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 17th, 2022
SPRING: Expect!
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)
I felt like the winter was such a long season, an insurmountable lengthy haul I needed to survive. In fact, I know I entered survival mode sometime between my dad’s passing and his Memorial Service three weeks later. I realized after the fact, somewhere, somehow, I actually decorated for Christmas but couldn’t recall doing so. I even celebrated the holy season with the family who remained. NOTE to self: don’t miss the loved ones you are surrounded with by yearning for the one whom you lost. I think we all made a fair attempt to commemorate the season. I mean, we went through the motions, but there wasn’t much glimmer, nothing really twinkled except the lights on the tree; it seemed an exercise in futility. What we needed was fertility instead. We needed life. I needed hope that this wasn’t all there was ever going to be from here forward. For someone who loved Jesus so much, I really battled with my lackluster joy.
And like it happens every year, Spring sprung. Little sprigs of green began to pop through dirt. Imperceptible growth traveled beneath the surface of the earth. Tiny changes mulched across the ground, almost too invisible to see. Not quite but almost, life breathed, and healing began, the budding of belief. There groaned an expectancy for transformation, for metamorphosis. Grief changed color from grey to green, and like a long winter nap where one awakens and stretches, so did I. I had missed so much. I rubbed my expectant belly filled with hope and life, patted the grief to make sure it was still there and safe because I knew it well by then and I had become accustomed to nurturing it instead. To say the least, I would need retraining. There is nothing like a paradigm shift, one which includes a complete change of heart and focus, where the inward becomes outward, and you squint because life is suddenly too bright to take in after lurking in the shadows for several seasons. That’s how the mending began to happen for me. I had come undone; I had unraveled. Now I was being put back together again.
I don’t know about you, and what you might have been through, what losses you might have withstood. I had never traveled this path before, losing someone to death, which is so final, someone who was a part of the very air I breathed in and exhaled every day. I’d never been here, and to say it rocked my world is still to this day an understatement. My love for Jesus consumes me, and the delight of going to be with Him colors many desires a beautiful shade of hope. So why do I for one moment even ache because my dad has gone ahead of me, as he should? But I think that’s because death is so very final. Knowing Jesus transforms the finality of it as there is eternity to look forward to, but life as we know it in this world is forever altered on the day a person passes. The last cup of coffee and conversation you shared is forever gone. The last time your name fell from their lips, those three words ‘I love you’, the plans you might have made, decisions underway…all things unspoken eternally silenced now. I struggled. There was still so much I hadn’t conveyed, we hadn’t shared, so much time I was yet to make up for.
It also dawned on me, too late perhaps, this wasn’t going to be a fast turnaround. I think I really counted on the belief I’d see my dad again, but I hadn’t considered the timing of it. I assuaged my loss by telling it, it would be okay and before long we’d be together again. What I failed to accept is that while my dad’s life ended abruptly, mine went right on living. As days turned into weeks and weeks to months, I had to grasp that people fade, memories fade, smells fade, glimpses fade, yearnings fade. Did that mean my love was fickle since the remembrances faded? I learned that shame and guilt come with the territory where grief homesteads, and the sooner those emotions are unwelcome guests, the sooner acceptance can be moved in instead. I never knew the barrage of feelings, both right and wrong, that come naturally with the loss of someone dear. If grief made me hollow and irresponsible and listless, this current assault of emotions made me crazy, upended, conflicted. How long should I expect to be in this condition was the new debate. That’s when I stumbled upon a verse I had been knowing my entire life which I never before had a reason to understand: ‘To everything there is a season…(Ecc 3:1a)
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)
