Video Transcript: Comfort, Strength, and God’s Peace: The Chaplain’s Role in Trauma and Recovery

Comfort, Strength, and God’s Peace: The Chaplain’s Role in Trauma and Recovery 

Henry: So welcome back, everybody. Today, we're going to talk about comfort, strength, God's peace, and the chaplain's role in trauma and recovery. So you've been through your career as a chaplain. You've experienced crisis times, and let's discuss the nature of Crisis Ministry.

Tom: Well, like the first bullet point there says, trauma breaks everyday life. So often, life is proceeding, quote, unquote, typically, and then something happens. It could be an accident, or it could be an unexpected death. It could be a natural disaster or a man-made disaster, as we discussed last time. Suddenly, everything that someone thought was normal in life is upended, and the things that they thought they could expect did not turn out to be true. 

Many people, whether they will say it or not, think, "Well, as long as I do the right things and as long as I'm the right kind of person, my life will be fine." And then something horrific happens, and there's a death of a child, or there's an accident of some sort, and so it breaks into life. It disrupts all the mechanisms that we have, which we think will keep us moving forward. It's tough to recover from trauma. In everything that we are, much of what we may have believed about the world suddenly seems to no longer be true. 

A prevalent response of people is, "If God loves me, then how could something like this, whatever this is, have happened?" "Therefore, maybe God doesn't love me. Why doesn't God love me? Maybe I'm a bad person, so maybe this trauma is God punishing me for being a bad person." They can go on and on, trying to figure out why these bad things happen, as we discussed last time. 

However, it does more harm than good, because people are not yet at a point where they can process that kind of information. Some things need to be endured for a while before you can begin to make sense of them, if you ever can make sense of them. Because there are things that happen that we, this side of heaven, will never be able to make sense of, right? And yet we are called upon to minister to other people amid those things. 

Henry: One of the things I need to know, to give hope as a chaplain, is where my hope comes from. I can't give what I don't have. Therefore, if I'm called upon as a chaplain to respond to disasters or any crisis, I need to have a solid theology of hope. 

And where does my hope come from? My hope comes not from the fact that my bank account will remain stable, that the economy will continue to thrive, or that everyone I love will always be healthy. My hope comes from my relationship with Jesus Christ. 

Tom: Yeah, and I have to keep going back to that, because all the things that the world tells me to put my hope in are going to fail at one point or another. Therefore, it's vital for the chaplain to know, in their preparation for ministry, trauma in ministry, and disasters, "What do I believe?" 

Henry: There's an old song. How does it go? I won't sing, don't worry. But it's something like, "I know whom I have believed and am persuaded that He is able to keep that which I've committed unto Him against that day!" We both know that. 

Tom: We both know it, yeah, but it's the hope that comes from God, not from the circumstances that take place around me. Again, as we discussed last time, presence is far more important than words, because people aren't yet at a point where they can even start to hear those words. 

Henry: So, what you're saying is basically that this trauma breaks normal life. Chaplains officiate hope, but the hope must be genuine within them. We're not ritual, we don't do incantations. We have rituals, but the foundation of the ritual is hope in Jesus. Jesus is risen from the dead. He is our hope. He is our everything. 

Tom: And presence is more than words. You're not going to try to figure it out for them right now and let them know what they got wrong or right. It's just you're there. There, and even when they ask questions, which they will, why did this happen? 

Henry: Why did this happen? Sometimes we feel, as chaplains, because we're representatives of God, that we have to explain what happened in a way that will satisfy them, where the truth is that at that point in the trauma, nothing we say is going to provide a satisfactory answer. 

Tom: That's right, and God doesn't need us to defend him or explain him. He needs us to show His love to people who desperately need to find it. So there are some serious occasions that chaplains may confront and deal with, and walk into or bring themselves to: overdoses, suicides, accidents, school lockdowns, or deaths. You become that calming, spiritual presence. 

Henry: Pick one of them. I know we're going to go into future classes, into way more details here, but let's just take suicide. How would you know as one in the military? I have another good Chaplain friend who said that suicides commonly happen in the military, and you have to address that. So, how do you bring hope to that?

Tom: That's really like all of those would be, whichever one you pick. So, thank you for picking a really hard one. They're all difficult. One of the suicide issues is that it affects so many different layers of people on so many different levels. 

