Transcript of a published conference session by Mickey Mangun, transcribed from YouTube. An attributed primary source — not Acts 2:38 Life doctrine text.
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Summary
Summary prepared by Acts 2:38 Life from the transcript below — the preacher’s words follow in full.
Summary
- **Her daddy.** Daddy was 77 years old when he died the previous April, just eight and a half months ago, and she misses him — Anthony does too, and so does Jim. He was sharp, quick, brilliant, and gentle, a man who loved people; the one thing he could not tolerate was taking pictures, which happened to be the thing mom loved to do most. From him they learned how to manage their finances, kindness and old-fashioned being nice, honest pay for an honest day's work, work ethic, lots of humility, impeccable integrity, and how to honor people — daddy honored mom.
- **Her mother.** Mom died two years before daddy did; she has been gone three years this June. She died with Alzheimer's — "a really mean disease." She didn't much like it if you acted lofty: she had a sixth sense for figuring people out, and she was usually right, and they didn't want her to figure them out. If you were an underdog, you had better hope you were in mom's pack — she was fierce if you messed with underprivileged people or the less fortunate. (The talk pauses here for laughter while they fit her headset around her bun: it must be nice, she tells the men, not to have a bun to work it around.)
- **The day daddy went to see mom.** This last April the 17th, on a Tuesday afternoon, dad went to see mom. His grandsons carried his body out of the home to a waiting van, and all the family got to be there. She remembers standing outside paying attention to absolutely every detail — and then he was gone, and they just stood there for the longest time looking down the road that took him away.
- **Attachment, and the disconnect.** From the moment we are born we have an attachment: a baby's first contact is connecting with its parents, and the attachment is formed by soothing words, comfort, nurturing. She tells of the babies born in the Cold War who were put in orphanages and hospitals — fed and bathed properly, but with not enough people to rock them and hold them, hug them or touch them — and died from lack of physical connection, what she calls "failure to survive syndrome." When we have a loss there is injury to our attachment, because death is a disconnect: standing outside that house on Georgetown Drive eight and a half months ago, she became disconnected from daddy — and finally from mom. "My world stopped when my daddy's heart did. Life continued, but I didn't."
- **The light in the front room.** The first time she drove by daddy's house and saw his front-room light off — that light was never off — she drove to the end of the street, turned back around, parked as close to that window as she could, and had the first conversation she ever had with him without being able to hear him or see him: "Daddy, if you only knew how much you took with you when you left. I'm stripped of you and all that you embodied" — stripped of his cute songs and poems, and hearing him pray, and his cute little smirk, stripped of watching him engage and interact with people — "you were the greatest people person that there has ever been" — stripped of his amazing wisdom and his wit and his humor. "Daddy, we always had a special bond, and that bond has been disconnected, and your light's out." And she cried and cried and cried.
- **Fellow grievers, and her support.** She is together enough to know there are plenty in this house whose pain is much more intense than hers, and she speaks to them by name — she misses the ones they have lost, and she knows their pain. And does she have wonderful support? Oh yes — incredible support. Her greatest support comes from Tanya and from Jimmy — her brother and her sister — who minister to her more than anyone; and her husband, who has tried so hard to live inside her pain: "Thank you, Anthony." Her children, her family, and this church have all been giant encouragers.
- **Unpredictable.** But this loss is so weird, it is so indescribable, it is devastating, and more than anything it is unpredictable: there is no blueprint to follow, there is nothing to study, and no one — as much as they try — can help. She remembers walking past someone a few weeks after daddy had died, thinking, "I just hope they don't say anything to me — I'm just not up to it today" — and then, having made it safely past, thinking: "It's terrible, she didn't even speak. She knows I'm in pain; she should have acknowledged it." Really, she says, it's weird.
