The Journey of Grief

 (by Mark)

It often starts with a simple phrase… “OH God NO!”.   It is a plea, an expression of shock, an admission that though not fully realized, life has changed.  I remember saying it on 9/11, I remember speaking it after hearing my grandmother had cancer, I remember pleading it after getting the news we wouldn’t be able to adopt Bella.  In some ways it is a last ditch effort to return to life as before, and in another way it is the beginning of grief.  It is the acknowledgement of loss and the beginning of the changing of the life you once knew.  Over the course of the months following one truth sinks deeper and deeper into your soul, making more and more profound an impact on your heart.  It is the reality that you can never go back.  To be truthful, in some cases there is happy resolution… a curing of cancer, a restoring of property lost in a fire.  However, one is still profoundly affected by these events.  Something is still lost.  In many other situations though, resolution of this reality is a hard process that can take years to truly make peace with.  We build memorials, monuments and scrapbooks to help remember.  We seek counseling, entertainment and medication to forget.  We seek to rectify our shattered world with the continued passing of the world around us.  Life goes on.  Whether we want it to or not.  And I guess that is where so much of the pain can come from.  There is the pain of loss.  There is also the pain of the coldness of the natural world… where time and seasons move on, unfeeling, uncaring and insensitive to where one might be in the process.  People too, move on.  They are not uncaring, but they have lives too.  As much as you might want to stop and linger, to bask in what is left of the person, dream or former reality, life goes on. 

I have found immense comfort in one marvelous thought in my process.  Jesus does not move on.  Profoundly, as one outside of time, he exists eternally in every moment.  He is as much in the past as in the future as he is with me here now at 5am while I type.  So too, he does not emotionally move on.  He is with me moment by moment, and he grieves the loss, my loss and the loss to the world that sin and brokenness bring.  Just as he weeps for Lazarus or Jerusalem, he also weeps for Bella and for us.  He weeps for her abandonment as an infant, he weeps for her time in an orphanage, he weeps that loving parents will not be able to keep her.  He weeps in all these things even knowing that HE is making all things new, HE is working all things for our good, HE is there in the future when resolution will take place.  He keeps a perfect balance of remembering and hoping, knowing there are greater things, better days that may never be seen this side of heaven.  I cannot imagine where comfort might come were I not to know Him.