Henry: Okay? So you have the person who, for whatever reason, thought that life was not livable anymore, that the only hope that they had for their pain to end was to die. So, you have that person in mind. You have their immediate circle: mom, dad, husband, wife, kids, fiancé, shipmates. You have everybody they worked with. You have their friends from high school. 

 I have had parents say to me, "Please tell me why." Let's say Joey. "Please tell me why Joey did this." Yeah, and the truth of the matter, as far as I can figure it out, is Joey probably doesn't know why Joey did it. How could God have let this happen? 

Well, then you get into some very tricky theological issues that those parents are not able to even begin to think about, if they ever will. What responsibility does God have for the actions of a person? Could God have stopped it? Many believers think he could've, and then he didn't. So, what does that say about God? So the more you try to explain it, the less that explanation is going to be helpful, right? 

I have found that sitting next to a person, weeping with a person, telling the person how sorry I am, sometimes telling them that God tells us that He weeps and grieves over the death of his people. A big concern people have with suicide is, "Can God possibly forgive my son, my wife, my husband, for doing this?" You can discuss this a bit further. However, again, it's being present with them and surrounding them with people who love and care about them, and who help them get through the next minute so they can make it through the next hour, and ultimately, the next day.

Henry: So you are doing a suicide class, which is fascinating and very interesting. I'm sure we hope you can teach that class at Christian Leaders Institute. It is a challenging but needed subject to address if you're in ministry. If you were to look at the topic of suicide, is suicide, in your opinion, is the suicide rate increasing? I know you've done this class. What are a couple of highlights of a class like that? What are some of the subjects you get into? 

Tom: Well, one of the things that we talk about is how anyone could be at risk for suicide. Okay? So while we often think stereotypically, what kind of person takes their own life, and we tend to give them a negative view, right? The person must be a loser; they must be a failure. They must be mentally ill or something like that. 

Well, when a parent's child dies by suicide, and the parent knows that that's what people are going to think about their child, that makes it even worse, because their child isn't a loser. In their mind, their child isn't a loser. People, suicide is an overwhelming decision; whatever happened in that person's life was so overwhelming that they felt they did not have a good choice to keep on living. We will never be able to go back and analyze all the things that did or didn't happen in that person's life. There's a lot of guilt on the part of family and friends because I should have seen something, I should have done something. We can only do what we can do and what we're aware of. Usually, in these kinds of cases, we had no idea what was coming. One of the things we try to do is help family members understand that their ability to change things was minimal. 

Henry: Got it. People want to try to reduce the guilt. You can't take away the guilt, but want to reduce the guilt, because they're going to feel very guilty about what happened, especially parents with children. They think that they should have seen it. I should have known. I should have seen a hint, but I missed it. 

Tom: Yeah, and, and, you know what? Sometimes there are hints. But it's like Monday morning, you know whether that quarterback should have thrown the pass or not, but it sure wasn't clear on Sunday. And this is a much more important topic than that! In retrospect. You know, looking back, there may be things, but usually there aren't, and we can't hold ourselves responsible for things we have no control over. 

However, that's not even a conversation I would have in the days immediately after the event. In such a situation, I would surround the person with those who will love and care for them, be close to them, listen to their grief and pain, allow them to mourn, and permit them to express anger towards God. Allow them to be angry with themselves and with other people, and just slowly, bit by bit, start to work through that. Even knowing that that is not God's will for our world, for people to take their own lives, but very bad things happen, and it's a painful world that we live in.

Henry: The Bible addresses great sadness. Jesus Himself wept, the shortest verse in the Bible. Job's friend sat in silence. Fascinating, Paul in the storm in Acts 27, so calm and sure of the Lord's protection. We can also discuss laments. There's the book of Lamentations, and many of the Psalms are laments to God. So in some ways, we don't have to fight the sadness that occurs. 

Tom: Yeah, and the pat answers are not going to satisfy anyway, and they are more likely to offend than they are to heal. We don't want to give pat answers. And because we don't know why, we can walk with you during this season. 

Henry: So that calm presence and listening is a listening ear.  And sometimes you will have someone who is so angry at God they don't want to pray, right? 

