Tragedy, Scripture and Comfort Edited by Amy Scheer
Interview with Christina McGrinson
On Grief
It was horrendous to go through that grief [when her four-year-old son, Christopher, was killed by his father]. God in his mercy helped me to survive. I didn’t know the human body could survive such pain. It was incredible, incredible pain. Because it was so excruciating, I wondered if I would survive it.
Grief sapped my body. I was a hundred pounds. I was 38 years old. I was never skinny—I was always a medium-built person—but I was emaciated by then.
One day, I was coming down the supermarket aisle. A lady had her only child, a son; she saw me, and she grabbed that child and ran in the opposite direction. I just found a chair and sat down and cried. Then I got up and finished doing my shopping.
There were some friends that disappeared. That was hurtful. But then there were people who hung in there with me. You’ll find that in anything.
There was one person who used to come every day. I supervised him [at the school where I worked]. A very good worker. He didn’t have good social skills; he didn’t know where he fit in. Every day he came and he sat on one couch, I sat on the other couch, and after 45 minutes, he’d get up and leave. He did that every day. Every day. He did that for four weeks, six weeks. Then it went intermittently for six weeks. It was solace. It was cathartic. He would sit there, and I could cry or talk or not say anything, and he was there.
For six months I didn’t pay any bills. I didn’t have the emotion to pay the bills. One day one of the collectors came; they sent him out because we always paid our bills on time. He came to find out what was happening. I said, “Sir, my son died, and I can’t function.” And I told him what had happened. This man sat down on my couch and bawled. I couldn’t figure out if he was going to be all right! He bawled and bawled and bawled. His son had committed suicide two weeks before, and he had not dealt with it. So here he comes to my house, and he said, “I have to be strong for the rest of my family.” He felt comfortable with me. This was a man who was 6-foot-3, 250 pounds, thrashing all over! It was the most frightening thing! [She laughs.] I can laugh about it now. I didn’t know whether to call the police. I didn’t even know his name! When he finished, he said, “Thank you ma’am; that was therapeutic.” I never got another visit. At the end of the year, I paid off all my bills.
I struggled with God, just wrestled with God when Christopher died. I said, “God, I prayed for protection. I did everything. Where are you in all of this?”
I wrestled with God. I had a belief in God; I thought I was serving him to the best of my knowledge. I had asked for protection for my husband, myself, my child. And for such a horrendous thing to happen, it didn’t make sense to me. I would question. I said, “Oh God, oh God. God, you’re going to have to do something, because I do not understand.”
I would lie at night like this [folds hands over chest], because I would pray all the different ways I could die. I wasn’t going to kill myself—people die in their sleep, so I would lay this way or this way, in preparation, because I would be praying to die because I could not bear that pain. I could not bear that pain. I said, “God, you can take me now, because there’s no reason for me to live.” I’d wake up, and I’d be feeling quite good. I’d say, “Oh, you have a sense of humor—here I was ready to die and I’m still here! You must have a reason for me to stay.” There’s a reason why I’m alive.
I sense that I am alive because of those thousands of children that were in my classroom. I think I gave them opportunities and encouragement, hope for the future. I really do. Because I saw where I was in a very devastated situation, and the Lord has brought me to this point.
I really feel that if nothing else, I’m an encourager. I feel the Lord has preserved me to be an encourager to children. Then, my mother dies in an accident [the ambulance carrying her from a hospital to a nursing home in 2000 crashed], and I said, “What’s up with this, God? Because this does not make any sense. How is lightning going to strike twice in the same place, in the same heart?” I would get in the shower and scream. I’d go to Lake Michigan and scream. The amount of tears I shed in Lake Michigan. I didn’t wrestle with God when my mother died. I said, “God, there’s a reason. You brought me all the way from 1981 to 2000, and then you make something else happen?” But that song, “We Will Understand It Better By and By,” came back to me when my mother died. I felt the same excruciating pain when my mother died, but I did not wrestle with God in the same way.
