Bringing Restoration to a Season of Loss
/“She was my best friend”
I’ve lived my whole life in KC alongside my parents, my little brother Vic, and my older sister Sandrina. Growing up, our family dynamic was pretty all over the place. My parents often split up for a season only to get back together in an attempt to tolerate each other for the sake of me and my siblings. With poor life patterns, financial issues, and a lack of trust, their tolerance of one another would often wear thin. In the center of that dysfunction, my sister became another mother figure for me. She was my best friend, sister, and someone I looked up to. We grew up sharing rooms, oftentimes sharing beds and later on, sticky situations we had no business being in. We spent a lot of days together that were full of laughter, tears, and discipline. Growing up with her was a blast and she was the person that knew me without me having to take the time to explain myself. All we needed was eye contact.
As Sandrina and I grew older, we didn’t always get along. Any time we had a falling out, it got ugly and it felt as if I lost my sister. But then we would inevitably reconcile and get back to our genuine, goofy, and sisterly relationship. However, when I accepted Christ in 2015, our relationship changed in a much different way. Now there was a spiritual conflict. Before, I bent to whatever my sister believed. We both were confused, didn’t know for sure, and didn’t think we could know what was true. After getting saved though, I wasn’t going to relent on what I believed, whether she agreed or not. It wasn’t that she didn’t agree with something I said or something I did, now she didn’t agree with who I had become. Though that was frustrating for me, I really could understand where she was coming from because I used to think the same thing about Christians.
Until this season, I never felt so far from a relationship that was so important to me. I had to learn to depend on the Lord in prayer to win her heart, instead of trying to get her to understand me like she always could. In 2018, I was finally starting to see those prayers come to fruition and we started to connect again. For the first time, I felt like one day we would be worshipping together, sharing that same sisterly connection we had before I got saved.
“I began seeking an escape of my own, which was not an escape at all.”
August 19, 2019, my hopes for what our relationship could become would be made void. I was winding down after a long day at work when I received a phone call from my father. My sister was shot several times in the stomach and was being rushed to the hospital. Even though I was told she might not make it, my first thought was that this was just a trial that God was going to bring her through. My prayer was that this would be the moment that she would draw near Christ. I trusted that she would make it, but that’s not what happened. The situation itself didn’t take me by surprise. It was just the fact that she died. The reality hit that everything I was hoping to bring her into was impossible because she was gone. This wasn’t a circumstance that would bring her to Christ, like I had thought. This was it and her life was over.
My family’s reaction panned out exactly as I would have expected. In the middle of the chaos, there wasn’t a moment for me to really grieve. I had to take my sister’s kids in and do other things for my family. While everyone else grieved and reacted to the pain of losing Sandrina, I simply held it in and managed what was in front of my day-to-day. It wasn’t until several weeks after the funeral and after her kids moved to their uncle’s on the West Coast that the grief finally sunk in.
Understanding how to mourn did not come easy. My initial reaction was to avoid the pain, rather than to confront and mourn that loss. Then, replacement. I was looking for things I could use to replace this void in my life. It also produced temptations for hidden sin. In that loss I was weak, and those hidden sinful desires I had bottled in and suppressed were surfacing. My grief and sorrow surfaced and spiraled out of control. I gave into those desires instead of running to the Lord. I was wrestling with feelings of loneliness and distance from the Lord, lacking hope in the Lord’s promise to be my refuge and comforter. I began seeking an escape of my own, which was not an escape at all. It was a disillusioned course down a more complicated path of grief. Grieving my sister became this confusing maze of guilt, shame, and feeling disabled in ministry. There were already so many layers to grieving the murder of my sister and the effect it caused on my family and now, I was also having to grieve my failure to run to God and lack of desire to continue or abide in him. I had lost a sense of spiritual reality and this for sure was a hard thing to bear.
Loss is a reality for every single person. 1Timothy 6:7 says, “For we brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out.” As we live, loss is inevitable. It is difficult to process something that happens so unexpectedly, even though we are all living in the reality of knowing that life is brief. Something I learned was that grieving is a process that is to be taken seriously and with patience. This requires me to respond and deal properly with what surfaces throughout each day, whether that’s emotions I am not used to feeling, sinful desires, or really painful memories. I learned to respond rather than react, which looked like being honest about all of these things, but not letting them control my behavior and decision-making. This can be so difficult during a storm, but possible through faith and communication with the Lord Jesus Christ.
“Our hope is not in God shielding us from pain”
In Mark 4, the disciples cry for help in honest fear, and Jesus responds by calming the storm and then calls them to have greater faith. It is so much easier to react to the storm in the moment, but it is always more profitable to bring your perspective and fears to Christ.
I didn’t get what I wanted when I prayed for God to save my sister’s life. Even Christ didn’t get what he prayed for in the garden of Gethsemane before he drank the cup of his suffering. How often and how much more does God suffer the loss of his desires because of our rebellion? So much more often than me. God doesn’t get what he wants and is still patient, slow to anger, and sinless. He remains sober and patient in his own loss. Where I am quick to react, he is slow to anger. When I don’t want to work through my grief, he is longsuffering. Regardless of what I choose, he is faithful. The hurt I hold in losing my sister is a piece of the pain that he currently feels. He has lost so much more than us. Our hope is not in God shielding us from pain but in his promise of bringing restoration when the loss inevitably comes.
Psalm 73:26 My flesh and my heart faileth: but God is the strength of my heart, and my portion for ever.
Tori Khan is a discipler and small group leader in Midtown Baptist Temple’s College and Young Adults ministry, and also serves on the hospitality team.