- **The hole, and the Sunday it was told.** One day Anthony wanted to go with her out to Forest Lawn, where mom and dad are buried, and sitting there quietly on the steps she tried for the first time to put a sound to her loss: it is like walking along, trying to move ahead, doing pretty decent, gaining ground — and then, just out of nowhere, not even thinking about him, the next step is into a hole, "and I fall, and I hit hard." The next day happened to be Sunday, and a particular point in Anthony's message made room for the moment they had shared the day before. When he started telling it, her first thought was: this is good, this fits, this is really going to help someone today — and not fifteen seconds later she was so angry at him for revealing her, naked sitting there in front of the whole congregation, where now they could see her bleeding. "Strange. I can't explain it."
- **What she read in Lewis.** It is kind of like something she read out of *A Grief Observed* by C. S. Lewis: "Grief is like a long valley, a winding valley, where any bend may reveal a totally new landscape" — and yet not every bend, for sometimes the surprise is that you are presented with the exact same sort of countryside you thought you had already traveled and left back there miles ago, and that is when it dawns on you that "this is not really a valley — this is just a circular trench." She laughs that the poor guy needed help, he needed God, he needed a Max Lucado in his life — but it is so inexplicable, it is weird, it is strange, and so many in the house know precisely what she is talking about.
- **The upheaval, and grief is good.** She was not prepared for the emotional upheaval: a wide array of emotions, from not caring to being on edge, anger, mood swings, depression — what she experienced was a total loss of fulfillment of any kind; numb, dazed, empty, having so much but feeling like she had nothing at all. So far this is what she knows: she has been grieving, and grief is good. Jesus was a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief, and she has gotten acquainted with grief herself: "I have found power in grief. Grief heals." And with the door open to her recent pain, other losses and hurts have been revealed, and she has been working through those, too — and that is also a good thing.
- **Unresolved grief, and reintegration.** Dear people, many problems in our lives stem from grief that is unresolved and unhealed. There are few good models of grief — we don't do that; grief is undetected and invisible to the untrained eye. She does not believe we have been encouraged enough to heal from our scars and to mourn outright; we must think it is a sign that we don't really trust God or don't really believe in His word — yet Jesus was a man acquainted with grief, and he acknowledged it. Though we have access to bereavement counselors and other health professionals, most people today still feel very much alone in their grief; we avoid it, even though inwardly every one of us is really longing for a pathway through our pain and our isolation. Learning to grieve has helped her to connect again, with help, and she has been in the process of reintegration, trying to put the pieces back together. She doesn't think for a minute that she has completed the Kübler-Ross stages of grief, but at least she is back in motion, and she has realized, sadly but wisely, this: "I will grieve as long as I'm alive, and that's a good thing. I will not get over my loss; I will learn to live with it." And since she made that determination, she is closer to mom and dad again.
- **Every loss counts.** When we speak of loss we tend to think of the death of people that we love, but loss is a far more encompassing thing in our lives: there is loss of health, jobs, friendships, self-worth, loss of finances, marriages, loss of youthfulness, children leaving home — all very real losses, and uniquely yours. And no loss counts more than another loss: your loss counts for you, your loss is deep, your loss is big, and it deserves your personal attention without comparison; no one but you will ever know the meaning of what was shared, or what was lost, or the deepness of the void that shadows your future. The period of time after a significant loss is full of the feelings we have usually spent a lifetime trying to avoid — sadness at our doorstep with a deeper range than we have ever felt, an intensity beyond our normal range of human emotions: "our defenses are just no match for the power of our loss."
- **Her text: blessed are they that mourn.** She reads her text, Matthew 5: "Seeing the multitudes, he went up into a mountain: and when he was set, his disciples came unto him: and he opened his mouth, and taught them, saying, Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted." Even Jesus required comfort — he was encouraged in the house of Mary and Martha and Lazarus. Everybody needs somebody: Moses had Joshua, Paul had Barnabas, Mary had Elizabeth, and David had Jonathan.
- **Jonathan.** Jonathan — how he ministered to David: he was a lifter, he was an encourager, and she can only imagine the enormous loss David must have felt when Jonathan was taken from him. They were cohorts; Jonathan was never a threat to David; he simply loved him. Jonathan admired David, trusted him, served him; he relinquished his throne and his dream and his leadership — his future — because he loved David: "I'll fight for you, David; I'll fight for you, even against my own father." He was so selfless, so giving; he held David's hand while he grieved.
