Grieving With Hope

By Dr. Larry Black

The grief book for these solemn unpredictable times. Whether you're grieving the loss of a loved one from the Corona Virus or helping someone mourn the loss of daily routines and ways of life, Grieving With Hope: A Time to Mourn offers comforting affirmations of faith and Scriptural support to walk you through the mourning process. It reveals some of the emotions of the grieving process and how best to navigate through the pain. Its topics include:

Mourning the loss of a spouse, child, in-law, parent, sibling, friend, and mentor.

Explains the difference between grief and mourning.

Shows the physical and emotional effects of grief.

Understanding the grief reconciliation process.

Uncovers alternate models of mourning.

Embracing the God who allowed your loved one to die.

Written by an author who has experienced multiple losses and has the heart to help others process their grief, this book offers solace to newly bereaved individuals, seniors who've lost loved ones years ago, and those dramatically impacted by the pandemic.
While there is no playbook for navigating these unchartered waters of mourning, Grieving With Hope: A Time to Mourn provides those suffering from grief with up-to-date and practical information to support you through the harrowing depths of despair as you navigate back from the brink of hopelessness and rebuild your life.
It also contains a reflecting and response section that offers a combination of contemplation activities, self-exploration questions, and a place for journaling to help you through the mourning process.

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dr. Larry Black
• Release date: Nov 29, 2021
• ISBN: 9798224933440

Book preview

WELCOME

Welcome to the self-contained course for those who desire to grieve appropriately and help others who mourn. Experiencing loss can be very traumatic. I invite you to use this guide to study yourself and am very grateful that you have chosen this course to assist in your process. Be sure to read each chapter, answer the questions, and follow the instructions pertaining to your needs. You will discover helpful information to move forward with the pain of grief and loss. 

The information presented is the culmination of my years of helping those grieving and looking for reconciliation. When the death of a loved one challenges one’s faith in God, there can be a conflict between their beliefs and reality. I understand your hurts, emotions, and painful experiences! I, too, have lost a loved one on my life journey. I have experienced the endless weeping that comes when mourning stops by for a visit and bringing with it fear, anger, and the dark soul of the night. 

When your loved one dies, it’s common to feel isolated and alone. Losing someone can be overwhelming. It’s easy to feel like no one else has walked where you have, and it’s easy to believe that no one could understand your situation. But the truth is that you are not alone; others know what you are going through. I recognize this can be a significant hurdle for you to mentally scale. But your wellbeing depends on your ability to accept this truth.  I have established, as one of my goals, a program that assures that you do not have to travel alone. 

This course uses personal interviews, real-life case studies, biblically-based principles, and spiritual/religious language to describe a grieving process to serve as a guideline for you. This program contains lessons throughout each chapter, covering intense emotions of fear, anger, guilt, and shame. It demonstrates how, by addressing these emotions through Reflecting, Reframing, and Restructuring, you can safely navigate the tumultuous waters of grief to the calm harbor of reconciliation. 

Whenever a traumatic grief event happens, you may desperately try to escape the emotional and spiritual pain by dulling it with alcohol, drugs, sex, and other avenues. Thus, you may become physically and emotionally addicted to your negative behavior. You must receive informed instruction; otherwise, you might not remember, recognize, or address the underlying processes that are adversely affecting your life. Helping you learn the grief process allows you to integrate your loss more healthily.

My primary goal with this course is to deliver a spiritually based, self-discovery, informed reconciliation program for those who have experienced loss and grief. When individuals re-evaluate and adjust, they can find peace and become whole.

Course Description

Grieving with hope is a three-phase comprehensive course designed to enhance participants’ ability to grieve through education and demonstration. In this course, you will learn proven strategies to develop or reconnect your spirituality for creating greater spiritual awareness by examining your faith and belief system. An essential part of this course is showing individuals how their personalities, upbringing, and misconceptions of grief hinder their mourning and how the influence of spiritual interventions can assist in reconciliation and healing. 

