My heart pounds in my chest.

The terror of death assaults me.

Psalm 55:4 NLT

Your son is turning 15 tomorrow. You’re having fun deciding which of his favourite cakes you’re going to bake for his birthday tomorrow.

Then the phone rings.

It’s bad news.

Your peace-filled morning is shattered.

Suddenly, you feel numb —helpless.

Where did your inner peace suddenly vanish?

For the next hours and days, even weeks, it seems that you’re living through a nightmare.

Receiving and having to deal with bad news is part of being human.

No one can claim immunity from bad news.

At some points in their lives, even the very best of people have to deal with news that jolts them to their core.

Bad news can come to people who don’t ‘deserve’ it.

Bad news can come as a direct result of our own actions.

Bad news comes in many forms.

It can be the loss of someone dear.

It can come in the form of a rejection by those whom we’ve loved or cared about.

It can be a serious medical diagnosis to ourself or a loved one.

It can be a sudden, irreversible physical injury to a loved one.

What to Do?

There is no easy escape from bad news. You must go through it.

But there’s good news.

There are several things a Christian woman can do to make her passage significantly less harsh.

Eventually, you’ll reach the other side of the tunnel a stronger, more loving, more faith-filled, peace-filled, and joy-filled woman than you were before.

God will use you to help others in the same situation.

Dealing with Pain

As always, everything I write in this article is based on my own personal experience of 38 years.

I think it’s presumptuous to offer others advice about a situation that you yourself haven’t experienced several times.

So, I’ll begin by explaining that I’ve had to deal with 3 pieces of truly bad news in the past 39 years of my life.

The 2 worst pieces of news happened 26 years and 29 years ago respectively.

First came my husband’s announcement that he intended to leave our God-ordained, happy marriage of 26 fulfilling years.

Then three years later, the institutional Roman Catholic Church declared that our holy marriage had never existed in God’s eyes!

This last news was even more shattering.

It gave the lie to everything my husband and I stood for.

The shock of this double-whammy was visceral.

It’s not an exaggeration to say that I experienced it as a virtual crucifixion.

I had never faced nor expected to face a situation like this.

My inner pain was severe, raw.

Bad news inevitably brings an experience of inner pain with it.

The question then becomes:

How do you deal with inner pain?

The very first thing to do is to face it, not to run from it. 

You see, it’s only by facing squarely all the truths of your life that you are liberated from their dark aspects and catapulted into lasting blessing.

But acceptance doesn’t mean grovelling in your pain.

It means holding tightly to God’s hand as you progress through the experience.

Which brings me to the second point.

God Lives Smack in the Middle of Every One of Your Life Experiences

NOT Somewhere Outside of Them

The second thing is to keep always at the forefront of your mind the fact that God lives right smack in the middle of each and every one of your life experiences, both happy and horrendous; NOT somewhere outside of them!

What you need is a way to find Him in each one of your experiences, or —more accurately —to be found by Him in each one.

You see, I learned 38 years ago, that God specializes in finding us in each one of our experiences.

But He won’t over-rule your will. You must invite Him to share each of your experiences with you.

Here’s the thing though:

Sometimes when you’re experiencing deep shock and pain, your connection to the Lord can seem to get lost or, at the very least, fudgy.

How, then, do you ‘find’ God when He seems to have disappeared completely off your radar just at the moment when you need Him most urgently?

This is the wrong question.

The right and only question is:

How do YOU allow GOD to find YOU?

How to Bring Down the Barriers

And Allow God to find You

The good news is that you CAN bring down the barriers between you and the Lord (but more about this later).

It’s important to be honest with the Lord.

Present to Him what you are really feeling.

Don’t try to ‘get right’ with Him before you pray.

You don’t need to get right with the LORD in order to let Him find you!

That only creates yet another barrier between you and Him.

God understands your very human emotions even better than you do.

And He wants to heal them.

But He can’t do that if you pretend that you don’t have them!

Always be completely honest with the Lord.

Dealing with Temptations:

Bad News Can Trigger Doubt about God’s Goodness

When you’re experiencing negative emotions, it’s easy to doubt God’s compassion and love.

This inevitably leads to a strong confusion of mind and spirit.

This, in turn, compounds your pain.

Remember that stirring up confusion in the mind of believers is a favorite tactic of the Evil One. 

An Example from My Own Life

Let’s take an example from my own life 26 years ago.

Almost exactly one year before receiving the bad news that my deeply loved and cherished husband had decided to leave our marriage, the Lord had promised me a peaceful and fulfilling future! He had done so during a month-long sabbatical retreat that I had made at St. Benedict’s Monastery.

During this special retreat, the Lord had instructed me to continue to enjoy my life and to take good care of my spiritual, physical, mental and emotional needs. He had also revealed Himself to me in a new and intriguing way as my ‘Joyful Shepherd’, the One on whom I could always depend for vibrant life and joy and nurture.

The bad news of my beloved husband’s departure certainly didn’t mesh with what the Lord had suggested would be the case. 

I began to doubt that I had heard the Lord correctly.

This added greatly to my already profound pain.

But by God’s grace, I quickly realized that it wasn’t that I had mis-heard the Lord, but that Satan, the master of deception and confusion, was doing what he most enjoys: he was sowing the seeds of doubt —a little here, a little there —in my heart and spirit.

Satan feeds on a person’s pain and on her mental, physical, emotional and spiritual exhaustion. This is especially so in the case of those who are trying to follow Christ.

You need to be aware of this.

Other Questions You Might Struggle With

There are other questions that might present themselves to your tired and overwhelmed mind and spirit at this time.

For example:

• Does God really care when my heart is breaking, or does He hang out in His own posh ivory tower, cut off from the highs and lows of my ordinary, raw, human experience?
• Does God simply abandon me to the turbulence of real, everyday life and to the pain and perhaps even to the experience of evil that can come with it?

 If you are wrestling with such questions, keep reading!

The Pain of Helplessness

Another form of pain is the pain of helplessness.

This is an especially difficult kind of pain to bear.

Based on my own experience,  it requires considerable patience and a continuing conscious decision to forgive those who have wounded you if one is to come to terms with it and heal it.

The Good News