Grief

This is the Truth Network. The heart of every man craves a great adventure, but life doesn't usually feel that way. Jesus speaks of narrow gates and wide roads, but the masculine journey is filled with many twists and turns.

So, how do we keep from losing heart while trying to find the good way when life feels more like a losing battle than something worth dying for? Grab your gear and come on a quest with your band of brothers, who will serve as the guides in what we call the masculine Journey, the masculine journey starts here now. Welcome to Masculine Journey. We're glad that you're with us this week, and we are small in numbers. But what is it called?

Mighty in spirit? Is that what that is? Mighty in something? Yeah, there's five of us here. Yeah, not all that small in numbers.

Well, you know, compared to some weeks. Yeah, you know, compared to most radio shows, I do which are one or two. Yeah, we we have a lot of numbers going on here. Yeah, yeah. I guess it's your perspective, right?

It's what you think normal is. Yeah.

So, good. No, I'm just excited about the topic because I it it really helps you push into some your relationship with God.

So I'm excited to go there. Yeah, it's um it's a topic that we all face. Not just once in our life, but often many times in our life. It is many times in our life, and we're talking about grief, right? And immediately, what a lot of times comes to mind is when somebody's passed away, you know, and that is a big part of grief.

But then there's also grieving over over lost relationships, you know, grieving over a lost job. Right, all these kinds of things that grief plays a role in betrayal. Betrayal is a big one, right? Betrayal on any of those, you know, any of those things, right? In a relationship, in a marriage, and with a company that betrays you, or a boss that betrays you, you know.

And and there's a process you go through, and we'll touch on the stages of grief, just to make sure people are aware of them. But that's not really going to be our focal point. What I wanted our focal point to be, as we talked about this, is I just asked the team, you know, how has grief played a role in your life, and how has God came after you in it, right? Because at the end of the day, if we just try to process the grief on our own, it's probably not going to work out real well, right? We that's something we have to invite God into for it to go where it needs to go.

Right, and so this topic came up. One we've all faced it. I think the last time we kind of did a show on grief was a really early on in the show when both Robby and I lost our moms in the same year. Yep, and we did a show on dealing with grief at Christmas. Right, we touched on it again.

Some I think when Robin Williams, right, right, died. You know, so we've talked about it a few times. But ironically, when I went to put the folder in there called grief. We didn't have any. We didn't have like good grief, Charlie Brown.

We didn't have any of that. We just we we didn't have any any any folders labeled. I never made that association, but oh my goodness, Lucy had it going on. She did, yeah, yeah. Apparently, t here is some good grief you can have.

You just have to ask Charlie Brown. The, but I was watching a show. I got married in May. I love my wife dearly. We we love each other quite a bit.

We have different tastes in television shows, and so there are some shows we can watch together. T here is some shows she watches when I am at the radio show. You know the things that I don't enjoy as much, or sometimes she'll watch something and I just look at my phone while she's watching it, kind of thing. But she doesn't really like shows that can have much violence in them, and that really doesn't faze me a whole lot. I don't know what that says about me as a person, but I can watch those.

It's not that I enjoy them, but it's just part of life. Right, and so I watch some shows that she wouldn't enjoy as much after she goes to bed, and so we have a little bit of a different schedule there. But one of the shows that I watch is a show called Tulsa King. And it's from Taylor Sheridan, and he's done a lot of TV shows like Yellowstone and Marshals. There's a whole list of them: Dutton Ranch, Lioness.

There's some others, but he's one of the more popular people that is writing shows and producing shows these days. And it stars Sylvester Stallone.

So you know right away that acting is top notch. Sylvester inside joke. Yeah, Sam has never thought much of Sylvester's acting. Yeah, I I do like him as a person, and I respect him a lot for what he's done. But you know, it's he's gotten so much better at his acting along the years.

It's like watching early years of Arnold Schwarzenegger. You know, I mean, he got really pretty good, and Sylvester Stallone's really good at what. He does now, but in this show, he's an aging person that's involved in organized crime, and they kind of shipped him off to Tulsa just to kind of let him go out there and just. Be gone from everybody else, and so he starts this organized crime syndicate there. And along the way, he's partners with some different people that have a lot of animosity and arguments within them, you know, in that type of group.

But what's just happened in the scene we pick up is Sylvester Stallone's character, Dwight, has been dating a lady for a couple years, and she was on a plane, a small plane, and the plane went down in the ocean, and they've pronounced her dead. They haven't been able to find. And so, this hard-nosed person that's got to be tough for everybody—you know—that's his image, that's his portrayal, that's what he has to live up to—is trying to struggle with this topic of grief. And we enter into a conversation with him and a guy named Bodie that works with him, and some of their relationships, of some of their partnerships. Question: What's the deal with the rooster that crows at night?

