It seems that lately a lot of my conversations with people have revolved around loss of some sort or the other. Loss of a boyfriend, loss of parents, children growing up and leaving home, losing jobs, loss of the dreams you had for your children or the dreams you had for your future… even losing faith in God. Then in the last few days, it just seems like I’ve been tripping over quotes from all sides regarding loss, so I thought I’d try to put it all together and make some sense out of it. 
First of all, I’ll start with this. I don’t deal well with loss at all. I’ve learned that about myself. That’s why when I read this quote from Beth Moore’s book recently, I pretty much laughed out loud:
“Learning to say ‘good-bye’ is a necessary life skill.” (from “Get Out of That Pit.”)
And by the way, that wasn’t Beth’s insight… that was something her husband told her that SHE needed to learn. (That made me feel a little bit better… haha)
Then, the next day, I heard this quote at the end of an episode of Grey’s Anatomy. (This should go in one of my ‘things I learn from TV’ blog posts.) It caught my attention and I had to go back and listen to it again… so here it is:
“Practicing medicine doesn’t lend itself well to the making of friends. Maybe because life and mortality are in our faces all the time. Maybe because in staring down death every day, we’re forced to know that life – every minute – is borrowed time. And each person we let ourselves care about is just one more loss somewhere down the line. For this reason, I know some doctors who just don’t bother making friends at all. But the rest of us, we make it our job to move that line, to push each loss as far away as we can.”
I’m certainly not a doctor, but I get what is being said here. The older I get, the
more ‘losses’ I face, the more I realize how much I dislike the whole process – and it does have a tendency to make you want to insulate yourself or find some way to push the loss far enough away that you don’t feel the pain. (but I think we all know that really isn’t possible)
But then this passage of scripture came up at church yesterday morning:
“But we have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us. We are hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed. We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body. For we who are alive are always being given over to death for Jesus’ sake, so that his life may also be revealed in our mortal body. So then, death is at work in us, but life is at work in you…
Therefore we do not lose heart. Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed dayby day. For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an eternal glory that far outweighs them all. So we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.” (II Cor 4)
"That's what learning is, after all; not whether we lose the game, but how we lose and how we've changed because of it and what we take away from it that we never had before, to apply to other games. Losing, in a curious way, is winning." - Richard Bach
So, losses are an inevitable part of life. Maybe the point is that somehow through it all we don’t lose heart. And dealing with loss seems to be a lot about perspective. I’m pretty sure I’m not quite at the place where I feel like losing is winning, but I can at least say that I get what they are trying to say… There are necessary lessons that are learned from losses. I don’t have to like the loss, but perhaps I can at least find a benefit in the lessons learned and find a way to let that help me in the future…
Oh, on a totally different subject but perhaps a happier note, I recieved a call from the doctor about the biopsies from last Thursday and everything came back clear. So that's a sigh of relief and a special thanks from me for the prayers. :)
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