As a pastor, I learned to expect the unexpected. There were events in the life of the church that I could predict. I learned to predict fairly accurately which items on an agenda would take time to resolve in a meeting. I learned which church members would step into leadership positions and which ones would decline when asked. I learned which members would be short and sweet when making an announcement and which ones would go on and on. But I never learned to anticipate which marriages would end in divorce. I never got good at predicting whose funeral would be the next one for our community.

After serving the same congregation for 25 years, I got used to officiating at funerals for friends. I didn’t enjoy every part of that task, but I did learn to serve grieving families even when my own grief was part of the process. When the time came for us to move on from that congregation, I knew that I would receive news of deaths in the congregation after I moved. I knew that I would continue to feel those losses even after I had become a member of a different congregation in a different community. But I couldn’t predict whose deaths would come first, or which ones would catch me by surprise.

Yesterday, a phone message from a young adult prompted Susan to make a phone call to South Dakota. She commented to me before making the call that she wondered what the call would be about. I guessed that it would be a request for a job reference. We still receive occasional requests for references even though we have now been gone from that community for more than two years. We knew the people in the congregation well. Some of these young adults we have know for all of their lives. We don’t mind writing letters of reference when we have the information to make honest references.

I was wrong about the reason for the phone call. It was to inform us of he sudden and unexpected death of the young man’s father as the result of a heart attack. I have known the deceased since he was in his thirties. He was nearly a decade younger than I. He seemed to be in good health. When Susan reported the news to me, I said, “I didn’t see that coming.”

I remember a lot of experiences with the young man who called to report his father’s death. It was a bit of a challenge to find the right mentor for him when he was in confirmation class. He made a couple of poor decisions just after he graduated from high school and I have a clear memory of siting down with his father to discuss his worries about his son. I’ve written a couple of important letters of reference for the young man over the years. Now, within the last six months that young man has seen the death and funeral of his confirmation mentor and now will be planning his father’s funeral with his brothers and his mother.

I didn’t see it coming. I didn’t anticipate that the widow would be suddenly plunged into grief at this age. I didn’t anticipate that the father wouldn’t live to see the birth of the next grandchild due in July. I didn’t anticipate that the young man would have to sort out a complex matrix of grief at such a young age.

When I was the age of the young man, I had just begun to serve as a pastor. I remember well my first funeral call. The man whose wife had died kept saying, over and over again, that he never expected her to die before him. He believe that he would be the first to go. He had never anticipated that he would have to make funeral plans for his wife or learn to live as a widower. I remember the first time I had to deliver the news of the death of a child to a mother. It happened when I was about the age of the young man who called yesterday. It was an experience that taught me that sometimes people literally fall to the floor in grief, and that it isn’t the worst thing that can happen. Lying on the floor is relatively safe and people don’t dissolve emotionally forever. A few minutes of simply sitting with the grieving person will begin to reveal the healing that is beginning to take place. It won’t be as dramatic as the shock of the news, but there will be signs of recovery.

I also have learned that I don’t know the exact path that the journey of grief will take for a person. I am familiar with the feeling of wanting to simply go to the person in grief and knowing that the limits of time and space don’t allow me to do so. I understand and respect the professional boundaries that mean that another pastor will officiate at the funeral of this faithful church member and will attend to the grief of his family.

I also understand and accept that my emotions are still bound up in the events of the life of the community where I lived and served for 25 years. I am grieving from a distance, but I share the grief of those who mourn. And I know from my own personal experience that having others share your grief is important. None of us wants to be alone in our grief. The young man needed to call us and hear our words of condolence. I know this in part because I was just a bit older than he when my father died. My wife was pregnant with our first born just like his is. I know a bit of the grief that comes from raising children who don’t get to know their grandpa in person. I know the importance of telling his story to those children. I have even lived long enough to hear our firstborn tell some of those stories to his children.

I knew that I would be walking the journey of grief from a distance with the folk in our congregation. But I will never learn to predict which events will lead us on the next steps. There is much that we do not know.