Ascension : News From The Grotto - Thought For The Week
Submitted by The Islander (Shari Parkhill) 19.06.2008 (Article Archived on 03.07.2008)

This past Sunday I went on a hike and a search and recovery mission, I hoped. Two weeks ago, while hiking with a friend, I managed to lose the rain jacket he had loaned me.

 It had rained heavily while we were preparing to hike, and so I borrowed a jacket he had in his rover, just in case.

I hate to lose things, especially when they belong to someone else.  I have a penchant for misplacing things; I like to blame my invisible gremlin.  But I know that it is just me, I tend to have too much on my mind.  It’s either that, or just age!

It started me thinking about the important things that we lose in the course of our lifetimes.  When we are small, we are upset by the loss of a favourite toy, our blanket, or some other thing that helps us go to sleep at night.  I’m sure all the parents among us will recall frantic searches for a misplaced item while our child sobbed with sadness. 

As we get a little older, we mourn for pets lost to old age or accidents, friends who moved away, and heaven forbid, friends who decided they liked someone else better.  I think these sad occasions are to train us for the bigger losses that we experience in our lives.  As we get older we start to lose parents and friends to illness and accidents.  Saying we lost them is a bit of a misnomer.  We didn’t misplace them; we didn’t forget where they are; they were taken away by circumstances beyond our control.

But it is certainly a loss to us.  We miss them with all our hearts.  As I said a few weeks ago, to lose someone we love to death is to have a hole punched out of our hearts, and our souls.  Even when we lose someone’s presence in our lives, not through death, but simply by the fact that our circumstances change, and someone moves on, is a huge loss.  Unfortunately most of us will suffer from the loss of a meaningful relationship at some point in our lives.  We all grow and change, and sometimes the person we think we will spend the rest of our lives with, turns out to not be that person.

We also lose jobs, friends, and homes.  Look at the misery caused by earthquakes, tornados, hurricanes, tsunamis and wildfires.  It seems that there is always something in the news about these horrific disasters.  Imagine having a home that you have made your own one day, only to have it disappear in an instant?  What a loss this would be.

So, how do we cope with all these losses in our lives?  We cope through two great gifts.  The first is our faith; faith that even though we may have lost something so very important, we will make it through the pain and the grief, and come out the other side of the darkness a stronger person.  The second is through the gift of friendship.  Friends and loved ones will make it possible for you to gain the strength to move on.  

The other important lesson, I think, is to have the wisdom to understand the difference between big and small losses, and to approach them with the proper amount of concern and worry.  The other day I became very upset over the fact that I couldn’t find my Ipod.  In retrospect, I worried too much (I eventually found it), and was too hard on myself for misplacing it in the first place.  Remember, I do have a penchant for losing things.  I have to learn to be easier on myself.  And in the grand scheme of things, one thing the major losses in my life have taught me is that the loss of a material item like an Ipod is way down on the scale of importance.  So why did I get so bent out of shape about losing it?  I guess I was angry at myself for being careless.   Or maybe I was really upset about something else. 

We have to learn not to get upset over the little things, to accept that we are not infallible, and most of all, to save our energy for when the really important losses come along.  For it is then that we will need all our strength, all of our faith, and the support of the good friends in our life. 

So, this week, maybe we should all take some time to examine how we approach the losses in our lives.  Re-evaluate how we react, and make a pact with ourselves to be a little calmer, and save our energy for when we will really need it. 

May you have a blessed week, with no losses, big or small.   And by the way, we found the rain jacket!!