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Becoming Whole
Relationships and sexuality are areas of life that can be beautiful or confusing, life-giving, or painful. Becoming Whole is a conversational podcast for men, women, and families seeking to draw nearer to Jesus as they navigate topics like sexual integrity, relational healing, spiritual health, and so much more.
Becoming Whole
Pursuing Goodness: Grief & Lament part 1
Welcome to the first part of our four-part series on pursuing goodness in 2025! In today's episode, hosts Aaron Tagert and James Craig dive deep into the often-overlooked topics of grief and lament. Contrary to popular belief, these emotions can be a catalysts for healing and growth. Aaron and James discuss personal experiences, the importance of acknowledging sorrow, and share insights on how grieving well can lead to genuine comfort and maturity. Join us as we explore how to embrace these challenging emotions to start the new year with a journey toward wholeness.
Resources:
Grieving the Seasons of Our Lives - Ron Walborn
Lament Psalm 3 (from Soul Shepherding Ministries)
The Good, The Bad, & The Ugly (from Awaken 360)
Psalms in a Month
👉Men's Overcoming Lust & Temptation Devotional
👉Women 21-Day Prayer Journal & Devotional - (Women overcoming unwanted sexual Behavior)
👉Compass 21-Day Prayer Journal & Devotional - (Wives who are or have been impacted by partner betrayal)
As we get started. Today, we're going to do something a little bit different. We're going to do a word association. Are you ready? What is the first thing that comes to mind when you hear the word good? You got it Now.
Speaker 1:I bet it wasn't grief or lament, and on today's show, we're going to have a conversation about how grief and lament are actually good things and why it's worthwhile for you to begin to embrace them on your journey toward healing and wholeness. We're starting the new year, coming off the holidays, and maybe you had a wonderful experience this holiday season filled with great food, great people, great times. Food, great people, great times. Or perhaps you found yourself back in a setting that has been a trigger throughout your story. Maybe you didn't experience what you were hoping to experience, maybe something was different this year because someone or something was missing.
Speaker 1:However, you find yourself as you're listening to this conversation. I just want to say that we're so glad you are here to listen, and my prayer is that God would meet you in a very tangible way as we press into the topic of grief and lament. Something just seemed right about starting off the new year on becoming whole by acknowledging grief and lament and possibly reframing how we see the presence of these in our lives. My name is Aaron Taggart and I'm one of our men's spiritual coaches in our Unwanted Intensive Guide at Regen, and I am joined today by my friend and fellow coach at Regen, as well as our Awakened Program Coordinator, james Craig James.
Speaker 2:Welcome in, brother, thanks for having me on Aaron.
Speaker 1:Now I'm excited because we're starting a four-part series today on pursuing goodness as we enter into 2025. So there's excitement for kicking this off, but I have to admit, my heart is also a little heavy, as I know that we're talking about today is not necessarily an easy topic to discuss. But nonetheless, let's dive in. So, james, as as we begin to kind of set this stage for grief and lament, why don't we just start by unpacking a little bit about what grief is and what lament is?
Speaker 2:yeah. So I love that we're pursuing goodness by talking about such a hard topic, but we we are, and I'm excited to hopefully convince you all, or or you know, to be part of showing us that this is such an important thing. Grief is simply sorrow or it's like that, that idea of mental anguish or pain you might say. So grief is kind of that objective fact. Lament or grieving or mourning are all the same, basically, and lament is to express that grief or sorrow it's to mourn, it's to grieve. So you can kind of use these words interchangeably.