It was one of his traits. He never shuts up. He's blind, so he has no idea what time it is. Are you ever going to say it? What?

Margaret. You haven't said her name once. Don't.

Okay. If you ever do want to talk about it, don't. What's the point of talking about something that's like the worst thing that ever happened in your life? You're holding on to it like a time bomb. If you don't release it, it will explode.

Releasing it won't bring her back, but it will keep you here. Right now, you're numb, just going through the motions. That survival, that surrender. Don't tell me how to handle it, please. You didn't love her.

You don't know what I feel inside, buddy. You have no idea. None. All due respect, Dwight. You have no clue what I know.

Unfortunately, this is a pain that I do know. Before I ever met you, I. I was married. We had a little girl, and they both died in a car accident.

Sorry, I was in denial, refused to grieve, angry at the world, just like that blind rooster that screams into the darkness. Until I realized that if I didn't let it out, that grief would kill me. My whole life, I've been. Other people, buddy. I spent 25 years keeping it in.

Now I don't know how to let it out. You just face it head on. Let the feelings come when you're ready. And so, as we kind of talk about that, that was a clip that was originally four minutes, and we don't play anything longer than two minutes.

So there's a lot of pauses. They're not just really just talking that fast, but I wanted to get all the pieces in of that particular conversation. And then the scene changes after that. But it was really, you know, this guy stepping up and helping another person start to understand grief. And understanding what happens if you don't release it, or if you just try to bottle it up and you try to keep it in, and so it made me start thinking about this topic of grief again.

And and for me, as I talk about grief, I don't know that it ever goes away. You know, I will say I lost my dad in 1984, and I was 21 at the time. Never really had a relationship with him as an adult, too much, and. Although I miss him, it's been so long since he's been gone, and we didn't have much of a adult relationship to draw on. You know, most of my memories of him as a little when I was a little kid.

You know, but then when my mom passed away ten years ago, I still miss her a lot. You know, there are times I find myself really grieving for her. You know, it gets easier over time. My brother passed away a couple years ago at Christmas time. You know, and just this last couple weeks, I've been thinking about him a lot.

You know, and really just still processing some remnants of that grief, trying to let it get out. And so we're going to talk more about that as we go through this conversation today, and just talk about how we've dealt with it and how it's impacted us. Yeah, I love that clip because it, you know, from my standpoint, points out. The first two stages, two stages of grief, so beautifully. In other words, the first stage, if you're not familiar with, is denial, which is, you know, or you watch almost anybody when something like this happens in a relationship or happens, they lose someone, unfortunately.

You know, you have to watch them suffer through that part of denial, where they obviously, but that in itself is like a protective, you know. But it's fascinating to me that God rigged the world. We're talking about this all the time, so that you can't do it without Him, and it's clearly. You know, like "Hello, McFly." I want to help you through this. You know, how long have I got to sit there watch you like a butterfly in the cocoon?

You know, try to struggle your way out of this thing. And so, anger is interestingly the second stage there. And the beautiful thing of that rooster screaming into the dark—the imagery there—is he's mad at the world because he can't see. And so he doesn't even know he's screaming out in the dark. He just knows he's screaming.

Right. And unfortunately, that grief hits you like a wave, and and you're dealing with something you literally have no control over. Like you don't know what's going to trigger it. I remember after my dad died, I went and I live in his house, right, and I stay in his bedroom. That's what I inherited his house, and I was in his bedroom, and I was in his closet actually looking at his suits, all lined up the way he kept them.

He was, he loved his stuff in order, meticulous. He was, yeah. And I just became furious, like, and I had no control over, just being absolutely furious at myself. For not taking better care of him, as if I could somehow, because he was pretty stubborn, I was even more furious at him for not taking care of himself. But he was eighty-seven, like you know.

I mean, a lot of this stuff's totally illogical, right? But nonetheless, it's like God saying, "Robby, you need to deal with aspects of this that." We we need to talk, Robby, because at some level, the actual betrayal that I was dealing with is God. How did you let him go? Or yeah, right. How did you let this happen?

Yeah, you know. Ultimately, you're in control. This was my dad, right? Or this was my mom, right? Or fill in the blank.

Yeah, this was my marriage. Right. I mean, all those things kind of play into it, and so there's the a gigantic aspect that I I really feel like a big part of the process is for you to deal with what God knows all too well that there's an aspect of it. Where it's it's entering your relationship, the fabric of trust between you and God, absolutely, and and it's not apparent until you kind of go through it. We'll talk to you after the break.

Go to Masculine Journey dot org. We'll talk to you soon. What we have at our boot camp is something that makes you stronger and gives you the strength to go on. Your regular walk with God—it's something that will make you be bigger than you were when you got there. The first one, I had no clue what I was walking into, and then realizing that other people are in the same boat, and you know how open everybody was to share their struggle—it was a great group, and a lot of talking was able to be done.

