Hello Grieving Mom,
How has your grief changed your life? As long as we live here on planet earth, life as a grieving parent will always be viewed as before and after. I'm going to put some questions before you today that will help bring self-awareness to your grief journey. Because you cannot make progress if you are not aware of your personal habits. My goal today is to help you see inside your grief. You might answer that with Teresa, what are you talking about? I live inside my grief every single day. That is my point exactly, Inside your grief is messy.
Today, I'm teaching you the mistake to avoid in your grief journey!
The next Grief Mentor Support Group is August 15th! This is a safe place for bereaved parents to come and just be with like minded grieving parents who understand what its like to have your child leave this earth.
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How has your grief changed your life? As long as we live here on planet Earth, life as a grieving parent will always be viewed as before and after. I'm going to put some questions before you today that will help bring self-awareness to your grief journey because you cannot make progress if you are not aware of your personal habits. My goal today is to help you see inside your grief. You might answer that with Teresa. What are you talking about? I live inside my grief every single day of my life. Friend, that is my point exactly. Inside your grief is messy. You need someone to help you bring self-awareness because that is where the impossible becomes possible. Let's do it. Are you lost in the chaos of grief? Struggling to find your way in the darkness? Are you asking yourself, "Will I ever be able to enjoy life again?" Are you wondering where God is right now? Welcome to the Grief mentor show. This podcast is a safe place for you. It will shine a light into the shadows, helping you discover that joy and pain can coexist, that you still have purpose and there is a path to peace. Hello, friend. I'm Teresa Davis. I too was lost in the chaos of grief the day my son died. Just like you, I longed for peace in this unfamiliar world. I longed for the weight crushing my chest to be lifted so I could breathe. I clung tightly to the anger and it was there that I discovered the tools I needed to navigate life after loss. And I'm ready to help you do the same. If you're ready, I'm holding my hand out to your friend. Let me show you the way one step at a time. God, can I share something with you? The grief master class that we did on the 5th was the first event of any sort like that that I've ever planned out myself. Before we went live that day, I practiced the recording. I had these beautiful slides that took me a considerable amount of time to make that went with every point. I did that intentionally to help you stay focused during the education and the teaching time. Well, I finally got up the courage to watch the live, right? You know how that is. You never really want to watch yourself on live video. When I watched it, I discovered that not only did I record in gallery view, instead of speaker view, my slides didn't show up correctly. Even though I was seeing them perfectly on my screen and I was clicking through them with my points, the only screen that you saw was the slide of my picture on it and the title of the class for almost the entire teaching period. I was nearly brought to tears on my way home from work yesterday. But here's what I learned from it. We expect perfect for ourselves, right? But God desires a willing heart and the rest is up to him. In my eyes, I could have done much better. In his eyes, he said, well done my child. You did what I asked you to do. So where do you go from here if you're a grief mentor insider? If you're inside the class, then we're going to be spending the next 12 weeks together. And I'm blessed beyond measure that you said yes, and I simply cannot wait to see what God is going to do in your life because of it. If you didn't make it inside the grief road map, where do you go from here? Number one, you keep listening to the podcast and you apply what I'm teaching you. Number two, come to the monthly support group. It's a safe community for grieving parents to share your grief. Number three, spend some one-on-one time with me in a session. Go to my website. For those of you who've not been there yet, my website got an upgrade, but it's still at the same URL. So go to my website and see if that's for you. It's at thegriefmentor.com. The main thing is to not ignore your grief. Reach out for help. Find a way to process your grief. Be careful about distractions though. I'm not speaking about taking a break from your grief or respite, being a distraction, but I am speaking about being careful with what you take on as truth. That is one of the things that we cover in boundaries in grief. It's easy to get pulled away or distracted from the truth when you're in severe pain. For me personally, I would never let anyone speak into my grief journey that did not hold my same values, especially the foundation of the truth of God's Word. Be choosy, friend. Matthew 10, 16 says, listen carefully. I'm sending you out like sheep among wolves, so be wise as serpents and innocent as doves. If it's easy to be deceived by the ways of this world on a good day, imagine how easy it is to be deceived when you're grieving. Here's the truth. If you don't find a way to process and manage your grief, it will manage you. When Andrew died, I wanted Jesus to come back. I started looking for all the ways that the world was going to hell in a hand basket, and then I decided, well, the Lord can't tear you much longer, right? Things were so bad, I just knew that my pain would be relieved soon, because there was no way that God was going to delay sending his son back to get us, because the world was so full of evil. I just knew it in my heart that it was going to be sooner than later. I prayed for it. I would say, come quickly, Lord Jesus, come quickly. And every morning when I would wake up and I was still here, I was disappointed. Is this you friend? Just a word of caution. Be careful who you share that with, because people that have not walked in our shoes do not understand it. I remember the first time I spoke those words out loud to people that were not in my inner circle, you know, people who get it, people that I do life with. They shamed me for not wanting to be here and live my life. They told me that I had a daughter to think about, and how would that make her feel? Well, I was a bit stunned, because I wasn't praying to die. I was just praying for Jesus to come back and take us all home. And just between you and me, I still pray that every day, come quickly, Lord Jesus, come quickly. I have a question for you today. How has grief changed you? Write that down. Spend some time with that question, ponder it. Ask the Lord to reveal it to you. Write down the positives, the things that you see as a positive. List them out. I'm going to give you some examples here in a minute. But I also want you to write down things that you see in your life that you want to change. One of the things I teach is training yourself to become more self-aware. Okay, in order to make progress in processing your grief, you got to know the steps that you need to take. And then you need to be intentional with making those steps. You can't do that without self-awareness. As I said in the opening, grief is messy. Our brains do not function at normal capacity when we are in severe pain. Let me give you some examples. One of the things that I learned about myself in my grief journey is that I had become way too