A Man of Sorrows and Acquainted with Grief

Our Lord is “A Man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.” Isaiah 53:3 Many of us have become similarly acquainted with grief through our service of people in sports. The last week for me has been one of multiplied sorrow and grief. Last Friday I wrote about a coaching friend who had come home to hospice care after science had exhausted its options for curing his particular form of cancer. My friend died mercifully quickly on Monday afternoon with his wife and two daughters present. Laid on top of that was the four day process of dying experienced by my mother-in-law. She decided on Saturday to no longer take insulin for her diabetes and to discontinue her kidney dialysis treatments, effectively saying, “I’m ready to die.”

 

Coach’s death was peaceful and thankfully quick. Betty’s was slow, painful and very difficult for her husband, children and grandchildren to witness. My last week has been filled with hospital visits, little sleep, emotionally charged meetings with college baseball coaches, players and administrators, long hours of waiting in hospital rooms, occasional conversations with dying people, and much prayer for God’s mercy to be extended to the dying and the grieving. We have had multiple conversations with the coach’s widow regarding the planning of a memorial service for her husband in person, by phone, by text message and by email. We have done similarly now for my mother-in-law with family members and have hosted numerous extended family members in our home as we became “family central.”

 

Having grown up with a large extended family and thus attending many funerals, wakes and having made hundreds of visits to emergency rooms and hospitals for any number of issues, I have become “a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.” We who serve as sport chaplains or sport mentors, like our Lord, are uniquely qualified to help people in sport to deal with the grim reality of death and dying. We must be prepared and willing to walk with people “through the valley of the shadow of death.”

 

For the 30 young me with whom I sat in their locker room last Friday and Monday afternoons, they are 18-22 years old and perceive themselves to be bulletproof. Death and dying are the farthest things from their minds, until tragedy assaults them with the inevitability of mortality. To help them understand the process of dying, the emotions that would accompany their grief and proper ways to respond to the situation was an immense privilege for me. To walk through it with the coach, his wife and daughters, as well as with the other coaches, the team and others was both painful and comforting. To be in it with my family keeps me from taking a cold, unfeeling and clinical approach to the grief or to simply see it as a part of my job.

 

Normally for us in high school, club, collegiate or professional sport, tragedy is a torn knee ligament or a separated shoulder injury, things from which one recovers over a few months and returns to competition. For our friends in motor racing, tragedy means someone has died in an accident. Drivers, pit crews, even spectators are all in harm’s way as the cars or motorcycles are flying by on the razor’s edge of control and chaos. Death is a much more frequent visitor to their sporting events. We would do well to learn from our motor racing chaplain colleagues related to handling issues of grief, injury and certainly, death among sports people. My conversations with Indy Racing League Chaplain, Bob Hills, have been invaluable to me. The brief training and the book I received from Sports Chaplaincy Australia were also helpful in preparing me for weeks like this one.

 

I would challenge each of us to be prepared and willing to walk boldly into the arena of injury, disease, tragedy and death with the people of sport. We carry the living presence of the Lord Jesus into that terrible environment and thereby transform it into a place where men and women can hear the voice of the Savior, finding hope and comfort. “The wicked flee when no one is pursuing, but the righteous are as bold as a lion.” Proverbs 28:1