God does not bring evil, because God is good all the time. He allows certain things to happen to certain people, because it carries out his purpose in our lives. Life is a journey, and you can’t know what’s going to happen along the way. Things just happen. You have to walk by faith and know that God knows best. It’s a journey we have to walk through. And sometimes on the journey you have tunnels, you have hills, and you either have to go over them or through them or whatever it is. But God is in control of everything.
Writing the Book
The Lord guided me to write the book. November 2006 was the 25th year, and I was very sad because I had not written the book. All along I sensed the Lord was telling me that I needed to write the book. I said, “God, I don’t know what to write. That’s too hard to write!” He said, “Write what you lived,” is what I was sensing. I am not the kneel-down-and-pray [type]; I walk and pace, and it’s in the shower, and it’s gardening, and I am wrestling and having a conversation with the Lord, doing those things. I would grab something and say, “Do you hear me, Lord?” I’m very passionate in my interaction with God. And the spirit of the Lord is my guide. Since I wrote the book, I realize how many people it has spoken to. Tremendous, fantastic responses. You know Ephesians 3:20 in the King James [“Now unto him that is able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think, according to the power that worketh in us”]? That’s what the book has been.
The response of people has been unspeakable. And this is both here and in Panama. I went to Panama for almost two months. We had book events, and people responded in the same way. They had lived through the whole thing with me. All my schoolmates, my colleagues, they have lived through this. 100, 150 people plus showed up at the release at the Western Michigan University Multicultural Center.
I challenged God. I said, “You said I need to write this book. Then you need to send me the people.” Very sassy. I turned like this, and the newspaper was on the sofa. I picked up the newspaper, opened it, and there is this lady who’s doing a workshop on self-publishing.
[Writing the book] was very difficult because of the emotional part. I’d cry and write, cry and write. [She flips through the book.] When I go through this, I remember every tear I shed. I would laugh; I went through every emotion they experience. This was a heavy one [she points to the page of the boys parting after their last playdate, and cries]. Because I couldn’t figure out why the boys were so intent on being together. It was an incredible feeling. Why do these two little boys want to be together? I must have written it a dozen times because it was very, very intense to write.
It took the boulder off my back. There’s a sense of freedom. No longer this boulder. It felt like a backpack that was on my shoulders, then all of a sudden it’s gone. It brought closure to the whole experience.
Comfort From Scripture
I write that in [all the books]: “The joy of the Lord is my strength.” When I got the news of Christopher’s death, that was the Scripture that jumped out at me. You know when Nehemiah was building the wall, people were depressed and dejected because everything was burned down in Jerusalem. He said, “Go, have weddings, christen your babies”—he listed all the things they were to do, because the joy of the Lord is your strength. No matter what hardship you’re going through, the joy of the Lord is your strength. I had just read that a few months before, because I had not heard that Scripture before. Christopher liked to sing that. He had a nice little voice himself. He would sing, “The joy of the Lord is my strength” [she claps and sings the children’s song]. I looked it up in the Bible.
Last year, I had done so much crying and stressed myself out so much with the writing of the book that by September my blood pressure went up to 202 over 100. I went to the emergency room, and they put on all the bells and whistles. After they attended to me, it was quiet, and they left the room. I sensed somebody came, held my hand, and said, “Be anxious for nothing, but in all things through prayer and supplication—with thanksgiving—make your requests known unto me.” [Philippians 4:6] There was a release from this hand. I knew it was a hand. When the doctors and nurses came back in, I said, “Was somebody in here?” They said, “No, nobody was here, we were monitoring you from outside.” The monitor went from 200 to 190, 180, 170; 150, it stopped. They monitored me all day Saturday, all day Sunday, and my blood pressure went to 130. It was not “Let your requests be known unto God,” it was “let your requests be known unto me.” So I knew that it was the spirit of the Lord that had visited me. Clearly, clearly, clearly. That was the 29th of September, 2007. The book was finished Nov. 18—that would have been Christopher’s 31st birthday. Writing the book was such a hard thing, but God was in the midst of it.