It’s been two weeks since I lost my sweet wife Carol. I\u2019ve waited from writing anything specific because I wanted to have time to walk through some of my thoughts before I expressed them publicly.<\/p>\r\n
For those of you who wish, I want to take you on my journey through the grief of the greatest loss I\u2019ve ever known. I will share openly and honestly my grief struggles, not for your sympathy, but so that others might learn better how to and how not to handle grief.<\/p>\r\n
I\u2019ve studied the matter of grief much in my ministry. Two of the best resources I can offer are small, easy to read, books called “Silver Lining” and “Grieve Well, Live Well” by Dr. T. David Willets. I will refer to them several times during my journey.<\/p>\r\n
Dr. Willets takes a little different approach to the stages of grief than what I have traditionally been taught. He writes, \u201cI believe there are four general stages of the grieving process: trauma, disorientation, adjustment and rebuilding. The emotions of anger, denial, guilt, and bargaining are part of each of the four stages.\u201d<\/p>\r\n
I will use his model to express what I am gong through. Understand, these stages do not flow smoothly for one to the next. While there is a general flow from one to the next, we will bounce back and forth through all four stages.<\/p>\r\n
THE DEPTH OF GRIEF IS DETERMINED BY THE VALUE OF THE LOSS.<\/p>\r\n
I have never grieved over the loss of penny. Why? Because it has no value to me. There was a day you could put a penny in a gum machine and out would come a round little ball of gum. Not even that value for a penny exist anymore.<\/p>\r\n
The depth of our grief is directly determined by the value of our loss. In recent years I have grieved the loss of my fellow pastor friend, Burl Mackey. He was like a brother to me. My kids thought of him and his wife as uncle and aunt. I thought I understood grief, but not until the loss of Carol have I ever known how deep the depths of grief can be.<\/p>\r\n
David Anderson offers this insight: \u201cThe depth of the grief that we feel is a direct indicator of the greatness of the blessing that God had given.\u201d Since Carol\u2019s stroke nearly twenty years ago, I promised her that I would never see her as a burden, but only as a blessing. While caring for her was, at times, burdensome, Carol was not a burden. She was and is always a blessing to my life. And because of the blessing, my grief is very deep.<\/p>\r\n\r\n
<\/p>\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
From The Heart Of Ken Shiplet It’s been two weeks since I lost my sweet wife Carol. I\u2019ve waited from writing anything specific because I wanted to have time to walk through some of my thoughts before I expressed them publicly. For those of you who wish, I want to take you on my journey […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":28,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false},"categories":[148],"tags":[],"acf":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/southsidealive.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4542"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/southsidealive.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/southsidealive.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/southsidealive.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/28"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/southsidealive.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4542"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/southsidealive.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4542\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4694,"href":"https:\/\/southsidealive.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4542\/revisions\/4694"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/southsidealive.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4542"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/southsidealive.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4542"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/southsidealive.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4542"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}