JOB LOSS

Losing a job is a major time for pain and grief.  Even if opportunities open up because you lost the job, there are many things about a job loss that are a real challenge.

To grieve any loss, it is important to identify the multiple layers of loss that occur when something significant, like a job, disappears.  If we name the multiple losses in any loss, we can understand not only why the pain lingers but what we need learn to live without or find some other way to satisfy the need that the loss creates. Just naming those losses can be helpful.

Here are a few things that you might discover that disappears when you lose a job:

1.  Contact with job friends.

2.  Purpose that comes from getting up each day and having something to do that others expect you to do.

3.  Focus that comes from particular tasks that the job offers.

4.  Confidence in yourself as being able to do a job.

5.  Trust in the system to provide you with meaningful work.

6.  Income to support you and your family.

7.  Confidence in the future.

8.  Hope that is grounded in a predictable present.

9.  Confidence in your ability to get a new job.

10.  Confidence in  your ability to come up with the new skills for a new job.

These are just a few things that you might lose when you lose a job.  To grieve the loss of a job (that is to learn to live again in the absence of this significant activity by which much of your life has been defined) requires a journey of discovering yourself and your new future.  But, it begins with the naming of the multiple layers of loss.   Keep a list.  Add to it.  

And when you do, you can then begin to find ways to address the different losses.  While you are re-focusing and moving toward a new job or career, begin to address some of the losses that you can focus on at the same time.

TIME HEALS

You hear it whenever someone doesn't know what else to say.  "Time heals all wounds."  I am not sure this is true.

My experience indicates that some wounds cut deep.  The loss of someone who is signfiicant in your life creates a deep canyon in the heart of your soul.  While time may ease the pain, the scar will always be there.

What troubles me about this word that people speak to each other is that it has a passive implication.  One could gather from this statement that time will do the work and that all we have to do is wait for it to work.

Grieving loss is not a passive exercise.  It is really hard work.  And it is an opportunity.  For the tearing away of part of your life creates an opportunity for you to discover more about yourself.  To simply wait for time to heal causes you to miss the opportunity to learn more about your own life.

In my book, "Lose, Love, Live: The Spiritual Gifts of Loss and Change" I offer an active guide for persons to discover more of their life as they work through loss.  Grieving (learning to live again in the absence of someone or something significant) is an occasion to discover a fuller and deeper understanding of oneself.  It creates multiple opportuntities for growth and change.  

Time, coupled with the work of self discovery, can contribute to healing.  But, don't expect time to do all the work.

BELONGING

I know it's not new, but I had never heard it put this way.

In a recent consulting session with a church staff someone said they had read that church life had shifted from "Believing, Behaving, Belonging" to "Belonging, Behaving, Believing".  

Now, like most bumper stickers, this may be an overstatement.  But, it resonates with my experience.

There was a day that it seemed that churches were more interested in doctrinal purity than they were in welcoming the stranger.  The church seemed to require some ascent to an agreed upon creed.  It seemed to follow that if we believed certain things, our behavior would follow from that belief.  If you believed rightly, and behaved rightly, you could belong to the group.

But, many people doubt that right belief is the forrunner to right behavior.  Some of us now assume that it is the relationships of love that shape our behavior.  The groups to which we belong call forth certain practices and behavior.  If we love people in a group and participate with them, our actions are formed by that love.  It then follows that our actions eventually lead us to articulate what we believe about life.

If belonging preceeds behavior and belief, I suspect the church that practices hospitality to strangers may be in a good position to grow.  At least, it might be the kind of place people will take a second look at.

OUT OF THE BOX

I loved it.  25 degrees--snow-covered trails, steel gray Indiana sky.  Usually few people travel the trails of Fort Harrison State Park on such a day.  But, as I parked, I saw a couple of yellow school busses.  Traveling down the trail I heard talking--young teens--not yelling and laughing--but talking and listening.  I approached and saw they huddled, looking, listening to a teacher.  As I walked by I heard her say, "If you close you mouth and open your ears, you can hear the water in the stream."  

Further down the path I saw another gaggle of middle-schoolers, their teacher telling them about the deer tracks, the clumps of leaves lying on top of the snow where animals were looking for food.  The apologized for filling the trail.

But, I loved it!

For here were school rooms learning "out of the box".  They were not reading.  They were freezing and smelling and feeling that which they were learning.  Some even seemed intrigued by what they were hearing and seeing.

I loved it not only because they students were leanring where life was lived, but they were in the wildest part of nature that you can find inside a modern city.  They are dealing with what Richard Louv called "nature deficit disorder".  In his book "Last Child in the Woods" he warns that children's fear of nature and their lack of exposure to the rural and wilderness parts of their landscape is leading to all kinds of personal and emotional disorders.  Whether this is true or not, I know nature to be a wonderful teacher of patience and flexibility.  I know it to be a place where, when we slow down and listen and experience, we discover ourselves part of an amazing system of life, energy, tension, death, birth, love and delight.

I loved it--kids out of the bos--learnig and laughing, tasting and seeing.  

MUSIC IN THE DEAD OF WINTER

January 20--blistering cold.   Snow falling.  Trying to keep ahead of it.  The driveway scrapes under the blade of the snow shovel.  The whishing of the snow blowing off the shovel, back into my face. The scratching was accompanied by the background noise of interstate traffic a mile away.  Scratching, whishing, humming--scratching, whishing, humming.  

I stopped to breathe.  Leaning on the shovel, I heard it.  Music--singing over the drum beat of scratching, whishing, humming.  A robin--a lone singer who forgot to head south.  Singing its call, hoping for a reply.  And then in a tree near-by, an answer.  Another snow-bird enduring an Indiana winter.

I thought, “The dead of winter can be such a hard time.  The absence of green, the sun hiding for days, the snow carpeting the brown grass for days and weeks on end.  And we can be so driven to keep ahead of the overwhelming gray-white days of despair that we fail to stop and listen--deeply and quietly, to the song that whispers in our soul--the song that reminds us that life has beauty and loveliness.”  

I am grateful for shovels on which to lean and breath to breathe in and ears to hear a robin’s song--and for my own song that sings my own soul forward.