When it was built, the London Underground was an amazing piece of innovation. Affectionately referred to as ‘the tube’ by locals, was original called the Metropolitan Railway, and when it opened on January 10th, 1863, it was the first ever underground passenger railway. Traveling underneath London and eventually adjacent counties like Buckinghamshire, Essex, and Hertfordshire… the railway travels in lines, but not necessarily straight ones.
The Circle Line, the Northern Line, the District Line, and the Bakerloo Line are all examples of routes the tube takes, and for various reasons, those routes are rarely direct. Sometimes they curve to avoid the complications of dealing with property rights, sometimes engineering considerations lead to a more circuitous route, early decisions even curved the line in order to “avoid frightening horses” on the streets above. So as the system grew and developed, the gently curving lines stretching underneath the bustling London cityscape encountered a problem. All across the London Underground there is a space – about ten inches give or take a centimeter between the platforms and the curving rail lines. A small space between platform and train that eventually became synonymous with London as everyone learned to “Mind the Gap”.
I’m Scott Beyer and this is the Love Better podcast where we explore the truths and lies about love and more importantly how to turn love into a skill – something we can get better at and hone along the way.
This episode is the sixth installment in a ten-part series on learning to love with all our heart, part of a broader goal this year to study the greatest commandments – to love the Lord (and our neighbor) with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength. In every account of the gospels, the command to love always begins with the heart… and today, we are going to look at one of the most difficult challenges the heart will ever face – the challenge of grief and loss.
When the ‘Mind the Gap’ slogan was originally coined by the London Underground to help remind its daily commuters of the risks at platform edge, the voice was one of a sound engineer named Peter Lodge, but when royalty disputes arose, the tube quickly found a replacement in theater actor, Oswald Laurence. From 1969 until 2012, Oswald’s dulcet tones and rich theater voice could be heard warning incoming passengers to “Mind the Gap”. For over 40 years, Mr. Laurence’s voice graced the length of the Northern Line, until in 2012, a new digital system was installed and overnight, Oswald Laurence’s iconic voice winked out of existence.
And that same morning, a distraught woman (which is quite the statement when you consider she was British) approached station staff to ask where the voice had gone. It turns out, that the woman, was Margaret, and she was Oswald Laurence’s widow. Oswald had passed away in 2007, and for the past five years she had found solace by traveling the tube, sitting on a bench at Embankment station, and listening to the last three words she would ever hear her husband say – “Mind the Gap”.
Grief is a strange and powerful thing. It has a way of overcoming a lot of the typical, rational responses we might normally have to the world. We talk about being “overcome” by grief and “overwhelmed” by it. Words like ‘mourning’, ‘lamentation’, ‘brokenheartedness’, and even ‘wailing’ are found throughout the Scriptures to describe grief. When we mourn, we may not dress in “sackcloth and ashes” like the Eastern cultures, but even Western cultures change our attire to match our mood and loss as we don black for funerals. The Bible has poetry like Lamentations to express sorrow, and almost every genre of music has a way of singing about and expressing loss. Grief does everything from alter our eating habits, impacting our sleep patterns, to even adjusting our biochemistry. Chronic grief may also lead to structural and functional changes in the brain. Research has shown that prolonged stress and emotional trauma can affect areas of the brain involved in emotion regulation, memory, and decision-making, such as the hippocampus, prefrontal cortex, and amygdala. In short, grief is a heart issue that touches every part of your heart, soul, mind, and body.
In Psalm 31, David cries the plea of the grieving when he says, “Be gracious to me, O LORD, for I am in distress; my eye is wasted from grief; my soul and my body also.” (Psalm 31:9)
The shortest verse in the Bible, and one of the most poignant, describes the sorrow of Jesus at the passing of his close friend Lazarus in two words. “Jesus wept.”
Death, and the loss of those we love is such a powerful struggle that the New Testament describes the return of Jesus as the moment where “Death is swallowed up in victory” and where death’s victory will be removed. One of heaven’s greatest prizes is it will be a place where God “will wipe away every tear from our eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things will have passed away.”
Death is the great inevitable of this life, and therefore, grief is inevitable, too. Which brings us back to Embankment station, Dr. Margaret McCollum, and the comfort she found in hearing the voice of her late husband. Hearing his voice helped her to mind the gap, too.
Which begs a bigger question – if we are going to love people better, how do we help those who are grieving? How do we help them mind the gap of loss they face? Does the Bible give any answers?
I think it does, and I’d like to share with you three clear and practical tools from Scripture that can help you to love better through grief.
#1 Stop trying to make sense of it. Grief isn’t logical, it is emotional, and sometimes it just doesn’t make any sense at all. I’ve seen people lose loved ones and laugh at the funeral and then cry at the gas station the next day. Feelings are weird and they can be triggered by just about anything. A smell, a sound, a phrase in a sentence… even an old pair of reading glass found stuffed in the back of a junk drawer.
