My tendency when bad stuff happens is to try to make sure everyone has what they need.  When death occurs, loved ones are not going to be okay.  They are emotionally suffering.  If you’re like me, I spent the first day and a half just making sure everyone else was okay.  It wasn’t until I went to work the following Monday that Jet’s loss started to really hit me.  That afternoon, I went home stood in the kitchen with my wife and we just waded into our pain.  We took the time to talk about the things that made us sad, give room for open tears and not try to bottle up the grief.
  • Taking opportunities for sadness and using them as triggers to focus on and express gratitude.  For the next several days, I would have waves of sadness wash up against me.  I would be reminded of some awesome thing that he did, and would begin to miss him.  I would take each of these trigger moments and I would stop and just thank God for allowing us to have the time we had together.  I expressed how grateful I was to have had such a remarkable dog.  He could have ended up with someone else who wouldn’t have appreciated his awesomeness and would have just chained him to a dog house some where.  That didn’t happen and because of it, I was grateful.
  • Lean on God. I prayed specifically for the Lord to help us move through the grief.  God really does care for us.  I am totally convinced of this truth.  Because of this, it seems inconceivable that my Heavenly Father wouldn’t care how this loss has hurt me and my family. 2 Corinthians 1:3 says  Blessed be God, even the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and the God of all comfort.  He IS the God of all comfort.
  • Talk about it. Find and share with a trusted friend. I have a friend who is a man of like precious faith as me.  He reminded me of scripture in Deuteronomy and Proverbs that really helped my faith.  He reminded me that God made promises concerning  our animals.  I found this a real help and comfort.

The Bible is absolutely silent concerning the subject of our pets in Heaven.  Where the Bible is silent, we need to be silent too.  We can’t form any doctrine where there isn’t any verse to back it up.  The one thing required for something to be scriptural is scripture.

That being said, I found an article in Christianity Today regarding this question that I thought was well stated.  The full article can be found here.  In this article, Karen Swallow-Prior makes the following statement.

“When we choose to take into our household creatures that share with us the breath of life and bestow them with names, perhaps we enter into a kind of covenantal relationship with them too. To echo C. S. Lewis in The Great Divorce, perhaps when we name animals, they “become themselves” and our salvation “flows over into them.”
She goes on to say “As foretold in Isaiah, animals will be there. “The wolf will live with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the goat … and a little child will lead them” (11:6). Perhaps God will honor my acts of naming the animals by bringing Gracie, Kasey, Myrtle, Peter, Oscar, and so many more there, too.”

What’s the take-away?

My encouragement to you is simply this.  Moving forward, try to pace your life so that you have more time to draw the value out of the everyday moments we all spend together.  Relationships can end so suddenly, and then those moments become so precious.

Where Did The Time Go?

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My Life In A Graph.

This image is a graph I threw together to represent my life on earth.  I don’t know how long I will live but for the sake of the graph, I chose 94 years old.  Each block represents a week.  There are 52 blocks wide and 94 blocks down.  The highlighted portion shows the time that I’ve already spent.  The blocks that are not highlighted represent the yet to be lived portion of my life.

my-life

I got the idea for this graph, watching Tim Urban give a TEDtalk about procrastination (see link at the bottom).  Tim showed a similar graph for a 90 year old person.

While some might think this is a bit morbid, I think it’s important to measure these things because we as humans, have a tendency to drift and put things off until “Someday”.

Where did the time go?

Have you ever looked back at some important event in your life and suddenly realized how many years had passed since it happened?  Where did the time go?  It may seem like it was only yesterday.  We’re human. If we are not intentional, we will lose track of time.  That’s really what this is about…Time, and how we use it.

In Tim’s speech, he humorously outlines the difference between the brain of a normal person, and the brain of a chronic procrastinator.  While they both looked very similar, the procrastinator’s brain had one difference.  It’s what Tim calls the “Immediate Gratification Monkey”.

People everywhere living with regret.

One of the thoughts that I came away with after watching Tim’s talk was that there are people everywhere living with regret.  Why?  Because regret is usually what comes after procrastination has run it’s course.

Many things that we might procrastinate on are short term & temporary.  A report due to your boss at the end of the month, or a low interest rate on a loan.  These things are tied to time and have a relatively immediate consequence attached to them.  Even if you have to put in extra hours, do extra stuff, or lose sleep to get these done, you’re not likely to totally forget because of the consequences.

There are other things though, that are not tied to time and don’t have an immediate consequence.  It’s these things that cause so much of our regret.  These are the things in the “Someday” slot.  I wrote in a previous post about how I had asked my dad if we would ever go see Elvis Presley live.  My dad said “Someday”.  Just a few years later Elvis passed away.  Someday never came (see link at the bottom).

Someday!  

How many people had big dreams, dreams of traveling to some place they long desired to see, but in the twilight of their lives, they looked back with regret? They never made it happen.  Maybe they had broken relationships that they always intended to fix, or hurt feelings they always intended to forgive…someday.  Suddenly, they realized that it’s too late.  they are too old, their health is failing, or that other person is now gone.