Speaker 2:But grief is kind of the fact of sorrow in our lives. Lament is choosing to express grief and sorrow it's choosing to mourn. And all of the grief in our lives comes typically from some sort of loss, really of anything. It could be things even we don't get like, things that we are hoping to get, that we don't get. There could even be godly things that we do, like we sacrifice for our children or our spouse or a friend, or we break up with someone that should be broken up with, or whatever. That does not mean that there's no grief. Even good things we do can carry grief on this side of heaven.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, and I would say too grieving and this might sound a little interesting, but grieving the absence of porn in our lives for someone who has struggled with unwanted sexual behaviors in the sense that it was something that used to pacify and soothe maybe. Some grief and pain, some different things, right, like just the difficult things.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we even do a lesson in this. We just today we're starting the heart module in Awaken360. You know it's a year round program but we have, you know, each three month quarter of the year is a different set of content. We call this one the heart module. We do something called I forget exactly what we call it but we actually grieve the loss of our sexual sin, not because it's inherently good but because there's actual loss that we need to count the cost of if we're going to move forward. And then we actually the following week we grieve the cost. But I know for me and for many men who go through our Awaken program it's kind of a shocking thing Really. I should lament the loss of sin in my life or unwanted sexual behavior, lament the loss of sin in my life or unwanted sexual behavior. But we're going to again hopefully convince y'all today that this is integral to moving forward If we don't grieve things we will be impacted by them.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely yeah, and this being one of those things that you know as, as you know, someone who's who's you know, been on that healing journey or finds themselves on a healing journey, right, this is no longer a part of the present, right? So there's this loss of this thing that was so familiar, so comforting in times where maybe it was needed because we turned to that instead of other healthy ways of coping and kind of dealing with that, and so we'll get into some of that a bit later. But, yeah, just an interesting way to kind of frame, you know, grief and lament and you know the grief is so interesting because it there is no necessarily right way to grieve. You know we can't fix or cure grief.
Speaker 1:In fact, a really great analogy of grief is that grief comes like waves and if you've ever stood out in the ocean, you know sometimes, on some days, are just some really low key kind of waves, like no big deal. And of course, it also probably depends on you know, where you live. You, living on the Pacific, you guys get some pretty gnarly waves over there, not so much on the East coast, but yeah, we get. You know, we get some, we get some waves.
Speaker 2:Yeah, warmer water, though People don't realize. In California the water's actually pretty cold Mostly there's something to grieve when I first moved out there.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that would do it, man. But you know you think about these waves as they kind of crash them, and sometimes you know you're just expecting these little waves and all of a sudden there's this huge wave that just comes crashing over you and and that is so much what grief can be like kind of come out of the blue and remember something that maybe you know you had forgotten or didn't realize was there, and it just brings a different kind of awareness. So I kind of like that analogy as, as we talk about grief today, james, curious, how have you and this might get a little personal, but how have you experienced grief and lament in your own journey and how has that shown up in your coaching?
Speaker 2:oh yeah. Well, first of all, I just want to say, when I coach whether it's men dealing with unwanted sexual behavior or men dealing with betrayal, spousal betrayal most men have the tendency to minimize our pain. We as men and maybe women too, but I just primarily work with men we have the tendency to minimize our pain and we say things like it wasn't that big of a deal, it wasn't as bad as this. But honestly, I think that I've done that because I'm afraid to face my pain, I'm afraid to go into the sorrow. So I have yet to meet.
Speaker 2:Well, there's, there's few men that I've met who don't have at least some tendency to minimize the pain that they've experienced, the pain that might be very well driving them to unwanted sexual behavior, or even the pain of um betrayal, of being cheated on, or infidelity, and so in my own life this was totally the case. Or infidelity, and so in my own life this was totally the case. I mean, I was driven to my unwanted sexual behavior at a young age, in part because of my inability to greet. So one of the memories that actually came up for me in the heart module this was now almost a decade ago, when I was a participant in Awaken360, was I was going through the homework and I guess we were talking about. You know, the heart module is all about our feelings and it's the hardest module by far for most men to go through and awaken. It's all about these deep suit feelings that we have not really dealt with, and one of the days that I was working through this content, the prompt was often spend 15 to 30 minutes.
