Frustration and Fear Expresses Love?

Today is another challenging yet en eye-opening day for me! In my second round of pastoral visit to the Rumah Sakit Carulos, Pius Ward, where several stressed or depressed patients are rehabilitated, I had a chance to mingled and conversed freely with two female inmates there. Particularly, the 62-year old woman, who are still undergoing treatments for more than a month now. Let's call her Mary, not her real name though, for some ethical reasons.

Her deepest frustration and anger directed to God began after her lovely husband died untimely of stroke two years ago. Ever since that bleak day, she felt deep sense of lost, loneliness and life seemed no more meaning and hope to hold on. Due to these deep-seated depressions almost to the brink of total breakdown, she was sent to the hospital, really without her consent.

Now, at least she is seemingly stable and able to share her inner emotional hurts and sufferings. I was there as a friend, listening with a good ears, to all that she ever wanted to release. She asked me on how to get rid of her feelings of deep-seated frustration, anger and fears. She told me she had tried many times through fervent prayers and intimate sharing with church members, and closed friends alike but to no avail. "What should I do now?", she repeatedly asked. I am not the expert on this field, instead, what I simply did was this. I told her my own childhood's deepest frustration, anger and irk towards God for untimely taking my father's breath away when I was just five.

At those tender age, so crucial to my formative years, and yet God, without due explanation whatsoever, took the very figure so significant to my childhood, adolescent and adulthood support systems, just as any normal child should have had experienced in their process of growing. I told her I wasn't able to accept all past sufferings those very decision of God brought upon me, my siblings, and esp to my mum. No, not until I was 20 years of age. I also confided to her how I wish to exit from this seemingly cruel world during those bleak childhood's days!

While listening to me, I noticed she was quite taken aback with past stories of mine. She seems a bit relaxed and put up a smiling face yet empthy at me. At that moment of truths, I trust Mary was partially healed and lifted up from her own present inner grievances and frustrations towards God. Not that I had given her some specific Bible quotations or some Eastern wisdoms, but just on how I personally coped and managed my own real past experiences, which was really a blessings in disguise.

Now, I like to believe that emotions, frustration, grief, and anger are all form of fear, yet in its highest form, in the end, expresses love. All these expresses love? How can they be? All those feelings I mentioned above are natural emotions. It's part of us which allows us to say "goodbye" when we don't want to say "goodbye"; to express - push out, propel - the sadness within us at the experience of any kind of loss, esp the loss of a loved one. Now, the next step is crucial! When we allowed ourselves to express our inner grief, we get rid of it!

Children who are allowed to be sad when they are sad feel very healthy about sadness when they are adults, and therefore usually move through their sadness very quickly. Children who're told, "There, there don't cry," have a hard time crying as adults. After all, they've been told all their lives not to do that. So they repressed their grief. Grief that is continually repressed becomes chronic depression, a very unnatural emotion. People have killed or even succumbed to the tragic act of "suicide" because of chronic depression!

Anger, as well, is a natural emotion. It's our "tool" which allows us to say, "No, thank you." It does not have to be abusive, and it never has to be damaging to ourselves, let alone to another. And, one don't have to be ended up at "Pius Ward", at Rumah Sakit Carulos, for the same matter!