These “Someday” issues often carry a far greater weight of regret.  The problem is that they are not tied to a short term consequence, so we don’t ever get to the point of panic over a deadline.  We will put off something that may be hard or painful to deal with, telling ourselves that we will deal with it eventually.  Eventually is a very nebulous, ethereal word. It’s not concrete.  Eventually is a synonym for Someday.  They both describe a realm where things go to never get done.

Chip & Dan Heath wrote a tremendous book called Decisive.  In chapter 11 they discuss the need for trip-wires.  They tell the story of a woman from Alabama who always wanted to visit Italy.  She had a chance to go once but because of work, she decided to put the trip off.  While she often thought about Italy, time slipped by. After several decades pass, her health deteriorated to the point that she couldn’t go at all.  The Heath brothers ask the question “When did she ‘Choose’ not to visit Italy?  Was it every day? Or never?  She surely never expected that her first decision to postpone the trip, would become a permanent one.”

Deciding by not deciding.

For plans like this, we need to install a trip-wire.  Something that would bring the choice to the forefront of our mind, forcing us to reconsider our plan, make it happen, or discard it.  We have to be intentional about these things because we have a tendency to run on autopilot a lot more than we know.  If this woman from Alabama could have put a time limit on her postponed trip, that said something like “If I haven’t visited Italy by my 38th birthday, I will either make it a high priority, or discard it”.

There are a lot of examples of this.  Has anyone heard of the band Van Halen’s stipulation in their concert rider that a bowl of M&M’s would be placed in the dressing room with all of the brown M&M’s removed?  I remember the first time I heard about that, I thought they were being ridiculous and difficult to work with.  It turns out though, that it was a trip-wire to quickly tell the band that the venue hadn’t fully read or followed the details of the contract.  It automatically put the band and roadies on high alert.  They would need to be extra careful about the staging, power availability & safety.

Moving forward.

It may be because I’m getting older, I don’t know.  I have been thinking a lot about my time.  I want to make sure I’m not just drifting.  I don’t want to let my dreams just float by and not live them because I let Busy get in the way of Important.

Where do you stand?  Is there something important to you, that the busyness of your life has crowded out?  Maybe it’s time to put it on the calendar.

 

Tim’s TEDtalk

My previous post Someday is never a safe bet.

Your Time = Your Life.

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Have you ever heard the idea that space is a fabric? All the events that we see are actually hung in this fabric. They are static and we are the ones in motion.  In motion, in that we are moving through time.  We move past these events and observe them as being events but in reality, they are there constantly and as we move past them in time, they have the appearance of “happening”.  This is radical over-simplification of part of a theory by a brilliant physicist named Richard Feynmann called Sum over Histories.

Einstein’s theory of Special Relativity states that light, rather than time is the constant in the universe.  The closer an object comes to traveling at light speed, the slower time becomes and at light speed, time stops.

IMG_20160502_194943_812

I think that the eternal perspective is to see all of time at once.  Every outcome readily visible.  Scripture states that God declares the end from the beginning (Is 46:10). Scripture also says in Heb_4:3, For we which have believed do enter into rest, as he said, As I have sworn in my wrath, if they shall enter into my rest: although the works were finished from the foundation of the world.  

Unfortunately for us, while we are on earth, we are stuck in time.  Being stuck in time, time is measuring our life.  You may have heard the story about the the dates on the headstone.  The first date represents the persons’ birth & the second, their death.  The hyphen between the numbers is what is really important.  That hyphen represents their life.  It represents how they spent their small but extremely precious time on earth.

Opportunity cost is truly illustrated in the spending of time. Once it’s spent, there is no getting it back.  Your time is a truly non-renewable resource.  What do you spend yours on?  What opportunity did you give up, so that you could do what you’re doing now?

When we are looking at someone’s time, we’re really looking at someone’s life. Their life is passing with each second.  When we interact, we are spending our life on each other.   When others are spending time on us, we should make sure that what we are asking them to spend their time on is valuable and not frivolous. Make sure it’s worth the price being paid for it.

I think it’s a tragedy to see even a small piece of someone’s life being wasted because someone else didn’t have the sense to respect their time, and there-by, wasted a precious piece of their life.

As a Christian with a heart to help others, my heart burns within me sometimes because I have so much I want to do.  I read Paul, the Apostle’s command to the Ephesian church:

See then that ye walk circumspectly, not as fools, but as wise, Redeeming the time, because the days are evil Eph 5:15 & 16.

And to the Colossian church:

Walk in wisdom toward them that are without, redeeming the time Col 4:5.

This is the heart of the Lord.  My mandate is to redeem the time.  Buy it back.  Be intentional about how I spend it & leverage it to wring the most out of it for the Kingdom.  There’s a great work to be done.  He’s given each of us a place and a job to do.  Time is shorter than we think.

Take some time this week to examine yourself.  How are you spending your time? Because you are spending your life.