Speaker 2:The last question is like spend time with Jesus basically processing this stuff that came up in the lesson and I'm sitting there this is my college senior year dorm room or apartment room and God brought me back to a really vivid memory from the age of five, when my parents were actually getting a tour around a seminary that my family both my parents ended up attending, and this is a real memory. This wasn't just like an imaginative exercise. This was a real memory where I actually got lost in the basement of the seminary. It was like an old building. I got lost. I was pretty terrified. This was before. I guess I had figured out how to be good with directions so that I wouldn't be in this kind of situation, but I got lost and when I finally came to the surface and found my way up.
Speaker 2:No one had been looking for me around age 12 when I got into my pornography addiction that for those seven years, not only did this memory really happen, but it also represented those seven years where I felt like I was not being looked for, not being sought out. What was crazy for me, aaron, is I often, historically, do not have the easiest time processing sadness or sorrow, but in this experience this was totally God's doing, but I was able to enter in as if I was five years old and I was crying in my college apartment. I was crying Where's my daddy? Where's my daddy? To the extent I was wailing, to the extent that my roommate could hear and came in and just held me.
Speaker 2:It was one of the most beautiful moments of my entire healing journey and it was so pivotal to realize that God saw me in this. He reminded me of this memory and this memory was deeply impacting so much of what I was going to pornography for to feel sought, to feel looked for, and so that's a pretty personal story, but it was so integral to my own journey to realize there was actually something behind part of what I was going to pornography for, and I've seen this time and time again and with the guys I work with again, whether it's things they've minimized or really just very clear things that they're aware just kind of messed me up. It's very hard to enter into those places of sorrow and choose into grief of sorrow and choose into grief.
Speaker 1:Thanks for sharing that man. I resonate so much with what you said about the just an inability to grieve or to minimize our, our pain. And I actually I actually had a moment last night, um, watching a show with my wife had this kind of little moment of grief, kind of just come up. And you know, I lost my dad several years ago to cancer, had a very complicated relationship as an adult. I was trying to kind of repair some things and didn't have a relationship at all with my stepmother and when he passed none of us were. I say us. I have three siblings.
Speaker 1:None of us were contacted about any kind of funeral or kind of opportunity to kind of say goodbye.
Speaker 1:And I'm watching this show last night and this father passes and you know these, the kids are grieving and it just really hit me that I didn't get that opportunity to to do that and tears were shed you know as often do when I watch a show and there are these kinds of moments, but it really clued me into something I don't know that I've fully realized in that moment.
Speaker 1:And you know back to, you know just other, you know instances of, you know my parents divorcing when I was in college, and different things, and as these things start to happen and things start to kind of go sideways, if you will, in my life because I don't know what to do with the pain, I don't know what to do with this loss and the grief, right, and so, you know, enter in, you know these other vices that really kind of take the focus off of those things but that never really leaves right. The grief never leaves. The pain, you know doesn't leave. So we have to do, you know something, you know with that, we have to press into that and and so how is pressing into grief and lament helpful in pursuing goodness in our lives? Or how would you connect, james, these for the listeners who maybe haven't experienced grief or lament as being good well, everyone.
Speaker 2:I just want to say, if you're listening from the U? S, I don't think our culture is very good at grieving.
Speaker 2:I tell them we're lamenting right, Like most most of the time. You might not have heard many sermons about it or or been taught how to do this. Well, that wasn't always the case. I mean, we see men throughout the Bible just David or Jesus or others just weeping, and anyway, we could talk for a while about that kind of thing. But I listened to this amazing talk We'll put it in the show notes by a guy named Dr Ron Walburn. He was the Dean of Alliance Theological Center. I think he's at Asbury now, but in the talk he says that when we don't grieve well, our past robs us of our present and our future. So we're actually being impacted.