- **She rejected comfort; the body heals itself.** She will be honest: in the last few months of intense adjustment to life without her first loves and her first connections, she has rejected comfort — she has listened to words of encouragement, but she did not drink it in. She hadn't banked on such lows; spiritually she has been depleted. She hasn't felt backslidden, but she has felt lost on many occasions; she could feel the presence of the Lord, but still she was not comforted — and it's odd, but she believes there is a reason for that. Paul, her brother-in-law, is a nurse practitioner, and he has told her that no doctor, no drug, no object has ever healed anyone — they can only assist, in harmony with the laws of nature. Our mind and body system is designed to heal itself: if you cut your finger, the repair job is so perfect that after a few weeks you can't even remember which finger it was — even the fingertips and the fingerprints are restored. The body grows new arteries, new bypasses, when the flow of blood is blocked, because the flow has got to go on; even the liver regenerates itself within a week after half of it has been taken out. "The body heals the body. The body restores the body. The body comforts the body — if we listen to the body."
- **Bypassing the body; the card.** And here is her confession: she cannot count the times she has deliberately bypassed the very people who were designed for the moment, by God Almighty, to bring her a cup of cold water — she has dodged them, made a beeline to the closest door to get out of there, when a scripture was given to her to help her make it through the night, to help her get back on her feet again. Somebody sent her this in the mail — no name, just "from St. Louis, Missouri" written on there: "The Lord shall preserve thy going out and thy coming in from this time forth, and even forevermore" — Psalm 121:8. It is nice to get in the mail, she says, but the touch is hard to embrace when you are in rejection.
- **The soul that refused to be comforted.** She voices the psalm of her own condition: "I cried unto the Lord with my voice, and he gave ear unto me. In the day of my trouble I sought the Lord, but my soul refused to be comforted. Is his mercy clean gone forever? Does his promises fail forevermore? Has he forgotten to be gracious?" — "This is my infirmity." But she sees it right there: "I will remember the years of the right hand of the Most High. I will remember the works of the Lord; surely I will remember the wonders of old." "Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits: who redeemeth thy life from destruction, who crowneth thee with lovingkindness and tender mercy." So many times she reminds herself of Rachel, lamenting and weeping so that she refused to be comforted, and of Jacob, whose sons and daughters tried to soothe and console him, yet he rejected their acts of love and consideration — "I will go down into the grave with my son" — and Joseph wasn't even dead. Anthony inquired of her how horrible it must feel to be an orphan, and she can't put her hands around that thought; she has so closely connected to some of the kids on her bus routes who have never had an attending mother or father, and some don't even know who they are. What she can say is this: it has felt like there has been an amputation, like she is missing something — but through the process of grief she has begun to feel a regeneration.
- **The flicker in the window.** Through the process of grief, Psalms tells her that he knows her frame, and Hebrews tells her he is touched with her infirmity. And even though she shouts, "Not now — just let me go down into the grave," still he makes a plea to the body: "We then that are strong ought to bear the infirmities of the weak" — "Bear ye one another's burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ." "I guess I'm beginning to see a flicker in the window again."
Scriptures: Matthew 5:1-4; Psalm 121:8; Psalms (book-only, as spoken); Hebrews (book-only, as spoken)
Scripture index: Matthew 5:1-4; Psalm 121:8; Psalms (book-only, as spoken); Hebrews (book-only, as spoken).