It is a tight bond of men; everybody's the same, and each and every time that I've come to the camp, I've learned something different, and not. One man that's ever been there neglect not to take time out to talk or to share. It's serious business, and you need to come one time. You break bread with the men, fellowship, feel atmosphere. Hear the people pray and get down to earth about what's going on in life and get real.

Register today at masculinejourney.org. Don't stop. I wish I had a few more drops of the good stuff, the good times. Oh, but they just keep on flying right on by like it ain't nothing. Wish I had me a pause button for moments like those.

Welcome back to Masculine Journey. That's a song by Scotty McCreery, and it's obviously a country song. But the whole song, he's reliving things in his life that's passed already. And each one of them, he keeps telling himself how, in each one of those situations, he wished he had five more minutes. You know, five more minutes.

This one was just after he lost his father. You know, and you know a lot of his his remorse with himself was, "I wish I had five more minutes to say something, to do something, fill in the blank." You know, and that's part of that grieving process as you're going through, and part of the anger you get with yourself is the things that you think you should have done that you didn't. Exactly. Right. Completely.

And so that's why I picked that. There were a lot of good Christian songs on grief, and we have one coming up in the after hours. We'll play a little snippet of from Casting Crowns, which is apparently a lot older song than I realized it was. But we'll play that later. But I wanted to get something just from secular music and say, okay, it's something that hits all of us, Christian or not Christian.

Right. The advantage is, if you're a Christian, you have a way to deal with it much, much different than you would ever have as a non-Christian. Right? Because you just don't have the eyes to see what God's doing, or the faith that He's doing something. Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah, and that's that's the difference. You were talking a little bit, Robby, about you know when your dad passed. When my dad and I shared this on the air before, but when my dad passed, I was 21, and my sister was 14 years older than me at the time, so she would have been 35. I'm quick at math like that. She was 35, and she said, "Well, now you're the man of the house," and I interpreted that interpreted that as I had to be strong for everybody else, and so I just kind of shoved my feelings that down over my dad passing away.

Really didn't do anything, and I need to be strong for my mom. I need to be strong for my sisters. You know, my brothers were coming in from out of state, but then they were going to leave. You know, I needed to be that strength, and I never really dealt with the grief. It came out in anger.

It came out in other ways that I couldn't describe what was causing it, but it was causing the eruption of these things. And I moved to California three or four years later. After my dad passed away, no, year and a half later, after my dad passed away, my mom was going to be okay. She was a lot younger than him. And I moved out there, and I was in a grocery store.

It was called out there was a chain called Ralph's grocery stores, right? And so I was in a Ralph's, and I was sitting there, and a guy came in that had had a stroke on the right side of his body, like my dad had. He had the same type of haircut my dad had. Looked a lot like him, and I could not control my emotions. I couldn't get home fast enough.

I just left my groceries, walked out of the store, went home, locked myself in the bathroom, and just cried. Just cried. Just tears of just sorrow, of all that stuff that I kept built in, and that at least started the ball rolling more on moving towards healing from the grief. But you have to deal with it. And the clip we played last time that we've already played talks a lot about that.

It's going to do things to you if you don't deal with it. It's going to come out in other aspects of your life, right? And so you have a choice: do I turn to God and I deal with it, or I just try to handle it on my own, which won't work well for you and other people around you, right? Right, Harold. I wanted to get to you in this segment of the show.

You said you had something you wanted to add to on this topic.

Well, the first thing I was going to say is, what ironic your timing is that we're talking about grief on election day. Yeah, there's going to be a lot of grief coming up starting tomorrow. Mm-hmm. Probably we'll each feel some of it. Hopefully not a lot.

Yeah, the anger part—it's okay to be angry with God. He—he's big; he can handle it. In fact, I think he wants it that way. And that's not always easy for us to understand, especially when we're young. I know that.

Most of the first twelve plus years of my life, I lived in my maternal grandmother's house with my mother, and then my sister was born. But my dad was gone a lot. It it turned out that I lived there with my grandmother and the rest of my family. That was in a little town called Suligeant, Alabama, which is a, a lot like my little town of Moxvill, North Carolina. And I lived there with her, with the rest of my family back in Prattville, finishing out the second half of the fifth grade.

And then I lived with her, just the two of us, my whole time of the sixth grade. And then, just as the school year was ending, she she died. And I remember just how angry I was at God. You know, how can you do that to me? How can you let that happen?

And trying to deal with it. Fortunately, at age eighty-five, I don't have a a lot of real. Clear memories of that time. I just remember how hurt I was, and that my life was changing in a way that I didn't want it to change, but I had no control. And I think that's where a lot of the grief comes in: is that we want to be in control, and we're not.

