Oh thee why those emotional triggers? Why thou do they happen at moments you least expect them?

2 My Father’s house has room to spare. If that weren’t the case, would I have told you that I’m going to prepare a place for you? 3 When I go to prepare a place for you, I will return and take you to be with me so that where I am you will be too. John 14:2-3

My son is home for Spring break. While some of his friends traveled south to enjoy the warmth he decided to come home for some much needed R & R and just hang out with the family.

 In honor of his successful finish of some difficult exams my lovely bride of 26 years and I decided to take him out to eat. The place we decided on was the Baker's Square on Round Lake Blvd in Coon Rapids, Minnesota.

Over the years this place became the scene of many meals out with our growing children. As a dad I remembered the fun times of young children giggling and as they matured having plenty of conversations about the day. I remembered watching  and coloring with our children on the paper place mats and enjoying conversations about their day.

When my wife was the school librarian at Meadow Creek Christian school I would often meet them there for supper. It was a place that served comfort food and 'yes' pie.  After the loss of our daughter this place took on  more of a surreal feel that wasn't quite like the place I knew  when our daughter was alive. 

In the beginning, each time I drove by this place I would have 'triggers' that would pop up that for the moment would bring back a cascading flood of emotions and memories and for me the what if's from the evening she passed away; until, that is when I was reminded of the words of my friend, "you made the best decision possible with the information you were given at the time."  

On this evening I sat across from my son. Directly in front of my line of vision sat two young ladies, one of which appeared to be Hispanic, approximately 18 and in my mind a spitting image of our daughter Maria.  Maria would have been a senior at what is now called Legacy Christian Academy and I am sure would have been, like our son, involved in all of the usual activities of college tours, SAT preparations, high school classes and just hanging with her friends.  She would have been on the side lines rooting for her two friends playing girl's varsity basketball. We would have been communicating with the parents of these girls sharing common memories.

 When she died unexpectedly it was as though this huge iron floodgate slowly closed out all contact with the outside world that knew us as a family of four and silence would set in as the big elephant of grief sits down in the room. We know it's there, but no one knows what to do about it.

In another moment in time I remembered, shortly after my cousin Craig died unexpectedly, filling up at a gas station in North East Minneapolis ( the area he lived) and just as I was about to pay for my gas I glanced at a bench outside the station and seeing a heavy set man who was a dead ringer( no pun intended) for my cousin. He looked like he was waiting to board a bus with his suitcase beside him.

In still another moment I remember eating in a restaurant with my wife and in the corner of my eye sat a 80 year old gentleman eating dinner with his family and of course, he looked very much like my dad.

When a loved one dies we all at some point have these trigger moments where the one who died lives out in a person who looked like them. When these moments occur we have no choice but to ride the emotions created like a surfer learns to ride the waves. We learn to enjoy the memory of our loved one through the person we see. 

I remember the words of Pastor Greg, the one who was there at our home that evening reminding us that there are plenty of 'little Maria's' who will remind you of your own. He was in a way preparing us for those triggers that would no doubt occur in the coming days, weeks and even years.

In the beginning of our loss it was hard riding each of every trigger, but as we traveled our  grief journey  those once painful triggers became joy filled moments of remembering our loved one and the great times we had with her. It was as though God was reminding me that we do not have to worry about our loved one.Her mission is complete, but mine continues. Life is indeed worth living, even in the face of unspeakable tragedy.

Now I could have said no to all of these places we once enjoyed, but that would be giving in to the pain and suffering of my loss. If I give in then every time I pass by a place that reminds me of my loved one the pain will still be there and my recovery will take longer. 

By continuing to eat at this particular Baker Square our family is creating new memories. If my journey is worth any weight in gold it is that we ought to ride the emotions of our trigger moments by continuing to enjoy the places we frequented with the one who died. Riding those emotions, like a surfer, helps us to heal from the pain of that loss.