The Psalms are full of mournful, grieving cries to God and sometimes they are angry and full of accusations against God, sometimes they are wracked with doubts and fears, sometimes they are totally confident in God’s sovereignty and comfort… and sometimes they are all of those things in a single Psalm. Don’t believe me? Read Psalm 13 – it is a bundle of emotions wrapped in six verses.
“How long, O LORD? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me?
How long must I take counsel in my soul and have sorrow in my heart all the day? How long shall my enemy be exalted over me?
Consider and answer me, O LORD my God; light up my eyes, lest I sleep the sleep of death, lest my enemy say, "I have prevailed over him," lest my foes rejoice because I am shaken.
But I have trusted in your steadfast love; my heart shall rejoice in your salvation. I will sing to the LORD, because He has dealt bountifully with me. (Psalm 13:1-6)
It isn’t necessarily logical to visit a subway station to hear the same three words over and over again… but for Margaret, it worked. Grief is messy and when people grieve, we need to roll with the sorrow in the waves that it comes. Don’t make sense of it – just ride the wave and be there for them.
Which brings us to the second way we can love better through grief. Stop talking so much. Listening is better.
There are two definitive books in the anthology of Scripture that cover grief. One of them is Lamentations – a poem of grief or lament over the destruction of Israel, and the book of Job – the story of a man that lost everything. Wealth, health, and family – all of it.
And Job’s friends tried to comfort him by explaining to him why it happened… and that never, ever worked. Explanation platitudes come in many forms, like, “They are in a better place.” or the jarringly inaccurate “I know how you feel” or the well-intentioned, but potentially devastating phrase, “Everything happens for a reason.”
A lot of what we say to people in their times of grief are our attempts to explain loss… and Job’s friends were no different. They tried to explain his loss to him, even to the point of assuming that what he went through was actually his fault. At one point, Job simply says to them,
“Worthless physicians are you all. Oh, that you would keep silent, and it would be your wisdom!” (Job 13:4-5)
Silence was better than speech because death and pain only have one explanation on this earth. Death is the devil’s work. Sin broke this world and chaos has reigned ever since. You can’t fix it and you can’t explain it because you aren’t God and you don’t have all the answers. Even in Job’s case, Job never gets a “Why?” for his loss, he only gets a Who to trust in because comfort isn’t about a better explanation, it is about finding faith.
That’s why Jesus said, “Blessed are those who mourn because they will be comforted.”
And it is also why Ecclesiastes chapter seven tells us “It is better to go to the house of mourning than to go to the house of feasting, for this is the end of all mankind, and the living will lay it to heart. Sorrow is better than laughter, for by sadness of face the heart is made glad. The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning, but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth. (Ecclesiastes 7:2-4)
Sitting with people in their grief is harder than talking, but it is wiser, too. Sorrow and grief are part of the process of considering our own mortality, finding permanent joy on the other side of sorrow, and learning lessons that can only be learned through the crucible of loss. Sit with those who are grieving and you will love better, and you will find yourself wiser, too.
Which brings us to the last lesson of death – death is bad, but grief is good.
Throughout the Scriptures we are told that grief should be embraced. After all, if bad things happen, shouldn’t we acknowledge them as being bad?
Ecclesiastes tells us there is “a time for everything” including “a time to mourn”.
When Moses died, the Israelite nation wept for him for thirty days. Moses was a significant figure in Israelite history and leadership and his death marked the end of an era.
In Luke 19:41-44, Jesus wept and mourned over the impending fall of Jerusalem. He was devastated by their stubbornness and rejection of God and He mourned over what might have been had they embraced honesty and faith.
The Lord’s Supper is a memorial feast, a biblical command for the church to remember the death of Jesus Christ on a weekly basis. Every Sunday, across the globe, Christians stop in somber meditation of the death of the Son of God and the cost of sin found in His body nailed to the cross.
Mourning is good. We are told to mourn over loved ones, mourn over loss, even mourn over our own sins. If we cannot recognize and travel through grief and sorrow, we are not going to process it in a healthy way. People who don’t mourn, don’t move forward.
So, let the process work, let it be emotional and messy and don’t be afraid of it. Grief is a process given to us by a Creator who loves us enough to give us the tools to go through bad things and come out the other side… and I don’t know about you, but I find that very comforting. I love that God loves me enough to let me grieve.
And speaking of comfort – when word got out that Margaret was missing her man… they found an old recording and made sure she got it so she could hear him anytime she wanted.
And then, the London Underground went one step further. Though the tube is updated, sophisticated, and completely digitized with modern recordings, today, if you visit Embankment Station on the Northern Line’s Charing cross branch, you will again hear the dulcet tones of Oswald Laurence reminding us all that in subways, in love, and in loss, we all should remember to “Mind the Gap”
Learn to love better – learn to love through grief.
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And until next time, “Remember, you are loved, so go… love better.”