Speaker 2:I mean so many of us, maybe especially men, I don't know but would love to leave it in the past. It happened in the past. I want to leave it in the past. That'd be awesome if it worked that easily. I mean we can leave stuff in the past or increasingly leave it in the past when we have grieved effectively and it no longer has to affect us as much. But often that phrase of leave it in the past is a way to avoid pain, the thing that again, as Americans, with our devices and everything that we have, it's all geared around avoiding pain, avoiding discomfort. But again, in this heart module, I didn't think of all this stuff before, but these were really impactful lessons for me.
Speaker 2:There was this idea that in one of the teaching videos from Josh Glazer, who runs our ministry, that our emotions are like at a dinner party. Just a picture this is pre-inside out, by the way, but it's a great image. Our emotions are at a dinner party and pain's there, Sorrow is there, Sadness is there, right, but so is joy, so is delight, so is, you know, maybe anger I mean the negative and the positive emotions are all there. But what we've done so often is we've gone up to our bedroom, shut the door and we're not going down to the dinner party. But the reality is, in order to access more joy, in order to access the joy and the hope set before us, we need to go down and hear what grief has to say. It doesn't mean we put it in the driver's seat. I might've used this on becoming whole before. We don't necessarily need to. We shouldn't necessarily put it in the driver's seat of our lives. But also we can't keep it in the trunk. We need to actually let it into the cab of the car and hear it out so that we can be comforted.
Speaker 2:This is what the promises from Jesus Matthew 5, 4, right those who grieve will be comforted. There's actually a promise from God in that that when we open ourselves to grieve, when we get what's on the inside, the grief, and we lament it or we grieve it, get it out, we will be comforted. And this can be true also with the body of Christ. I mean, if I'm feeling sadness or sorrow and I grieve in front of Aaron, Aaron's actually the kind of guy who's going to give me room for that and he's going to probably comfort me as part of the body. But also I think that there's even a direct way. Even on that day back in college that I shared, yeah, my roommate did comfort me. I just knew that God was in that moment, Like it was so palpable when I was grieving and lamenting, like he was just so in that moment. And so you know, just one other thing I want to say about that is this is actually a journey of maturity, it's an invitation to maturity. This is us learning how to handle pain in mature ways, the way God has made us as spiritual adults.
Speaker 2:And again, I think that we're at a disadvantage. I think that we don't have, as we don't make, as much space to process. I mean, just picture Jesus on the road with his disciples. He didn't have Spotify, not even a GPS Like there were. There was nothing besides quiet singing or talking. I mean there's not much else right on the road, but most of our lives are spent in front of screens and other things. I'm not trying to demonize, you know, our modern technology. I'm just trying to say we are not in an environment that's trying to cultivate room for feelings to come up, for grief to surface, for the waves to hit us the way it hit you last night, aaron yeah, I mean, there's so much just makes me think there's so much competing for for our attention and there's so so many noises.
Speaker 1:You know that the world kind of throws at us today that it makes it. It does make it harder to kind of tune some of those things out, or, you know, and what makes me think about is just just being really intentional, I think, is what it comes down to Really creating that space, really being intentional to sit with these things. I think about that beatitude in Matthew that he will comfort those who grieve, and it makes me think about Psalm 56, 8, that God is a tear collector. He collects our tears. Now, and you think about this this isn't like a for any, like nineties you know anyone's growing up in the nineties that like a go-go gadget arm, kind of inspector gadget type arm collecting tears, like like he is, like even just picturing it now, man, it makes me kind of well up a little bit, like he is so present, like he is right there with his hand extended to capture the tears, and you think about the nearness and the presence of a God, who, who is a tear collector and how, how near he has to be for that, and there's something just so beautiful in light of that being comforted. We're not comforted from afar. He is right there with us in the midst of whatever the circumstances, whatever we're going through. He is there, present, to collect those tears and to comfort us as we grieve, and there is so much hope and peace in that. I think that's just so helpful, I think, to think about.
Speaker 1:Thanks for tuning in to today's podcast. We have so much packed into this episode that we're splitting it into two parts. So be sure to tune back in next week as we continue our conversation on pursuing goodness by leaning into grief and lament. We'll see you then.
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