Transcript
daddy was 77 years old when he died I was back in April really just only eight
and a half months ago I really miss him Anthony does too and so does Jim and Jelena tanyon Paul has six grandkids and his four great camp grandkids and I know all of you miss him too some of the reasons that we all miss him he was a sharp quick brilliant quick gentle quit and he loved people I only know of one thing that he couldn't tolerate and that was taking pictures and that just happened to be the thing that mom loved to do the most what did we learn from him we learned how to manage our finances we learned kindness just kind of old-fashioned being nice honest pay for an honest day's work work ethics lots of humility impeccable integrity how to honor people daddy honored mom mom died two years before daddy did she's been gone three years this June mom died with Alzheimer it's a really mean disease mom didn't much like it if you acted lofty she had a sixth sense for figuring people out and she was usually right hey you know what I was back there and I was putting this on and Mike was back there and we were talking with Bruce our sound man and he said you know I would really like to have one of those if you got one I'd like to take her home with me and they were talking back and forth and so they were trying to fit it around my bun I just wanted to say to you guys it must really be nice not to have a bun you won't have to work it around your bun all right make sure you don't wear a stick in your head okay but anyway mom's mom's six cents used to pretty much point us in the right direction we didn't want to we didn't want her to figure us out without us ever really having to do anything mom didn't like you if you acted lofty I'll tell you that if you were an underdog you better hope you were in Mom's pack she was meaner than a junkyard pit if you messed with underprivileged people or the less fortunate well just this last April the 17th Tuesday afternoon dad went to see mom his grandsons carried his body out of the home to a waiting van you were there brother tinny Thank You Terry all the family got to be there Stan we had that we had that joy as well I remember standing outside and paying attention to absolutely every detail every minut detail and then he was gone we just stood there stood there outside remember for the longest just looking down the road that took him away from the moment that we are born we have an
attachment your first contact is connecting with your parents your attachment is formed by soothing words comfort nurturing I'm certainly sure that you have heard the stories of the children that were born the babies that were born in the Cold War they had to put them in orphanages and in hospitals and they were fed and they were bathed properly yet there weren't enough people to care for them they couldn't Rock them and hold them hug them or touch them enough physical attention was not able to meet their needs and they died they died from lack of physical connection without attachment you can't live medically it's simply referred to as failure to survive syndrome I can say that I usually can't say those medical terms but it's simply failure to survive syndrome when you become unattached when we have a loss there is injury to our attachment the word attached implies a connection and so death is a disconnect and standing outside of that house 1:24 Georgetown Drive eight and a half months ago I became disconnected from Daddy and finally mom my world stopped when my daddy's heart did life continued but I didn't I remember the first time that I drove my daddy's house and his front room light was off that light was never off never I drove to the end of the street and I turned back around and I'll never forget parking is close to that window as I could and having the first conversation that I ever had with him without being able to hear him or see him daddy if you only knew how much you took with you when you left I'm stripped I'm stripped of you and all that you embodied I'm stripped of your cute songs and poems and hearing you pray and if your cute little stupid smirk drift of watching you as you engage and you interact with people you were the greatest people person that there has ever been stripped of your amazing wisdom and your wit your humor and your wit daddy we always had a special bond and that bond has been disconnected in your lights out and I cried and I cried and I cried and I cried and I cried so you really would think that that would have been enough I am together enough to know that there are plenty in this house this afternoon whose pain is much more intense than mine Belinda Scott how I miss him
Lucas Nancy I miss his face over there that smile I miss Scott McMahon is so bad brother Sam I didn't know where but New Zealand newer I know your pains intense brother and sister Becton Ronnie Rene Sarek Mahaney last night I said how you doing Rick it goes all I just still kind of wait for that call where I hear hear hey ignor I know you and lucky Nita miss charlie so much Mike I know your pain is intense but I know you're a believer do I have wonderful support yes oh yes oh yes oh yes yes incredible support probably my greatest support comes from Tanya and from Jimmy you know and and they minister to me more than anyone and I guess that's normal that's my brother and my sister and my husband who's tried so hard to live inside my pain Thank You Anthony my children my family and this church thanks Selina you have everyone been giant encouragers but this loss is so weird it is so indescribable it's it's it's devastating but more than anything it's it's unpredictable there's no blueprint to follow there's there's