Jim Coppoc.

Last night, someone I love died. No warning. She wasn’t old. She wasn’t sick. She just had a weak blood vessel somewhere in her brain and then was gone, with eight children and a mountain of friends left behind.

As a pastor in a small town church, I am regularly confronted with death. With grief. With mourning.But I have precious few resources for dealing with it. The Gospel that speaks so directly to so many other areas of my life tells me, “blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted,” but it says so very little about how.

There was a moment, though, at the Last Supper, where I think Jesus was trying to offer some advice. After sharing his body and blood with those who loved him, he washed their feet, changed the subject to his betrayal and death, and told them that where he was going they could not follow. Then he said to them, “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.”This line is often quoted generically as a statement of how Christians should show up in the world, and that is a valid read, but in the specific context of the Last Supper I feel like it can also be taken as concrete, actionable advice for how to make it through loss.

A couple months before my friend died, she wrote to me about a breakup she was going through. She told me, “I am thankful that I loved well enough to […] feel the pain of that type of loss. Loss that comes with a pain equivalent to the beauty shared between two humans.” Grief and connection are interwoven. The loss we feel reminds us of the bond we had.

Every Sunday morning, just before the closing hymn, I tell my congregation, “This is the time in our service that we remember we are a church, and a church is made of people, each with their own joys and sorrows – their own journeys through life. We share those journeys together.” Then we open up about the happenings in our lives. The births and deaths and all the big events between. We pray for each other and the world around us. We remind ourselves of the love we share.

If you are grieving, and need connection – or if you are looking for community – I invite you to my church, or any church that holds community as one of its core values. As the great theologian John Lennon once wrote, “I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together.”

Jim Coppoc serves the Ripley United Church of Christ at 400 S. Main St. in Traer. He lives in Ames and Traer, and also holds a “day job” as Director of Integrated Health Services for Center Associates in Marshalltown and Toledo. Jim can be found online at www.facebook.com/jim.at.ripley.