My Glorious Boaz

Although everyone says time heals, in my experience time by itself does not heal. It is what you do in the time that passes by that can bring healing or even greater pain. Time is, if you wish, merely the skin that covers a wound which may be healed or not. There are people who allow time to pass but do not deal with their pain and under the thin layer of skin there is a real wound, unhealed, full of blood and pus. Any “solution” for dealing with the pain other than bringing it all to God amounts to futile effort.
There are two reasons for writing a book like this.
The first reason is that we do not teach enough about dealing with death, and many times the process of healing that the widow(er)s in our churches go through is left in the shadow. We simply do not talk about it. Lack of information and shared experience, lack of knowledge among God’s people leads to destruction, as the Bible teaches us in Hosea 4:6. No one likes to remember the pain they went through, but God’s powerful hand intervening in our lives leaves a trace of blessings that needs to be shared to produce faith in others. We are a body; one body. We are knit together in love and love cares so we should care for one another. If the understanding I have received about God’s hand in my life can be used by others in their walk of faith, praise God! Any work of His hand is a treasure and treasures are of no worth unless they are brought into the light and shared. If all the widow(er)s were to teach one another how to walk with Christ through pain and suffering, we would have an army of teachers that hell would be afraid of. We have in us the Holy Spirit as the greatest gift we received from the Father to help us overcome our pain, yet many of us choose to bury our pain and keep silent about it. My heart is set against keeping silent about the work Christ is able to do in a widow(er)’s life because we are not called to silence but to teach everything He has taught us!
The other reason for writing this book is that if we allow the root of the pain to be treated, not only do we experience a dimension of precious godly healing that we couldn’t experience any other way, but the purpose of our existence as widows / widowers ceases to be solely reaching a certain degree of healing. Healing is a necessary first step of a long journey. If we walk the journey towards Christ instead falling on the track of a journey towards healing, healing will not become an idol or a purpose in life. The “thing” we pursue and the “thing” we are after has to be Christ, whether we are in a season of being married, widowed or single in our lives. When we cease pursuing Christ and we start chasing the healing, we stop being defined by our born-again nature and we become defined by a circumstance in our life; the Scripture calls that “idolatry”.
Regardless the circumstance of our widowhood, in His unspeakable grace, God does not waste our pain. He uses the painful circumstances in our life to deal with deep fears that are only revealed when our hearts are split open. Sadly, a funeral of a close loved one can split the heart in a way that nothing else does. After healing there is a new life, a new life which might be radically different from what we thought it will be, but it is nevertheless real. We cannot allow ourselves to be trapped by circumstances and tossed around in purposeless and fruitless spirals of thoughts, because Christ did not die for us so that we would become paralyzed. His death triggered the unstoppable power of resurrection to invade the Earth and to become available for us to grab even in our widowhood. The desire of my heart is to help you look beyond the healing. There is so much to do for the Kingdom!
I am fully aware that the first section of the book might seem a bit too dry, due to the slightly theological approach. I have to admit that initially I was a bit concerned about inserting a section about God in the Old Testament right at the beginning of the book. But in my humble attempt to help you take hold of the healing that is offered by the Father and move towards the new life that follows, I will kindly ask you to take your eyes off your pain for the reading of the first few pages of this book. The detour that I believe I should take you on prior to dealing with the practical issues of bereavement in our own life might seem strange at first glance, but having buried my father at 15 and my husband at 25 and having had a few friends who had untimely deaths I have learnt that without understanding what actually happened when we broke up with God in the garden of Eden, pain is incomparably greater and complete healing is practically impossible.
The structure of the book is as follows: the first chapters of the book are linked together in a section entitled “Know the Fields You Glean In” because we will focus on the perspective God has on the current spiritual status of humanity.
The second section is entitled “Separate Your Harvest” because it deals with the fruit of our hearts during seasons of mourning. Our reactions to dire circumstances speak the truth about what is going on deep down in our hearts.
The third section is entitled “Let The Blood That Is Water Be Water” because it refers to the social shifts which the widow(er) all too often encounters soon after the funeral.