nothing to study no one as much as you try no one can help I remember walking past someone a few weeks after daddy had died and I thought oh god I just hope they don't say anything to me I'm just not up to it today I just hope they don't say anything too and then I make it safely past them and I think it's terrible she didn't even speak she knows she knows I'm in pain she should have acknowledged it really it's weird one day Anthony wanted to go with me out to Forest Lawn where mom and dad are buried we were just sitting there quietly on the steps and for the first time to him I tried to kind of put a and a sound to my loss and I I said Anthony you know it's just kind of like I'm walking along trying to move ahead I'm doing pretty date decent I'm gaining gaining ground and then just out of nowhere nowhere I'm not even thinking about him I don't know where my next step it's just into a hole and I fall and I hit hard it is so bizarre well the next day just happened to be sundean Anthony was ministering to the church and a particular point in his message that morning made room for the moment that we had shared the day before and when he started telling that my immediate thoughts were now this is good this is this fits here this is really gonna help someone today not 15 seconds later I was so angry at him for revealing me my emotional pain had wasn't it I was naked sitting over there in front of the whole congregation and sure they all care but now they could see me bleeding strange I can't explain it it's kind of like something that I read out of a grief observed by CS Lewis I don't know if y'all read that book or not I was intrigued by it but God loving man
man poor guy he needed a Max Lucado in his life I think he is but this is how he wrote it he said grief is like a long valley a winding valley where that any Bend may reveal a totally new landscape and yet not every Bend sometimes the surprise is that you're presented with the exact same sort of countryside you thought that you had already traveled and left back there miles ago and that's when it dawns on you that this is not really a valley this is just a circular trench I'm not kidding the guy needed help he needed God but you know what it was it's so inexplicable it it's weird it is strange so many of you know precisely what I'm talking about you know what I was not prepared for the emotional upheaval I truly was not I experienced a wide array of emotions from not caring to being on edge - anger - mood swings depression what I experienced was a total loss of fulfillment of any kind that's bad numb dazed empty having so much but I felt like I had nothing at all so far this is what I know I know that I've been grieving and grief is good Jesus was a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief I've gotten acquainted with grief I have found power in grief grief heals grief identifies with the door open to my recent pain other losses and hurts have been revealed and I've been working through that and that's also a good thing dear people many problems in our lives stem from grief that's unresolved and unhealed there are few good models of grief we don't do that we don't do that grief is undetected and invisible to the untrained eye though much better I believe than we ever have been before I personally don't believe that we've been encouraged enough to heal from our scars and to out write down write mourn I guess we must think that it's a sign that we don't really trust God or don't really believe in his word Jesus was a man acquainted with grief and he acknowledged while we do have access to bereavement counselors and other health professionals most people today still feel very very much alone in their grief we avoid it as I said especially us even though inwardly everyone of us are really longing for a pathway through our pain and our isolation yet learning to grieve has helped me to connect again with help Thank You Sharon Turner I have been in the process of reintegration trying to put the pieces back together I've even tried to embrace a little common sense you ought to be glad to hear that
I don't think for a minute that I've completed the kubler-ross stages of grief but at least I'm back in motion Bo t-shir has helped and I have realized sadly but wisely this that I will grieve as long as I'm alive and that's a good thing I will not get over my loss I will learn to live with it and since you knows what this is what's so strange since I have kind of made that determination for some reason I'm closer to mom and dad again when we speak of loss we tend to think of the loss through the death of people that we love but loss is a far more encompassing thing in our lives there's loss of health jobs friendships long friendships some of them self worth loss of finances marriages loss of youthfulness children leaving home all very real very real and losses and uniquely yours and no loss counts more than another loss your loss counts for you your loss affects you your loss is deep and it deserves your personal attention without comparison it's big your loss is big and you are the only one who can survey the the magnitude and the damage of your loss no one but you will ever know the meaning of what was shared no one but you will ever know what was lost or the deepness of the void that shadows your future you alone know your loss and your loss is big and it shouldn't be compared to my loss the period of time after a significant loss is full of the feelings that we usually have spent a lifetime trying to avoid try not to feel now sadness it's at our doorstep with a deeper range than we have ever felt in in our lives and its intensity is beyond our normal range of