Everyone is hit with loss: unmet expectations, disappointments, tragedies, betrayals, failure, etc. How you view your losses determines if you get stuck in loss or bounce back.

I've talked in other posts about the difference between a scarcity vs. an abundance mindset. Let me contrast these two again with pie charts.

Viewing Your Loss With Scarcity

Look at the pie chart above. Each wedge in this chart represents a loss and the damage to your life:

• A: Abuse

• B: Tragedy

• C: Failure

• D: Betrayal

• E: Your ever shrinking sense of wholeness

If you view your losses through the grid of scarcity, you see your life getting smaller. You become increasingly hopeless as you feel losses chipping away at your life. You wonder if you can hang on any more because bad things keep happening. This view is often accompanied by anger and depression.

Viewing Your Loss With Abundance

But if you look at loss through the grid of abundance, your life isn't being chipped away. Now look at the pie chart below. Each loss causes a temporary set back (the blue wedge) but as you invite God into your life, he helps you to grieve the loss, absorb it, and continue on with your life.

Ask God to fill up your loss. That doesn’t mean that he’ll give you back what you lost (a job, a friend, a loved one). It means that he will restore you and make your life good again. Your life will be different because of the loss. But God can still make it good, if you let him.

In many ways, you are stronger because of the loss, like a bone that has been broken.

A scar remains, reminding you of the loss, but the pain of the loss is eventually gone. It shrinks back to nothing. Your loss isn’t forgotten. It’s been transformed. So instead of loss chipping away at your life, with God's influence, loss actually expands you as a person; it makes you deeper and able to be a resource to other hurting people.

I hope this simple analogy helps you or the people you might work with.

To learn more about recovering from loss with God’s help see my book, Return from Exile… overcoming loss, failure, and personal setbacks.

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