complacent to the ways of this world. Well, you might say, well, what do you mean, Teresa? Well, I was comfortable. I read my Bible every day. I taught Bible studies and I believed everything I taught. When the Lord revealed something to me in his word, there was weeping in joy and I couldn't wait to share it with others. But Andrew's death made the words on the page real. The words on the page became my lifeline that I had never experienced in that way before. I discovered that somewhere along the way I had lost urgency. I believed that life here on this earth was temporary and that heaven was my real home. But now I live with a sense of urgency surrounded by the reality that this life is temporary and I'm longing for home in a way that I never had before. Friend, it just makes me want to reach out and put my arms around your neck and just give you a big hug because life on this earth is hard. What drives me now is a sense of urgency that we have to get ready because no one knows better than you how temporary this life is. The scripture tells us that all of us will face death. Hebrews 9, 27 through 28 says so Christ haven't been offered once and once for all to bear the sins of many will appear a second time when he returns to earth. Not to deal with sin, but to bring salvation to those who are eagerly and confidently waiting for him. Friend, my son's death put the eagerness for Jesus back into my life. It became front and center because I had become so comfortable in living in my temporary dwelling. So back to the question we started with today. How has your grief changed your life? Sit with that question a minute. I want you to discover some wins that you can recognize and then I want you to write them down because they're more real when you write them down and you can read them out loud. Think about where you are right now in your grief. What is one thing you want to change? Acknowledge the hurt and the cost of your grief. Then decide one thing that you want to change. Side note, remember what I've taught you? You cannot control the fact that your child died and you cannot control the way they died, but you can control how you respond to it. Now once you do this exercise, then you need to put a plan in place to follow through with what you want to become a reality in your life because that is what you can control. This is what God says about it. As for us, we have all of these great witnesses who encircle us like clouds. So we must let go of every wound that has pierced us in the sin that so easily we fall into. Then we will be able to run life's marathon race with passion and determination for the path that has already been marked out before us. We look away from the natural realm and we focus our attention and expectation onto Jesus who bursts faith within us and who leads us forward into faith perfection. His example is this because his heart was focused on the joy of knowing that you would be his. He endured the agony of the cross and conquered its humiliation and now he sits exalted at the right hand of the throne of God. Hebrews 12, 1 through 2, TPT version. If you can write that verse down, meditate on it and pray over it. It holds the key to living the rest of your days on this earth without your child's physical presence. Let's recap. I want you to sit down and ask yourself that question. How has grief changed my life? That's your first thing you're going to do. And then I want you to think about where you were in the beginning of your grief journey and where you are now. And I want you to talk about things that you see as a win. And then I want you to document things that you see that needs to improve things that you need to change. Something happens in our brain when we take out what's in it and we put it down on a piece of paper. It's called a brain dump. First of all, it relieves anxiety and it relieves stress because all these thoughts and things that we're trying to manage without ever speaking them out loud, just runs in a cycle in our head that never stops. Okay. So writing it down gives a way to get it out of your body. Okay. While you're writing down the things that you want to change, make sure you lament. Like I said, acknowledge your hurt, acknowledge the pain. Tell him about it. And then I want you to document the things in your life that you want to see change. Now, if you document 10 things on that list, that's going to be overwhelming. Go ahead and document them if you want to, but I want you to pick one thing and focus on that. And then I want you to come up with a plan to put in place to bring that to reality. Okay. Take this verse. Hebrews 12, one through two. Write it down. Think about it. Meditate on it. Because life is a marathon without your child. Because our heart is somewhere else. We are longing to be with them. And the race looks much longer when you don't know the end point. Yeah. I'm the type of person that I can, I can endure. I have a lot of endurance as long as I know what's at the end, or I know when the end is coming. But unfortunately, in this race, the only way to get through it is to lean into the everlasting arms of Almighty God with faith. If we were setting across from each other today, I wonder what you would tell me what your winds are. I wonder what you would tell me what you're struggling with and what you want to see changed in your life. Being able to speak those things out loud to someone is very beneficial in our grief journey. Find someone that you can trust. Find someone that is going to pray for you, earnestly pray for you and lift you up before the Father. Because grief is messy, we are not able to see things on our own. Being able to recognize our personal habits to a place that actually brings change on a good day is difficult. So when you're grieving, it is much harder. It's very difficult to be on your own. It kind of leaves you in a place where you feel isolated. And especially if you're not able to see your progress, it makes you feel like you're just staying in the same place every day. And that in itself can be overwhelming. Sit down and talk with a friend. Sit down and talk with your pastor. Sit down and talk with somebody that you can trust and acknowledge your winds. Because often people that are close to us who love us can see our grief through different eyes. And that gives us a perspective that we may not have on our own. Be careful who you choose. Make sure it's someone that fits the qualifications that we spoke about earlier in the podcast. Be careful. Be wise who you share your grief with. I love that part of the verse that I share with you that says we look away from the natural realm. And we focus our attention and expectation on to Jesus. Because one of the things that was a big help for me in my grief journey is believing and understanding that the only thing that separates the natural realm from the spiritual realm is a veil. That's how thin it is guys. It's a veil. The only way to run your race well, and it feels like a marathon, I know, is to keep your eyes on Jesus. Just like the verse says. And that's all I have for you today. So until next time, take care. Did today's episode touch your heart? If it did, would you take a moment and leave a review on Apple Podcast? I read every single one. Scroll all the way down past all of the episodes till you come to a place where you can leave five stars. And would you go a step further and write a written review? It would mean the world to me if you did. Would you mind to share today's episode with somebody that you know that needs a ray of light in their grief journey? I would so appreciate it if you did. From my heart to yours. [Music]
