Learn to Lose?

"In America, we teach people how to acquire things, but we don't teach how to lose them,"

Bishop F. Josephus Johnson II said. Johnson is the senior pastor of The House of the Lord in Akron Ohio. This church is home to Patty Porter, mother of Jesse Marie Davis, the pregnant 26-year-old Lake Township, Ohio, woman whose body was found June 23, 10 days after she disappeared.

I was struck by this comment. At times I experience the clash between wanting to acquire and seeing the benefit in losing things. Even in the last few days I have seen that play out. I returned from the jungle with over 30 pounds of fruit including plantains, carambola, jungle mandarins and oranges. When I asked my friends what they did with their large containers of fruit, one admitted that while her family was consuming it, her mom was also giving it away bit by bit to visitors. Yesterday, someone visited and brought even more fruit! I have had the opportunity to give some away to people that visit my house and for whatever reason I could not.

I realize that fruit has no comparison with a life and that my giving away would be completely voluntary while so many people lose things involuntarily. But I am struck by the reality that Americans in general live to acquire more and must learn how to lose in order to be healthy, sane humans.

I was drawn back to the article I found on cnn.com and read it out loud to those at my house (translated into Spanish of course!).

The reality, Johnson said, is that life amounts to an unending series of losses. "From the moment that we come out of our mother's womb, there's a loss. There's a loss of connection. ... And then all along, we lose as we grow up. We lose friends, we change grades, we lose toys, we lose pets. ... As you get into later life, we lose hair, we lose strength. ... So life can be viewed as a series of losses, but yet America is much more concerned about what we acquire than it is about what we lose."

As a result, well-meaning people often make unhelpful remarks to grieving people.

"One of the things we say a lot is, 'Time will heal all wounds.' And time really does not heal anything," Johnson said. "We give the example in Grief Recovery that if we believe time heals things, then when you get a flat tire, just go out and get a chair and sit by it and see whether the flat fixes itself. It's not going to do that. You have to make informed decisions and choices in order to be able to heal certain things."

Part of the problem, he said, is that Americans tend to try to work through things intellectually rather than emotionally.

"When you have an event that brings emotional loss, you cannot think your way through that, you have to feel your way through it. It's like going into a dark room: You can't think your way through that room, you have to put your hands out and feel your way through it."

And although he says we often bring grief upon ourselves by making poor decisions that have bad consequences, Johnson acknowledges that bad things happen to good people.

"The redeeming factor is that God is going to redeem the world one day, and nothing that happens to us in this life is final in terms of where we're going to spend eternity," he said.

"God will redeem those things. He will one day right every wrong. But in the meantime, we are facing still some of the things that are going on because in the fall, the devil himself, now understanding that he is not going to win, is more active than he has ever been."