Church trained to help slain woman's family deal with grief

Editor's note: Jessie Davis, the pregnant woman whose body was found in a park after thousands of volunteers searched for days, was buried Saturday along with her unborn daughter after a funeral at The House of the Lord church in Akron, Ohio. CNN.com writer Jim Kavanagh is a deacon at the church. He spoke with the pastor about loss and healing.

(CNN) -- What would you say to Patty Porter? What comfort can you offer someone whose pregnant daughter has been murdered, the body left for a week in an open field?

That's the task that has befallen The House of the Lord, Porter's church in Akron, Ohio. Porter is the mother of Jessie Marie Davis, the pregnant 26-year-old Lake Township, Ohio, woman whose body was found June 23, 10 days after she disappeared.

"This kind of trauma touches the community," Bishop F. Josephus Johnson II, the church's senior pastor, told CNN. "Because of the media, it touches everybody who's watched the story, really."

The kind of trauma Porter and the rest of Davis' family have experienced goes beyond grief and enters the realm of post-traumatic stress disorder, requiring a higher level of care, he said. But there are some basic tenets for dealing with grief.

"In order to work through it, you have to face it," Johnson said. "You have to face the fact that there's a loss, face the fact of what you feel. And it's in facing it that you begin to move toward forsaking the pain of it.

"You don't lose the event, you don't lose the relationships that are tied into it -- relationships are eternal," he continued. "But you can move beyond the immediate and the long-term pain that is associated with that particular loss. That's where the Grief Recovery process begins to help people work their way through it, by working through that pain."

Grief Recovery is a proprietary therapeutic program created by John W. James and Russell Friedman of the Grief Recovery Institute in Sherman Oaks, California. Participants go through a 12-week series of exercises to acknowledge losses and bring the feelings they cause to the surface, and then deal with those feelings.

It is required of all ministry leaders and encouraged for everyone in the 6,000-member church. It's training that's sorely needed, Johnson said.

"In America, we teach people how to acquire things, but we don't teach how to lose them," he said.

The reality, Johnson said, is that life amounts to an unending series of losses. "From the moment that we come out of our mother's womb, there's a loss. There's a loss of connection. ... And then all along, we lose as we grow up. We lose friends, we change grades, we lose toys, we lose pets. ... As you get into later life, we lose hair, we lose strength. ... So life can be viewed as a series of losses, but yet America is much more concerned about what we acquire than it is about what we lose."

As a result, well-meaning people often make unhelpful remarks to grieving people.

"One of the things we say a lot is, 'Time will heal all wounds.' And time really does not heal anything," Johnson said. "We give the example in Grief Recovery that if we believe time heals things, then when you get a flat tire, just go out and get a chair and sit by it and see whether the flat fixes itself. It's not going to do that. You have to make informed decisions and choices in order to be able to heal certain things."

Part of the problem, he said, is that Americans tend to try to work through things intellectually rather than emotionally.

"When you have an event that brings emotional loss, you cannot think your way through that, you have to feel your way through it. It's like going into a dark room: You can't think your way through that room, you have to put your hands out and feel your way through it."

And although he says we often bring grief upon ourselves by making poor decisions that have bad consequences, Johnson acknowledges that bad things happen to good people.

"The redeeming factor is that God is going to redeem the world one day, and nothing that happens to us in this life is final in terms of where we're going to spend eternity," he said.

"God will redeem those things. He will one day right every wrong. But in the meantime, we are facing still some of the things that are going on because in the fall, the devil himself, now understanding that he is not going to win, is more active than he has ever been."

Grief often causes people to question their faith, but Johnson said Porter's response has been exemplary.

"She has not been bitter. She's not been negative. She's not been hateful," he said. "And at the same time, her pain, which has been very obvious -- which it should be when you face something of this nature -- well, I want to be the same way. I want to represent Christ, I want people to see that there is hope, that God is and we are bigger than this kind of thing." E-mail to a friend

All About Jessie Davis