There’s nothing like a good beating in the waves to make you realize you need a better-fitting bathing suit.
Last summer my family and I were camping at the beach—reconnecting without the internet, deadlines, inboxes, or the ongoing pressures of decision-making. Camping may or may not be your thing, but it most definitely is ours.
Going into this trip I had one item at the top of my agenda: Get wet. Swim more. Enjoy the waves. Let the salt water wash my tired body and rejuvenate my soul.
I’m not particularly good at bodysurfing, and I’ve already told you about my limited brushes with surfing, but I know basic ocean safety and tend to be a decent judge of the scale of an incoming wave—will I jump over it? Or dive under it? I usually make the right call.
Not always.
Every once in a while I decide to jump when I really should have gone under. (Classic rookie mistake.) Of course, when you misjudge a wave it’s easy to get tossed around. The force is no small thing. Although I had known for some time I needed to revisit the swimsuit issue after wearing the same one through several pregnant and postpartum beach days over a number of years, one particular crash and the ensuing bathing-suit blunder helped solidify that it was past time to go shopping for a better-fitting suit. Yikes.
And isn’t life like that at times? We can know an issue exists, but until it’s—ahem—exposed, we do nothing to address it.
The Fruit of Something Deeper
When a friend of mine experienced stillbirth a few months after my first miscarriage, it forced me to look into the eyes of my own jealousy.
Yes, I just said that.
I was devastated to hear her news. It triggered all of my own deep feelings of loss while also sending my empathy into overdrive, knowing (on some level) the cauldron of emotions she must have been thrust into.
I did my best to support her (long distance) through emails and responding to her and her family members who immediately turned to me for suggestions for grief support. I gladly did what I could, and it felt good to say “me too” and have something tangible to offer, even if it was simply a list of websites and grief forums that she could check out. But then I watched (via social media) her post professional photos taken with their baby, hold a memorial service at their church, and write of her freezer filled with enough meals to last them weeks. It was beautiful to see how her people rallied, but it also magnified my own lack and amplified all the things I imagined would have helped me grieve my own loss.
We didn’t have any photos.
We didn’t have a grave to visit.
We didn’t have a fridge full of food or a mailbox full of cards.
Seeing all that she had in her grief exposed how I felt about what I didn’t have. In short, I was jealous. The wave pummeled me and left me naked. My humanity was exposed by something beyond me. As humiliating as it is to have your heart exposed (or your bare bum!), it teaches you something. In this case, it taught more than the fact that I needed new swimmers; it taught me that I needed a renewed heart.
I wouldn’t have wished that pain on my friend in a thousand years, and I am so glad she was cared for the way she was. My jealousy had very little to do with her; it had everything to do with my own broken heart.
My jealousy was the fruit of something deeper. It revealed my desire to find comfort in people rather than God. It exposed my sense of entitlement—to be treated the way I thought I would treat others had the tables been turned. It revealed that even though I knew what was best for my heart, I didn’t always live into it.
Ouch.
While I worked through the issues in my own heart before the Lord, I had to take some tangible steps to make it easier for me: I hid her photos from my Facebook newsfeed, and whenever I began to find myself comparing my pain to her pain or my community’s response to her community’s response, I began to confess my jealousy to the Lord and use it as a reminder to pray for her heart. I don’t want to sound trite here, like you can “fix” your heart with a few simple steps. This process wasn’t easy for me, but it was life-giving. By allowing that specific trigger to become a reminder to lift my gaze to Jesus, I was able to not only support my friend in prayer but make room for God to heal my own heart. (By the way, we’re going to delve further into the issue of comparison in the next chapter.)
The Brutal Truth
Grief exposes everything. It exposes our insecurities, our bias, our misdirected beliefs, our weaknesses, our sense of entitlement, our assumptions, our jealousy, our pride. Don’t berate yourself for the ugly stuff it uncovers. The human heart is complex—a living, breathing, evolving center of your soul. You can’t heal it yourself by applying a spiritual antidote or by white-knuckling your way out of the pain by the power of your will. This is the stuff of spiritual transformation, a partnership between the human and divine. When these things are exposed in our lives, it presents us with an opportunity: Will we allow our weaknesses, sin, and beliefs to define our lives, our faith, and our relationships? Or will we recognize the chance to go deep and deal with the root of our muck?
