Category Archives: Random Thoughts

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.  ❤️

No matter what I understand about stress and grief and trauma, the understanding does not erase its reality.

Understanding alone does not give me freedom.

I still have to work through the muck. Albeit, it does help to understand.

Grief and trauma aren’t like injuries. They are injuries.

I never understood the physical reality of grief as an injury as well as I understand it now. I peel back the layers every day, and still there are more.

Grief is a uniquely human wound.

Even understanding the anticipatory grief packaged with John’s terminal illness did not prepare me for the eventual reality of his death. It did not prepare me for this side of the trauma. We soldiered on through the brutality of his fight for life, because John and I faced things together. No matter how gritty, our family faced everything together. And we had hope for a cure.

Now… that hope has exited stage left, as has John. And now he’s not here to stare down his son’s own cancer with us too.

Grief cripples, even when you understand. Even when you seek balance in all things. You are not “you” for awhile. Maybe you never will be.

“Faith” that I’ll see John again in spirit does not erase the physical reality I face every day. It does not erase the wounds of our trauma together. It does not remove the flood at my knees or the fight at my door.

While no one can take over my burden for me, my friends and family can cushion the pointy-ness, salve the pain, steady me when I falter and stumble. Hold my hair back as I vomit from this Life’s kick in the gut.

No one has ever thrived alone. Human history is proof of this, over and over again. The world’s sacred texts are filled with example after example. Nature also teaches us this. We can survive alone, but we do not thrive. And we don’t heal from mortal wounds without assistance, from God or otherwise.

Like any piercing physical ailment, grief and trauma require recovery and healing. Avoidance does not erase the reality of it nor the need for working through it, any more than a broken leg can be pretended away. But neither does justification or comprehension remove the reality either.

While many things are affected and even created by belief alone, some things cannot be simply unmade through knowledge and recognition. And while choices have consequences, not all “consequences” have choices.

Sometimes, the task set upon us is unfair and without cause.

Understanding alone doesn’t do the work or walk the path of Life. It merely assists in our perspective. We still must face and work with the actual reality.

Perspective and applied understanding help us transmute. And transmutation of the spirit is why we’re here. To be reborn with every conscious effort, ever seeking the Path, even when obscured by tragedy. Even when we feel alone and blind with pain.

We are not robots and we are not God. I may be a part of God, a part of the family of God, or even part of the Great Network as I understand it, but I am not the sum of Creator. And yet, even my Creator God feels. Even Jesus cried out on the cross.

Christ understood far more about the universe and spiritual reality than we can comprehend. And yet when Lazarus died, whom He was about to raise from the dead – “Jesus wept.” (John 11:35) 

Knowing everything he knew, knowing that Lazarus would return to life, knowing God and the nature of the universe and our connection, Jesus was overcome with emotion and cried for the friend he loved.

How could I be expected to perform “better” than that?

Life is in the Overcoming.

And some tasks are more difficult than others.

#ThoughtsForTheDay

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June 25th, 2018
5:40pm
by Julia Meek Chambers
All rights reserved.