.Because he lives in each of us He is riding the storm with us and as he does so healing will come as new memories are created in the places we visited with the person no longer present. 

How to heal from grief and loss

Lately, I have had a burden for the struggles of young people and the pain they are under.  One of the
questions I will ask them as I listen to their pain  is 'whether there was some point in their life where they suffered a significant loss in  their life around the time of their diagnosis,'

 In most cases, the emotional walls these young people created within themselves begin to crumble as they recall the death of a good friend early  in their teen years.

You see, in our American culture we are taught that grief should only take a finite number of months to recover and beyond that we should just bury it and 'move on' with our lives.  Grief, however, doesn't work that way. Grief is such a highly individual experience with all people that it is impossible to put a  number on it.

Our American culture also teaches us not to talk about our grief, but to focus instead on our educational achievements. After all, if we focus on the development of our skills or our industrious nature then we will be all right. False.

Young people who carry significant unprocessed loss issues are thrown into survival mode where  they have so much pain in their daily lives that it requires them to focus on just surviving' the day rather than actualizing their potential.

 It is literally impossible for them to do well in school when their whole life is one frantic chaotic set of colliding emotions. As I hear these common stories from young people I am struck by the similarities of those stories and how most of them point back to those early unprocessed grief.

 Not just young people struggle from this, but Adults as well. I remember reading about the high percentage of medical doctors who commit suicide because of their inability to work through their grief after experiencing death within the medical system. These doctors were taught that their calling to this profession was for healing the sick. Many are ill equipped to face grief when sudden losses occur in their practice of medicine. 

 Some hospitals understand this and  have started  groups called grief rounds help medical staff who are having significant problems processing their grief to share what they might be experiencing from any given day. Hospitals who do this understand the value of having emotionally healthy medical staff.

 Grief  isn't  rocket science; yet the emotions we experience from our losses are  real and can cause additional harm as other losses enter into older unprocessed  losses latter on in our lives.

"If there is a God then why do bad things happen" is a common them I hear from people. The sudden loss of a loved one can often be the deciding point on whether people continue to turn from or follow God.

 The other day I read about a 36 year old man who went on a shooting spree in the south, taking out  9 lives, after experiencing the death of his mom. Although I know nothing about this young man, but it became clear to me that when his mom died he was tossed into a whirlwind of emotions that he was totally unaware how to process those feelings. How we handle our grief is a life skill every bit as important as learning to write, spell and understanding math because for the rest of our lives we will be saying goodbye to friends and family along the way.

 When our family experienced the loss of our daughter back in 2007 and we all spiral down into our collective emotions of that loss we chose to keep moving forward, one foot print at a time, attending the  same church we attended before our loss. For us the simple decision to maintain our same rituals we had before the loss was part of the solution for recovering from loss.

 My wife and I chose to find a good listeners who were willing to sit in the muck and mire of our grief, listening to every painful emotion until we had no more pain to share.  I would encourage young people who have significant losses in their lives to not be afraid of their emotions and tell someone they can trust about the pain.

  I would encourage Adults who want to better understand what grief is like to go to my website www.soaringonwingsofeagles.org where they will find a variety of information through videos and testimonials that will help them better understand  the nature of this grief.

When bad things happen doesn't have to be the defining point in our lives.  We do not have to be victims of our grief and by understanding our grief by leaning into those emotions we can be victorious and stronger in the end.

God truly wants you to recover and he understands as our Creator and author of our user manual that recovery from grief takes time; after all, he experienced the same emotions as he watch his son Jesus die on the cross the most painful death any of us can ever imagine. 

 Finally, I noticed that  young people who experience significant losses were better able to help others recover from their losses. Now that is a beautiful thing!

Coming to America

6 For to set the mind on the flesh is death, but to set the mind on the Spirit is life and peace. 7 For the mind that is set on the flesh is hostile to God, for it does not submit to God's law; indeed, it cannot. 8 Those who are in the flesh cannot please God.

