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 19th, 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)
Somehow, hope and joy must be able to be unearthed from the depths of grief where it lies buried. That has been a quest for me. I think my husband and others who knew me well began to wonder if they would ever hear the rich tones of my laughter again. At least, I questioned it. It reminded me of another season not long before when I encountered substantial loss, yet no one had died. I felt entrenched by grief, surrounded on all sides, weighted down in the middle. How had I come through that, I wondered quietly inside. There was a song I listened to on repeat, sometimes all day, every day. ‘Breakthrough’, by Red Rocks Worship became my anthem back then. So I pulled it back out again and absorbed the words. It reflected the season I’d just been crawling through, buried and lost in a snowstorm of deep and heavy grief, searching for a dry and higher ground. I realized what I needed was breakthrough and I knew victory would come again as it had before if I believed it. ‘There will be victory…Yeah!’ their lyrics prophesied over me.
See, I am learning, someone doesn’t have to die for there to be extreme loss and extreme grief. I recognized what I was struggling through while grieving my dad was very similar to a loss of several different very close and personal relationships in the past handful of years. Those people had not passed away, but suddenly the relationships seemed as final and as absent as my relationship with my dad. The despair felt familiar, like a wardrobe of recognizable clothes you might have outgrown but, for whatever reasons, they fit again. It gave me some comfort because when relationships end in this world and we cannot figure out a way back there to fix things, it is conclusively over, definitively ended. However, with Jesus, there is eternity, and a great expectancy is being born of being together again someday, forever. That is where the new season transcends the previous and a heartbeat is heard once more; even if faint, but it is there pulsating within.
Like a symphony builds up to an amazing crescendo, one where breath is held and a pin could be heard like a gasp hit the atmosphere, had all previous losses been preparing me for this moment, the moment where my dad left this earth? Because while other losses I have suffered or survived have been difficult, this by far has been the most excruciating—losing someone I was doing life with. It doesn’t mean that the other casualties weren’t at times unbearable; it just means this time it knocked the wind out of me, sucked the air out of the room, stole the very oxygen I needed to breathe.
Like me, perhaps you have spent too much time analyzing your survival methods. Believe me, I have—plenty, and I assume I will for some years to come. When the first strains of a certain song filter through a playlist; when a moment is recounted; when a picture comes up on the ‘Memory’ counter; when a smell, a scene, a look, a verse, a dialogue triggers a significant recollection. But I am so grateful for the hind sights—they are truly 20/20. I believe the Lord is helping me know what to expect in the large scheme of things. And that is all about when to hang on and when to let go. What epic words King Solomon penned for us and left behind like a manual: Ecclesiastes 3:1b, ‘A time for every purpose under heaven.’
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)