Now listen, I’m not talking about rolling up your sleeves and digging into your mess when the grief is raw and you’re in the depths of your sorrow. Some of you are still spinning from the blow of your miscarriage, and right now you simply need permission to make room for the sadness. Don’t minimize or try to “overcome” your grief by crowding it out with soul work.
But others will know exactly what I’m talking about—you are ready. There comes a time when the dust settles and we’re faced with the full spectrum of what grief has exposed in our hearts. That’s when we have to choose: Will we let our pain dictate our heart responses? Or let it heal and enlarge our heart? This is not God’s punishment, or even his discipline. This is his kindness nudging us toward repentance so we can be liberated.1
Searching for a Win
Theodore Roosevelt famously said that comparison is the thief of joy. In my experience, comparison is also a sneaky thief of peace.
After our challenging and delightful year living in our caravan in other peoples’ driveways all over Australia, we moved into the most gorgeous, old, falling-apart boarding house in inner-city Sydney to plant a new missions hub and begin cultivating community. It was a longed-for homecoming and a relief to unpack our bags in a fixer-upper that would house both our family and our fledgling ministry.
What we didn’t realize was that the property was riddled with mold.
We ripped up layers of grotty carpets and vinyl flooring, scrubbed down walls with sugar soap, doused every surface in vinegar, muscled our way through decades of old paint, and only then layered on fresh coats of mold-resistant paint to make it all look pretty and new. We knew it wasn’t enough to simply paint over the old stuff, so we took the time to work long, exhausting days for months on end to address the problem in the best way we knew how. We were satisfied, believing we had done a thorough job.
On cold days we could feel a sense of the damp—there were little signs here and there that it wasn’t wholly eradicated—but it wasn’t until the late summer rains came that we realized the true extent of the problem. The mold was still there, invisible, woven through the innermost parts of our walls, and with each day void of sun the smell of damp made it more and more obvious that our house was still entrenched with mold. The spores were already there, but the damp caused them to breed.
Comparison works like that too. Just as my husband and I had worked hard to address the problem, so I thought I had addressed my problem with comparison when I dealt with the jealousy I felt toward my friend. However, not long after, another situation came up that caused me to examine my heart all over again. And then another. And another.
Reining in a heart prone to comparison is not a “one and done” event but rather an ongoing outworking of the Spirit’s movement in our lives, one opportunity at a time.
We might know our tendency to compare our lives to others (our loss, problems, circumstances, jobs, joys, family, and any number of things), but most of the time that tendency lurks under the surface, not causing us much pain or disturbance. And then something triggers its reappearance, making it obvious all over again.
Don’t be discouraged if this happens to you too. It’s part of the process of healing. With each layer of comparison revealed (and the junk that comes with it), God offers an invitation to go deeper. He wants you healed more completely. He wants to set your heart free.
Whose Grief Is Worse, Anyway?
Okay. I have to ask this: Do you hear my story—three miscarriages—and think I have more reason to grieve than you? I remember reading a story after my first miscarriage about a woman who had experienced five. I could never handle that, I thought to myself. Subconscious as it was, I believed her grief to be in a different realm than mine. I thought of it like a math equation: She had five times the amount of grief as me. I pitied her and felt foolish for feeling like my world was falling apart even though I had only experienced “one fifth” of what she had. Surely her pain was much worse than mine. And not just worse but five times worse.
Or perhaps you hear my story and think I have less reason to grieve than you because I easily got pregnant or because I already had living children. Maybe your pregnancy loss came after years of needles and tests and marks on the calendar.
We could play out a dozen scenarios, and they would all land in the same place: Comparison doesn’t satisfy. It causes our hearts to be anxious as we question our “right” to feel the way we do. It invites jealousy, resentment, shame, entitlement, and self-pity. It steals peace and circumvents joy. Like the mold problem in our old house, it seeps into the walls of our soul and comes out as soon as it rains; as soon as we’re feeling weak or let our guard down, those spores multiply and clog up our airways. We get stuck.