human emotions and our defenses are just no match for the power of our loss Matthew 5 1 & 4 seeing the multitudes he went up into a mountain and when he was set his disciples came unto him and he opened his mouth and he taught them saying blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the kingdom of heaven blessed are they that mourn for they shall be comforted even Jesus required comfort he was encouraged in the house of Mary and Martha and Lazarus Moses had Joshua paul had Barnabas Mary had Elizabeth David had Jonathan Jonathan Jonathan how you ministered to David you were a lifter you were an encourager I can only imagine David the enormous loss you must have felt when Jonathan was taken from you they were cohorts Jonathan was never a threat to David he simply loved him Jonathan admired David trusted him served him he relinquished his throne in his dream and his leadership his future because he
loved David I'll fight for you David I'll fight for you even against my own father he was so selfless so giving he held David's hand while he grieved I'll be honest with you in the last few months of intense adjustment to life without my first loves and my first connections I have rejected comfort I have I've listened to words of encouragement but I did not drink it in and I hadn't banked on such lows it really amazed me and spiritually I have been depleted and I'm sorry I cannot put meaning into that I haven't felt back slitting but I have felt lost on many occasions I could feel the presence of the Lord but still I was not comforted and it's odd but I believe that there's a reason for that Paul my brother-in-law is a nurse practitioner he has told me that no doctor no drug no object has ever healed anyone they can only assist in the act of harmony with the laws of nature our mind and body system is designed to heal itself if you cut your finger with a sharp object the wound heals itself and the red the repair job is so perfect that after a few works weeks you can't even remember which finger that it was even the finger tips and the finger prints are restored when we abuse our bodies with lack of rest and poor diets and bad disciplines and no exercise pain and aches are signals to our conscious mind that we have got to change our ways and if we do change and become intentional about a whole body and a whole whu-oh Ellie mind then we miraculously recover when we resist listening to the body we suffer the human body has the remarkable ability to grow new arteries when the flow of blood is blocked due to cholesterol plaque the vessels carrying blood detects decreased blood flow to the heart and so help me it will grow new bypasses because the body knows that the flow has got to go on this phenomenon occurs throughout the entire vascular system including all organs of the body even the liver regenerates itself within a week after half of it's been taken out the body heals the body the body restores the body the body comforts the body if we listen to the body now here's my confession I cannot count the times that I have deliberately bypassed you and you and you and you who were designed for the moment by God Almighty to bring me a cup of cold water I've dodged you I made a beeline to the closest door to get out of here when a scripture was given to me to help me make it through the night to help me get back on my feet again
somebody sent me this in the mail no name just said from st. Louis Missouri written on there the Lord shall preserve thy going out and thy coming in from this time forth and even forevermore Psalm 121 and eight it's nice to get this in the mail but it's hard the touch is hard to embrace when you're in rejection I cried unto the Lord with my voice and he gave urine to me in the day of my trouble I sought the Lord but my soul refused to be comforted is his mercy clean gone forever does his promises fail forevermore has he forgotten to be gracious and I screamed this is my infirmity but Micky I see it right here is it said let me just please encourage you just listen right here I will remember the years of the right hand of the Most High I will remember the works of the Lord surely I will remember the works and the wonders of old the Lord is gracious and he's good to all bless the Lord O my soul forget not all of his benefits who redeemeth thy life from destruction who crowded me with loving-kindness and tender mercy so many times I remind myself of Rachel lamenting and weeping so that she refused to be comforted or Jacob whose sons and daughters tried to soothe and console him yet he rejected their acts of love and consideration leave me alone I will go down into the grave with my son and yea Joseph wasn't even dead Anthony inquired of me how horrible it must it feel to be an orphan and you know for some reason I just can't put my hands around that thought I guess I've so closely connected to some of my busts throughout kids who don't even have never had an attending mother or father and some don't even know who they are but what I can say is this it has felt like there has been an amputation like I'm missing something but through the process of grief I have begun to feel a regeneration through the process of grief Psalms tells me that he knows my frame Hebrews tells me he's touched with my infirmity and even though I shout not now just let me go down into the grave still he makes a plea to the body we then that are strong ought to bear the infirmities of the weak bear ye one another's burdens and so fulfill the law of Christ I guess I'm beginning to see a flicker in the window again
Scripture references as spoken: Matthew 5:1-4; Psalm 121:8; Psalms (book-only, as spoken); Hebrews (book-only, as spoken).