On a recent Sunday morning, I was musing about the fact that I had been around a lot of death lately. A few weeks prior, a childhood friend had been killed in a car accident; his mother passed away two weeks later from cancer; I had lost a “second mom” at a fulfilled age of 91. All this, of course, is layered onto the loss of my late wife Dana who passed away in December 2009.

Then the morning’s sermon was on Genesis 23—Abraham burying his wife, Sarah. OK, God, it must be time to probe loss.

The Wrong Metrics
In Genesis 23, we see the widower Abraham seeking a burial place for his deceased wife—an entire chapter devoted to navigating loss. In the next chapter, there is a curious recap of Abraham’s life:
“Abraham was now very old, and the Lord had blessed him in every way” (Genesis 24:1).

This recap is curious in that it comes on the heels of an event that is rarely considered a blessing: death.

Here then is a principle that would be good for us to ingest and impart to the next generation: God’s metrics for measuring life are vastly different than the world’s.

Somewhere along the way, we adopt the world’s metrics: We hope we will live pain free, that we will be financially secure, that we will have comfort. When does this thinking begin? Things never work out that way. When loss comes, questions pop into our minds: “Why does God not like me?” or “How could He let this happen?” These show our ignorance of God.

Could we, in youth ministry, frontload our teens’ adult life with biblically sound metrics? If we did, it might sound something like this:
“But whatever were gains to me I now consider loss for the sake of Christ. What is more, I consider everything a loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whose sake I have lost all things. I consider them garbage, that I may gain Christ and be found in Him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but that which is through faith in Christ—the righteousness that comes from God on the basis of faith. I want to know Christ—yes, to know the power of His resurrection and participation in His sufferings, becoming like Him in his death, and so, somehow, attaining to the resurrection from the dead” (Philippians 3:7-11).

The Right Metrics
Paul had been using the accolades of his Jewish pedigree as a metric to measure life. In tossing out the garbage, Paul gave us what I might posit as God’s metric: knowing Christ and participating in His suffering and death.

When we experience loss, much recovery time is spent asking, “Why did this happen?” It is an inevitable and arguably a healthy question; but the sooner we start asking, “How can this help me know Christ?” the better our recovery.

Admittedly, “Come join and suffer” is not a great recruiting slogan for Christianity. It won’t bring the masses to your gatherings as will a sex series, but it’s necessary…and important. Suffering is a huge Bible theme and is one of the quickest access points to Jesus. It’s something He knows a lot about and may be the thing we have most in common with Him.

When we are exploring this subject with teens, we’re not only experiencing intimacy with Jesus, but we’re giving them a biblical metric on how to measure life; and with that metric, any loss will be a net gain. That’s a blessing.