Grief, Loss, and Death (PDF)

Learn to balance the professional demands of your ministry with your personal needs

No amount of research, study, or planning can prepare pastoral care givers for the stress placed on their personal lives by the demands of their ministries. But Grief, Loss, and Death: The Shadow Side of Ministry can help anyone involved in pastoral counseling close the gap between their professional and personal needs, encouraging them to use the stress, loss, and grief that accompanies pastoral care giving as opportunities to humanize their ministries and reaffirm their faith. This unique book offers comfort and solace to those in the chaplaincy who are torn between professional obligations and the limits and boundaries of the shadow side of their ministry—the human side.

The shadow side of ministry shoots a bullet through the brain that does not kill or prevent thinking or feeling. But the bullet creates a hole, a long, hollow, empty wound that thinking and feeling must somehow bypass. The wounded minister does not recover the previous self, cannot remember what the old self thought or felt. Like a veteran of a secret war, there may be a new life after the shameful wound, but no public way to heal. But there is a public way of speaking about it and this may help relieve some of the shame and some of the self-blaming.
—Author Halbert Weidner

Grief, Loss, and Death: The Shadow Side of Ministry can help in your search for the answers to questions you may have already found yourself asking, including:

• Do I prefer co-workers or friends?
  
• How did I lose focus of my original goals?
  
• How did I become isolated?
  
• How can I share authority without giving up responsibility?
  
• How do I cope when family issues arise?

The book also addresses issues of illness, death and suicide, funerals, the confrontation between joy and sorrow, and how life's stages are often like the Stations of the Cross.

Grief, Loss, and Death: The Shadow Side of Ministry is help against despair. Newcomers to the profession can use the book as a guide to the difficulties that lie ahead, and experienced pastoral care givers can employ it as a catalogue to be consulted when all hope seems lost.