Grieving Patricia Pickens: Introduction

 Stephen Ministry produces a resource called Journeying Through Grief.  We’ve given hundreds of books and gifts away to those suffering the loss of a loved one.  Each time a book is sent, a handwritten card or letter is enclosed with a gift card.  Demand has been steady and our purchases of the materials have increased in volume and frequency.

I discovered the resource less than five years after the death of my mother.  In several handwritten notes to the grieving, I confessed my desire to receive the same care I was offering.  Gifts, that the giver would like to receive, are the best kind.  During more than a decade of pastoral ministry, I have been giving the gift I hoped to one day receive.

Hope deferred makes the heart sick but a longing fulfilled is a tree of life (Proverbs 13:12).  I write under the weighty realization that no one is coming for me; no one is coming to journey through my grief with me.  Twelve years of journeying through other people’s grief, while ignoring my own grief, has made my heart sick.  Publishing this book is a longing fulfilled.

I’ve longed to write a book and like many wannabe authors, have dozens of partially finished projects littering the cloud.  Change comes when present realities are more painful than future possibilities.  Waiting for someone to come and care about my grief is more painful than finishing a journey I’ve watched so many others take.

Kenneth C. Haugk wrote the Journeying Through Grief series.  A reread of his work is fomenting dozens of authors, scriptures and unuttered groanings within me.  In writing while I read, his themes are keeping me on track.  How then do I keep these words from the gravitational pull of some many others I've penned and left incomplete?

A blog will do.

Exposing my grief and allowing people to poke and critique borders exhibitionism.  Publishing is however making writings public.  Availability to people is a violation of the intimate uncovering of grief surrounding my mother and a longing fulfilled.  Few readers will be a relief in that I get the butter of completing a thought without the guns of banter with commentators.  Publishing, I am seeing, is a part of the journey. 

Who reads is much less important than who writes.  I am writing because of the heartbreaking truth that no one is coming for me.  If Kenneth Haugk’s words are going to minister to my hurt, I’m going to have to pour them over my own wound.  With these first keystrokes, I pour.