I grew up in an area before highway 12 became 394 and County Road 18 became 169. It was long before a patch of wildlife preserve with intertwining snowmobile tracks became Ridgedale shopping mall. My parents built a small 3 bedroom rambler located on top of the hill at the crossroads of these two highways. On the opposite side of this busy interchange sat the corporate headquarters of General Mills, the makers of the famous Wheaties and Cheerios cereal brand.

This 3 bedroom home was built by Ecklund and Swedlund home builders. They were a couple of Swedish immigrants who developed much of the land in St. Louis Park The neighbors who built their home behind my parents were Japanese immigrants who spent several years in a Japanese internment camp. This man came to America to study Engineering, marry, and raise a family. They came to America to escape the post-war ravages of Japan. 

 Across the street was a Jewish couple, immigrants from Germany and survivors of the Nazi holocaust. The husband was said to be a Nazi survivor of Hitler's attempt to exterminate the Jews. He spent time in a Nazi concentration camp.

These two families became good friends..I cannot imagine what it must have been like for this Japanese and Jewish couple to be forced to leave their homeland, their families and travel all the way to America to start a new life away from the memories. It is safe to say that in each case their lives were better having left those homelands.

 Although each of them spoke English, it was a broken one. I often wondered what it must have been like for each of them. Do they often have sudden terror dreams of their war-torn homeland? Does this Jewish couple have nightmares watching their family members being carted off in cattle cars and never seeing them again?  I am told that the husband of the Jewish couple actually had a concentration camp mark on him which served as a constant reminder of the horrors he once faced. I wondered if he kissed the ground as he stepped off the boat at Ellis Island as he saw the face of Liberty. Oh, what a happy moment in time for this man who once faced the certainty of death in Hitler's Germany!

Not long ago I read something interesting: Immigrants were more likely to start businesses than those born in America.  Corporations like eBay, Colgate, Kohl's, AT&T, Kraft, and Pfizer are just some of the immigrant-founded companies that have become household names.

Fast forward to 2015 and we are hearing the cries and anguish toward Somalians because people are fearful that all Somalian's are terrorists. 

One of the quickest ways of dehumanizing people is to associate them by race and nationality. Hitler did this rather successfully and he came very close to exterminating the entire Jewish race and he would have been successful had America not woken up from their complacent slumber and come to their rescue.


“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me:
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”
― Emma Lazarus
Those words, found on the Statute of Liberty, serve as a reminder of what America represents to the immigrants who travel here. It is a reminder of who we are as a nation and what it represents to those coming here from lands ravaged by war, disease, and poverty. Regardless of race and nationality many of these immigrants value what America represents. Many of these immigrants risk life and limb just to try to reach our shores. Some make it while most do not.

The Hmong people group is one very recent example of an immigrant group that has successfully acclimated to the American way of life. When they first came over I remember reading stories about hardship with many Hmong extended family members living in the same household and sharing the same food and supplies just to survive. Today, many of them are college graduates, holding responsible jobs, raising families in the suburbs and doing the same things with their children as many of us did with our own.

The newer Somalian people group will be no different. In fact, I was truly inspired when a well respected representative of this group came out and strongly condemned  the statement made by
 El-Shabbad about attacking the Mall of America. So inspired were these people that they decided to have a solidarity luncheon at the MOA to show their support for the American way of life. 

It will be interesting to find out what common household names come out of Somalian run businesses in years to come!

I truly believe when it is all said and done these radical thugs that hide behind the Isis/Isil flag of evil will not survive. We have far too many people who value what America stands for to allow this to happen. Consider this Neil Diamond song posted here as an 'in your face' message to these terror groups that nothing will stop America for being who we are and what we will become in the coming generations. 

Finally, I am reminded by a famous quote from former President, John F. Kennedy: "My fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country."

As a Christian, I have a responsibility to pray for the leaders of my country and for the right decisions on how to combat this current menace that is affecting our American way of life. 

As in generations before America will survive!