10 Ways God Makes Loss Worth the Learning

LOSS, whilst it’s always unfair, is also a catapult to faith, provided it doesn’t crush us beyond care or make us cynical in the process.  Loss is supposed to be a catapult to faith, but that requires openness to God and to learning.

Here is a modest list of ten ways God makes loss worth it for the learning we receive:

1.      Loss floors us for an entire season.  Such an injury takes us to the bleachers of life where we’re forced to reflect, and become.

2.      Loss teaches us how to reorient ourselves for when future disorientations occur.

3.      Undone is what was.  To become is what is to be.  To be undone is to really learn who we are.  To become is to consolidate that understanding.

4.      In loss is the memorialising season.  Only afterwards do we realise how important memories and the valuing of oral tradition have become.

5.      Tenacity and resilience can only be mastered when practiced continually, day in, day out.  What better environment to learn?

6.      First loss forces us to look backward, but then, with time, we’re cast forward.  The pain of staying the same outstrips the pain of adapting.  Only when the past no longer causes us searing pain can we afford to press on forward.

7.      In the Lord Jesus, nothing can defeat us.  Yet it’s through loss that we discover the gospel truth is true; when we live it out personally.

8.      Only in a difficulty many times bigger than we can face will we admit our smallness.  What do we call this learning?  Wisdom… maturity… acceptance… humility… all the above.

9.      Loss compels us to imagine life beyond this life, and the hope of reconnecting with that lost loved one, or of connecting with God as to why this thing was lost.  All hope isn’t lost in loss if there’s a hope beyond the loss.

10. Finally, loss teaches us a lot about people.  We learn that most people are scared of loss, and that that fear affects how they interact with us.  For some, we receive their respect.  For others it’s a case that they avoid us, not knowing what to say.  Others are strangely envious for the character growth we show as a legacy.  One thing for sure, loss changes most, if not all, our relationships.

© 2016 Steve Wickham.