In our continuing Series: 2019 The Year of Joy, we move onto “Faith in the Mourning.”
I met once again with Karyn Lynn Grant of Joy Coaching America to discuss how “Faith in the Mourning” became part of her work and what she could share with our readers about “Faith in the Mourning” that would benefit them in this often so overwhelming day and age of the 21st Century.
Before reading this month’s article below, I’d like to have Karyn share with you now, in her own words, more thoughts for re: “Faith in the Mourning.”
Join us now to listen in on our conversation.
Carol: Karyn, such a pleasure to meet with you again and may I say that these articles, to date, about love and peace have been very potent, informative and inspirational.
Karyn: Yes! I love doing this series! Each month that we are working on a topic, I find that it is exactly what I need to be focusing on in my life! I truly hope that these articles are inspiring and uplifting our audience!
Carol: Jumping right in Karyn, how did “Faith in the Mourning” become one of the many topics and teachings you decided to add into your Joy in the Mourning course for “Gracefully Transitioning Through Grief into Love, Joy, Peace and beyond?
Karyn: Interesting Carol that we are discussing Faith today. I have been doing this work since 2001. Eighteen years to be precise, but recently, I felt inspired to “Re-examine and revisit my own personal “Why?” I believe it has much to do with Faith and how many years ago Faith played such a crucial part in my own survival, purpose and work.
When the Lord asked me to re-examine and revisit my own personal why, these were some of the questions He posed to me:
“Why are you doing what you are doing, Karyn? Why are you pursuing a profession (one that is not found in any college course catalog) that focus’ on mending broken hearts?”
That made me seriously ask myself: “Why are you doing what you are doing, Karyn? Why are you continuing to drag your spiritual and emotional provisions through the wilderness? What has inspired you to do what you do? Is it sheer will? Is this based in a belief that this is your purpose, calling and mission? Why do you keep pursuing this path of mending broken hearts?”
My mind started wandering back through the years when I was down in a marital wreckage with a gaping, bleeding gash in my heart. I would not have made it, had the Savior not come to personally rescue me! I did not know how to mend my own broken heart. I did not know anyone who even specialized in mending broken hearts! All I knew was that it might be easier to die than to try again and again to search for a better way all by myself.
Though my wounds were internal and not apparent to the casual onlooker, they were deep. I was bleeding to death, emotionally. My faith in the future was almost breath-less. It was the Savior who came to my side as I called out, through my grief each time, to come and find me. Times, I would whisper in the darkness, “Lord, I am here. I feel so lost…but I know that I am not lost to Thee.”
The Lord took me seriously and answered that prayer I uttered in 1987 when I also asked Him: “Lord, teach me how to mend a broken heart.”
Carol: that’s intense Karyn and what happened next? What were your next steps leading into “Faith in the Mourning” being what it is today in your work?
Karyn: I knew and experienced that it was the Lord who came to rescue me! No one else knew how to care for the invisible wound in my heart! No one knew what to do for me! It was the Lord and His angels that sang to me in the darkness and brought me light! It was He who filled me with the faith to hang on and endure to the end of each frayed and tangled rope, when I felt I could no longer hang on! He was my “Faith in the Mourning” times of my life!
My thoughts were: Thank you! Thank you! Forgive me for not remaining conscious of all that You have done for me! How can I ever repay you?!”
Carol: and?
Karyn: Then, once again, I realized that the Savior has done this for each one of His Father’s children and that He was once again reminding me, that He was asking me to do the same.
Carol: How potent. I am intrigued. Please continue.
Karyn: I have been given emotional emergency supplies to pour spiritual healing ointment into the hearts of the brokenhearted. I have dragged my precious provisions through endless miles hoping for someone to come and rescue what I have salvaged from my life experiences from marriages that crashed and burned having been caught in the onslaught of hailing emotional blizzards and spiritual gales that each of my marriages, could not or would not endure.
I thought “My own dear husband has been a savior for me too. He has done this for me in many respects, caring for my broken heart and nursing me along the way after my annulment from my former husband.”
Carol: and I can only imagine how all of that contributed to and transcended into the many who you have helped over these years.
Karyn: I think back now of the many women who I have laid on my massage table and pulled them into the Savior’s care. I think of the fading, forgotten faces of those who were ready to leave their marriages, surrender a child up as spiritually missing in action, ministering to young children who were missing a parent, cradling women who were ready to commit suicide, caressing the cheeks of women whose husbands had spiritually, emotionally left them….holding mothers of children who had committed suicide….drying the tears of bereaving husbands whose wives had “up and left” without leaving the slightest trace of “why.” Thousands upon thousands of hours spent in sessions using compassion, empathy, kindness coupled with “Song & Scent” as the ointment of pure love for raw, open, exposed, emotional wounds that had left tears, rips, gashes, bruises and even holes in the hearts of perfect stranger’s lives.