“It’s like we’re searching for a win,” my friend Jess said as we discussed the ills of comparison.
When you feel so awful, it’s easy to flail around looking for something to make you feel better. My loss is more worthy of grief. Win. My loss isn’t as bad as hers. Win. My loss is more tangible, therefore my grief makes more sense. Win. My loss is less tangible, therefore my grief hurts more. Win.
A Temporary Boost
Maybe a “win” like this will leave us temporarily feeling a boost, but ultimately it does nothing to address the interior of our hearts. When Ryan and I discovered the magnitude of the mold problem in our house, we realized our months of hard work weren’t enough. The outside brickwork needed to be resealed for moisture, and we needed professional-grade fans installed under the house to aid in circulation. Comparing types of loss (or responses toward loss) is like scrubbing the walls. It may give us a little temporary feeling of “win” but it’s short-lived. We must go deeper.
What is it in the human heart that tries to compartmentalize our grief and size it up next to another’s? Will it actually validate our pain? Will it minimize it? Elevate it? Heal it?
Listen. There will always be someone you think deserves to grieve more than you do. There will always be someone you think deserves to grieve less. But one grief cannot be measured against another. It’s your burden to bear. It hurts. Putting it in a lineup will do nothing to heal your soul. Either you will feel justified in your grief and exasperated that others don’t see it like you do, or you will berate yourself because your grief feels foolish. Both of these responses are utterly unproductive. (Ask me how I know.)
We must have the courage to feel our pain without exploiting someone else’s to make us feel better. We must not allow someone’s external responses to their loss dictate the internal responses to our own. The heart needs attending without qualifying statements like, “I know she has it worse than me, but . . .”
Not long after losing Scarlett, I shared with a friend how I thought having living children before my miscarriage made the grief worse than if I had miscarried before carrying a baby to term. My miscarriage was harder, I reasoned, because I understood the magnitude of what I was losing. I felt safe sharing this with her because she, too, had experienced miscarriage after having living children. Clearly I was searching for validation for my pain.
Recalling this conversation now makes me want to facepalm my old self—how untrue and insensitive! In reality, the woman with no living children who miscarries has a whole other grief unfamiliar to me: the grief of being an invisible mother that society doesn’t recognize. Who am I to minimize her pain?
Comparison always does this—it makes a mockery of our pain and robs people of dignity while suffering. Comparison tries to boss us into believing we would feel better if only fill-in-the-blank, but it’s a liar.
You might be comparing your loss to someone else’s. If only I had miscarried earlier, it would hurt less. If only I had been further along and had a chance to hold my baby, I would feel more justified in my pain. If only I knew I could carry to full term, I would have more hope. If only it wasn’t so hard for us to get pregnant in the first place, I wouldn’t feel so helpless.
Maybe you’re comparing your grief response to a friend’s. She’s grieving less; she’s probably repressing her grief. She’s grieving more; why don’t I feel more sadness?
Perhaps you’re comparing your grief to your husband’s. If only he would cry, it would make me feel like he cared. He must not care as much as I do.
You might be comparing your faith to someone you follow on social media. If only I had a “strong” faith like hers this would be easier. (When we pause to think this one through, we see how absurd it is. Only God knows what’s going on in the quiet of her heart.)
If only, if only, if only . . .
These comparisons will leave you empty. My guess is you already know exactly what I’m talking about. If you do, you are normal. But you have the power to change. You can—and must—shift your gaze.
Look Instead to Jesus
Let your loss be your loss. Let your grief be your grief. Resist the impulse to search for a temporary win.
I realize how difficult it can be to avoid the sting of someone’s joy taking the shape of your pain, or how tempting it can be to find your “win” by comparison to someone else’s loss, but as you shift your gaze to Jesus, his kindness will woo you into changing those self-destructive (and relationally destructive) tendencies. The kindness of God is the very best way to turn around a human heart.2 Let your heart be liberated by responding to his goodness.
When you spend your time looking at and comparing to others, it’s impossible to be looking at Jesus. You can’t look two directions at once. And when your eyes are off Jesus, it’s impossible to see his goodness. We find what we look for, so look to Jesus, dear heart, and let your belovedness inform the way you relate to others.