Tom: Sometimes they don't, and sometimes they will be receptive to praying. And even if people don't want to pray with me in that situation, I will ask them, "Is it okay if I pray for you after I leave or after you leave?" And they have always said yes to that, and even if they said no, I would still pray for them after they left.

Henry: So let's talk about this. Three chaplain gifts: comfort, be present, and still strength. Speak gentle, timely words of peace, guide them to the next step. That third one, guiding them to the next step, is important.

Tom: And I would say, guide them initially to the next small steps. Okay? And as time goes by, the steps can get a little bigger, but initially, it's about how we survive today. How do we get through the funeral? How do we get through? And even before the funeral, how do we get through visiting the funeral home to select a casket? Okay? Yesterday, we were planning our trip to wherever, and now we have to go to a funeral home. If you know the family, consider offering to accompany them. If you don't know the family, find someone who does to accompany them. Help them make those small decisions. Help them make good decisions. They have to make their own decisions, but you help them make good decisions. 

Henry: I've gone to funeral homes with people who are mourning the death of someone in a traumatic death, who somehow thought spending 10s and 10s and 10s of 1000s of dollars on a funeral was going to make things better. And so, you help them, let them make their own decisions, but give them some guidance on it, because, especially with young people, their families have never gone through a funeral before. They don't know what's expected of them, what they should or shouldn't do. And then, as you get through that, that first day or two, then how do we get through this funeral? How do we make this a celebration of this person's life in spite of the way that they died? 

Tom: Right. And in a funeral, different pastors will have different opinions about this, but when I've done funerals for people who have died by suicide. I don't pretend that this didn't happen, right? Because everybody there knows it happened. So, I talk about the grace of God being unconditional, regardless of what. And then I also discuss that if someone is facing those kinds of issues, it's a concern for them; please talk to someone. Because everybody in this room wishes he or she had talked to someone to address the elephant in the room. The reality is that there are people who are sitting there who are probably thinking, "If they chose to die by suicide, maybe that's a legitimate choice for me?" But it's a very difficult thing to minister in. 

Henry: I'll add it to your practical tips here. 

Tom: While you've already added their self-care, make sure you're taking care of yourself throughout the process. You can't be the only person supporting that family, right? Because that's just too much for you to do on your own. Get other people in the military. One thing we do is, when there is a suicide, an officer is assigned to that family, and that becomes their only job for as long as they're needed, so that they just take care of the needs of that family, not five families, but one family. Yes, they take care of the needs of that one family, and they are their support. But then we, as chaplains, make sure that that person who is the support for that family is also being supported, right, and not just by the chaplain, right?

Henry: You know, in some ways, this area of family support, you know, being supportive of a family with a suicide, and that is probably something Christianity could do better, to be honest. I'm not sure if we do. I'm just reflecting truthfully that I look back in my ministry, there were several suicides over those years, and just listening to you today, I think we did like 85%, you know. 

Honestly, I look back and, oh, that, you know, I wonder if we too quickly jump to answering the questions. Sometimes I wonder. Sometimes, you know, there are things you did really well, like bathing them with people and food. And I think, you know. But other things. I mean, as I really feel like this is an area where it is difficult, and maybe some people have more of a gift to do this than others, and that would be something important. If you know you have insensitivities, who do you know who can help you do things? 

Tom: Yeah, absolutely. And one of the things is, when there's a suicide, there are two things. One is you have lost a person who you love, yes, and that's traumatic enough as it is. But then the manner of the death is also extremely traumatic, right? And it can be difficult for someone just to mourn the death of someone they love because of the way the person died, right? And so we can give them permission to just mourn the loss of the person they love and to not focus on how they died or why they died, but mourn the fact that they've died, right? 

And then there is also the issue of time., Yeah, and that, you know, they need much more time and probably more counseling than you will be able to give them. As a chaplain, you can help them work through some of the elements that are going to stick with them forever about the manner of their death. 

Henry: Once again, we return to this theme. You carry Christ's peace and His presence into chaos. You are not the healer, but you know the Healer. Show up, stay, and be still. Let God move. It's just holding back. But while you're holding back, it doesn't mean you're not imparting; you're just bringing in the presence of God. But in fact, I feel trite saying just bringing in, I mean, the presence of God is really what you're doing.

Tom: Yeah. 

Henry: Okay, again, these are very emotional topics, but they are also very practical in a world looking for hope.