As a culture, we would benefit from talking about grief and aftermath more. No one should feel ashamed or shunned for grief.
Grief deepens us; it is our vehicle for honoring. Unless we are cheated of it and choked off from it.
It is said that God is with the grieving. The understandable assumption is that, of course, a Loving Creator has compassion and comforts the grieving soul. That when others abandon and neglect, God is steadfast. That even when you think you’ve lost all your friends and everyone stopped caring, God will be there, so count on Him. He will always understand. So much emphasis is placed on the righteousness of caring for widows and orphans in the Bible that it makes sense. God is the Great Comforter.
But I think there’s more to it than that. I believe that grief is a vehicle for God’s work in us. It is painful, but a new spiritual, transformative singularity is begun. As sideliners, we have the opportunity with the grieving souls in our circles: to step away from the energy of that remaking or to be a part of the work being born.
If grief is a sign that God’s Hand is present, then we should hardly turn our back and run from it when it appears in a friend’s life. Perhaps?
As uncomfortable as you may be with my obvious scars, you are mistaken if you think that grief makes me weaker.
Giving voice to these thoughts is much more poetic than it feels in real life since I pretty much feel like I’ve been set on fire and left to slow burn, a hot poker turning my coals. But then I wonder if the caterpillar feels pain as it dissolves into the primordial ooze that will eventually become a butterfly.
I desperately did not want to be reborn again. Not now. Not this way. But I’d be a fool not to recognize that my dissolving cannot help but be a part of reaching whatever my greatest potential is supposed to be. John is an inextricable part of my remaking.
Thing is, I was already a butterfly. I’m not sure what’s next.
Thanks to my friend Shari for sharing with me Nora McInerny’s TED talk about Grief. ❤️
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