Yeah, and. It's not easy to deal with, but must be. You can't, you can't suppress it forever. No, no, you can't. And it is part of the stages.

And Robby, you'd mentioned some of the stages. Do you know all five of them? You probably do, but I pulled them up in case you don't.

Well, I word them differently than probably most.

Well, then I'll let you websites, but I. I would love to know how you word it because you're a counselor as well. But you know, to me, it's denial, then anger, and then it's processing the debt. Like something needs to be paid here. That could be through forgiveness, or that could be through some other negotiation process.

And I think that's it's called bargaining. Bargaining. Yeah, you know, trying to. Get get your way through that, and then obviously there there comes to this point of resolution where you know you're essentially transferring the debt someplace else. You're dealing with it, and you're and you're transferring the need to God, right?

Is the last stage of like I still have a need for this relationship? I still have a need for whatever it is I am grieving that I've lost. But rather than leaning on what is dead now, whether that was through betrayal or whatever, that's dead, and now I've got to take that need somewhere, and to be able to process that with God is is ultimately where I hope. You can get to, but I'm very interested in it. It's very similar, you know.

I don't necessarily like the way it's worded here. In the reality of it, is you go through these steps several times, right? It's not like I go through it one time and I'm done with it, right? Because you may process part of it, you know.

So the stages that has here is denial, anger, which we both talked about, bargaining or negotiating, depression, and then finally acceptance. Right, that's the way they they call for it in you know the secular world, but really it's a lot of those same stages along there. But when I look back at mine, the denial I don't go through anymore. There are still times that there's anger, you know the things that are more recent. There's no anger with my dad's passing.

I dealt with that years ago with God. There's not really hardly any anger now with my mom's passing. There's still some anger with my brother passing just a couple years ago, you know, and we talked about it before the show. That anger ultimately lies with between you and God, but you don't have eyes to see it that way. Most of the time, it's expressed with anger with myself.

Right when my mom passed away, I was really mad at myself that I couldn't stay awake when she was she was dying. It was in the middle of the night, three in the morning. You know, my brother passed away. I was really angry with myself that I didn't hop on a plane as soon as I heard he wasn't doing well. I just expected he would recover.

Right, I thought I had more time. Right, right. And but those angers, first and foremost, are the guy in the mirror. A lot of times, are the female in the mirror. And then ultimately, you do have to get to the point where you are saying, "God, I am pushing that back on you as well." Yeah, it's, and I in the, I like the way the guys at Wild at Heart would not call it denial; they call it name it.

Yes, I agree. They say, "Name, okay, I am in grief. Like something horrible has happened. Don't just." Push through like nothing's happened. You got to name.

This is important. This is a big deal. This is something that that that I need to deal with, and this is something that's going to take some processing. And you know, unprocessed grief causes phenomenal problems, obviously. And so, naming it.

And I like the way John Eldred says. You know, it's not. He says, "You name it, and then you take a trash can with a with a with a baseball bat out in the garage, and you, you know, God gave you that emotion for a reason to to begin to reason through things with angers." Is very helpful in certain circumstances, and actually, I love what they said. That if you got a friend who's going through something and they're really, really angry, get angry with them. If they get sad, get sad with them.

But they need somebody to say, you know, this is a big deal with you, right? That a good friend makes you feel like they they're with you in this, in the, in the anger or in the depression or whatever it is that they're currently going through. Especially a spouse, yeah. That sounds hard, honey. That would be really hard.

It's really hard. But oh man, you know, I—that's—it's. I'm not saying, and Tammy would say, "Well, you're the person to say that." I mean, you're not good at that at all, and I—I struggle with it. But I do realize the importance of it. Absolutely, yeah.

And just trying to put yourself where they are. Right, because at that point they're not really able to hear anything. They're not able for you to talk reason to them. They just need to process through these emotions. You know, they need to invite God into them, obviously.

But you're there just to listen and reflect. And so, oh, one minute. Wow, we went. We didn't even get to a second clip. We have a bunch of clips for the after hours.

So.

Well, all of two.

Well, we have we have both clips.

Well, we have we have some more at our disposal. Oh, we have three. That's right. Oh, could be four. Yeah, it depends what you are looking at.

Any last thoughts on grief before we close, Danny? Do you have any last thoughts on it you'd like to share?

Well, you touched on like the anger and that kind of thing.

So, yeah, I've experienced that with several different incidences in my life, and a matter of fact, I was revisiting one just sitting here. Talk about it later, maybe. No, it's okay. We got after hours for that very. We absolutely do.

We are excited. We're going to have a spring boot camp. We don't know when it is, and we don't know where it is, but we are going to be having one. And so we're going to be looking at some camps closer here in North Carolina. We'll talk to you more about that later.