Tag Archives: grief

Life in the Dark

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Close-up of film negatives being processed in a darkroom, with red lighting and the text 'Image Processing' overlaying the image.

My life after Jean’s death became a bleak and morbid existence. There’s no gentler way to describe it. Everything felt stripped of purpose and direction. I knew I needed time away to care for myself, yet I never took it. Instead, I kept pastoring our church and managing the daily operations of Adam2 Café and its programs, moving through each day on autopilot.

Mornings were the worst. I dreaded waking up and facing another day. Evenings offered a small measure of comfort, but sleep rarely came. My body felt as if it were connected to a trickle charger—always humming, vibrating, never truly at rest.

I continued traveling to Russia with my friends during the Christmas and New Year holidays to visit their ministry house south of Saint Petersburg. Being surrounded by former street kids brought a surprising sense of grounding and comfort to my fractured emotions. I also attended my first Time of Refreshing in Switzerland without my partner of forty years. It wasn’t the same, and in hindsight, it was something I probably should have skipped altogether.

This hollow existence stretched on for more than two years. I felt like a zombie.

Early in this new and unwanted chapter, I began to write. I needed to pour my thoughts onto paper and dig deeply into the scriptures, searching for something I sensed was missing. What I was missing was freedom. I remembered Jesus’ words to the Jews: “You shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.”

But I was anything but free. I felt imprisoned, in trouble every hour of the day. It was as if I were constantly waiting for the other shoe to drop—or for the gun pressed against the back of my head to finally go off. Yet none of those imagined catastrophes ever came.

As I wrote each day, something profound began to happen. My writing brought comfort to my troubled mind. I started seeing things in scripture—and in life—that had been hidden from me before. It felt like developing film in a darkroom, watching faint shapes emerge into beautiful images. Those images became points of light, guiding me out of my terror.

I wrote like this for the next two and a half years. What I discovered was nothing short of extraordinary. Though I had been a Christian for decades, I realized how little I understood about the way life truly works. My writing revealed what I had been blind to. It showed me how hungry I was for truth—truth deeper and more real than anything I had known. And real hunger can only be satisfied with real truth.

The following quote became my compass:
“We routinely disqualify testimony that would plead for extenuation. That is, we are so persuaded of the rightness of our own judgment as to invalidate evidence that does not confirm us in it. Nothing that deserves to be called the truth could ever be arrived at by such means.” —Marilynne Robinson, The Death of Adam

This season revealed how naïve I had been throughout my life—how unaware I was of the suffering of others, how self‑absorbed and disengaged I had become. Strangely enough, this painful awakening was a gift, delivered to me in the dark.

Jean’s Death

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Life was moving along smoothly. We were enjoying our family, pastoring, developing the Adam2 Center, and traveling with the Kaisers for the annual Time of Refreshing in Switzerland.

We were celebrating our great-nephew’s birthday—he was born on the Fourth of July. Jean was carrying the birthday cake she had made, as she always did. It wasn’t one of her best creations; the decorations were messy. More concerning, though, was the way she was walking. Something wasn’t right.

The next day we decided to take her to the emergency room. From there, she was admitted to the hospital. The diagnosis was cancer—cancer that had metastasized to several organs, including her brain, causing swelling.

On July 6, 2009, we were told she had seven months to live. There are no words that can truly describe what a moment like that feels like. Life, as you know it, comes to a sudden and violent stop. The months that followed that were like living in a nightmare that wouldn’t stop. My wife of forty years was leaving us.

Seven months later, at her funeral, I spoke about what we call death. To us as humans, it is known as death. But to those of us who are in Christ, it is actually being swallowed up by Life. In as much as it’s necessary to make the transition from this life to the next, it can be a painful process. Our certainly was.

“For we know that if the earthly tent we live in is destroyed, we have a building from God, an eternal house in heaven, not built by human hands… so that what is mortal may be swallowed up by life.”
— 2 Corinthians 5:1–5

The Adam2 Center had been operating for about five years, and now I was single. I had never been single. Being married at nineteen is not the same as suddenly being alone. So what do you do? I did the only thing I knew how to do—I kept pastoring the church and running the nonprofit.

Every day was exhausting. Every day felt pointless.

That exhausting, empty existence continued for the next two and a half years. I kept pastoring. I kept traveling—mission trips to Russia and Ukraine, and of course, Time of Refreshing with the Kaisers. I needed someone to pull the plug on my endless activity, but there was no one to do that.

Until December 2, 2012.

That’s when I met Carrie.

It was memorable, to say the least.