GOOD GRIEF!
Living Through Seasons of Loss
Ecclesiastes 3:11, ‘He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end.’ (NIV)
October 14th, 2022
WINTER: the Dying Season
Isaiah 55:8-9, ‘”For My thoughts about mercy are not your thoughts and My ways are different from yours. As high as the heavens are above the earth so My ways and My thoughts are higher than yours.’” (TPT)
Just like winter creates isolation, so does death. If we are not careful, we can find ourselves in a cave of loneliness and seclusion. I think we get buried and hidden beneath the heavy blanket of grief, and it becomes comforting, what we know. In fact, do you own a weighted blanket? For some, it is impossible to sleep unless beneath the heaviness and covering of its weight, and at first, this confused me. Eventually, however, after my dad’s passing, I came to understand better. It was familiar and reassuring, the heaviness I carried inside that weighted me and moored me in a place I recognized; it was ordinary and natural.
For some, residency is taken up. They move in slowly, but before they know it, the grief provides an address where they have settled in. You pull the blinds and lock the doors and no longer come out to play or visit anymore. I think we get to where we believe no one else can possibly understand because no one has ever been this way before. We detach; the confinement of the anguish is insulating; the quiet deafening. There has never been a sound so raucous and vociferous as the sound of silence. Suddenly, we are quarantined within the walls of despair, fearful our sadness is contagious and life-threatening. No one should be around us anyway; nobody could possibly understand. The dark gets darker, impenetrable, smothering, sweltering, suffocating.
There is joy that can come after the mourning, a dawn that arrives with the morning. It is so very important if you have a loved one or even a colleague, co-worker or acquaintance, who is struggling with how to cope and how to manage the heavy blanket of grief, that you get them to fresh air and sunlight. Carry them if you must. Bring them praise music, saturate him or her with the peace of God which surpasses all understanding, pull them to their feet and cause them to move once more. Grief can be debilitating, and the unfairness of it all, angering, as one tries to find someone to blame, a place to cast the accusations, a significance and reason to still BE.
I am unsure where I would be today if I had stayed stuck and mired in the quicksand of grief I could have become comfortable in. It kept pulling me in and I had to stay busy to not drown. Just keeping my head above ground meant I was concentrating on survival, not on healing. It took being plucked out and set on a steady ledge with a word whispered to my heart of His constancy and His promise of reunification that moved me past what perplexed me. In Christ, we have been given a rare opportunity to co-exist again elsewhere. This is not the end of the line. This is not forever. There is an eternity which awaits us. Everyday it is beckoning us home. Everyday we are one breath closer. Everyday the fulfillment is even more complete.
When we come to Christ, He makes a covenant with us, His children. Life is but a journey in His direction. He has prepared a place for us, and those who believe in Him who have gone on ahead are awaiting our arrival. Every moment we survive in this fallen world is one moment closer to being set free in Paradise. We all agree, life is not for wimps, but it is a condition of this messy place we are passing through, and we can’t get there without traveling through here first.
I am so grateful God has been patient with my grieving. I am so thankful He has seen my struggle and He has loved me through it. In this life, I will never not grieve again. Now that I have known grief, I don’t think it is something we cast aside and never wear again. To me, it is like a garment, and we can choose each day whether it is a garment of praise or a garment of grief. I also believe, mankind knows grief from conception to death. Prior to birth, we are whole, and, I think, we are sinless in utero, because it is our human form which becomes our sin nature. I think our separation from our Heavenly Father causes great grief as we enter this world, and I also think, the grief of living this life imperfectly designates a long path of desperation. But hope, God’s hope, and His promise for what lies ahead, yields the courage to set aside that heavy blanket of grief and dress in a garment of praise even if just for a season.
Isaiah 55:10-11, ‘”As the snow and rain that fall from heaven do not return until they have accomplished their purpose, soaking the earth and causing it to sprout with new life, providing seed to sow and bread to eat, so also will be the Word that I speak; it does not return to Me unfilled. My Word performs My purpose and fulfills the mission I sent it out to accomplish.”’ (TPT)