Learning Objectives:

In this workbook, you will learn how to:

1. Reflect. You will learn how the profoundly distressing and traumatic events you have experienced contribute to your increased thoughts and feelings about grief and how reflecting and identifying is necessary for adequately processing traumatic experiences and adapting to adverse emotional pain. We will explore how attempting to suppress or avoid thinking about negative emotions can be self-defeating.

2. Reframe. You will learn that each of us views our environment through our own unique lens influenced by our experiences, ideas, and concepts. By reassessing these characteristics, changing how you think about them, and choosing to live more intentionally, you can reframe your lens and alter your worldview. When you change your thinking, you change your life. 

3. Redefine. By shifting your thinking about your traumatic emotions of fear, anger, guilt, and shame and replacing them with hope, forgiveness, meaning, and purpose in your daily life, you can experience lifestyle changes that move you effectively and efficiently forward on your path to emotional healing.  

INTRODUCTION

For I know the plans I have for you, declares the LORD, plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.

Jeremiah 29:11 

If you have experienced the death of a family member, friend, pet, or someone special, I’m sorry for your loss. I put this workbook together to assist you in reconciling your grief on your bereavement journey. I want you to know that there is life on the other side of death and darkness. As hard as it may be right now, this is your chance to look back on the good times, appreciate the memories, and use your pain and discomfort to grow from it all.

In choosing this workbook, you’ve taken a big step in addressing the death of your loved one. Grieving is a deeply personal and gradual experience. It helps you recognize where you are in this process, assists you in identifying your strengths, and supports you in developing proactive ways to cope. Throughout its pages, you’ll find positive questions and comments that help you integrate the reality of your loss into life-changing revelations, process your pain, maintain a healthy bond with the loved one you lost, and move towards reconciliation. 

You can use it as a companion to the Grieving with Hope: A Time to Mourn book or as a standalone. Whatever way you use it, it will assist you in grieving healthily, find a way to move along the path of your bereavement journey, and understand and cope with the emotions you ultimately experience. I suggest you find a safe place to process your grief since you will, undoubtedly, have conflicting emotions. Whether one-on-one, in person, or in a virtual group, you must discover where you can go and who you can talk to about what’s happening internally during your grieving process. In time, you will find what works best for you.  Many of those answers will be revealed as you work through the pages of this workbook.

This workbook is not a quick fix or shortcut through grief and sorrow; rushing the process is not advisable or healthy. Instead, this workbook is a safe place to learn — a place where you find creative concepts, reassuring reflections, and teachable techniques to help you survive and reorient after loss. It’s a tool that enables you to understand the role that grieving and mourning play in your life. It’s written to help you make sense of what appears to make no sense and direct you towards hope.   

Grief and mourning are not the same.  Grief is the set of internal emotions following a death or loss, while mourning are the outward expressions of that grief. There is no right or wrong way to grieve or mourn — no step-by-step guide to move through the grieving/mourning process because everyone is unique. It can mean different things for different people, but there is hope. You can move forward to a place where the pain is not so sharp and the sadness is not so all-consuming. 

Grief has been a part of the human experience for as long as there have been humans.  The bible, written thousands of years ago, chronicles the lives of many who experienced death and loss.  The painful trauma of loss shown in the lives of the Biblical characters like Job, Moses, Joseph, David, Abraham, and Naomi, whose losses were different, reveal that their grieving was unique to each one. However, they demonstrate what grieving with hope can accomplish and how we go on living. They show us an extraordinary picture of individuals who never lost their meaning and purpose in life. They chose to move ahead with their pain and loss. They adjusted to their new environment and circumstances by maintaining hope in the God they knew and served. Their purpose, direction, and zest for life did not end when they suffered a loss. Yes, they endured many sleepless nights, weathered many storms, cried rivers of tears, and walked the lonesome valley. But they lived on.

Every adaptation, adjustment, and step forward took them further from the happy life they shared with family, friends, and loved ones who were gone. Though they stopped the season of mourning, they continued to experience the emotional and physical pain of loss. It appeared the bottom had fallen out, but they knew there