Grief…it’s interesting to me. We all experience it for different reasons, death, divorce, health crisis’, children crisis’, financial crisis’, dream failures. And in those moments the heart grieves. I have found myself in a different kind of grief lately.
I have talked for years about the pictures we paint. How we have these pictures of how we think God should move, how our stories should play out, how the players should take the stage, and then life steps in and all that we thought life would be is nothing like our picture. And in a healthy heart…we grieve.
And that is where my heart has resided recently in a new kind of grief. Funny, after intense pain, like a divorce or death, there is a thought in the heart that “I have suffered enough, so the rest of this journey is going to be smooth sailing.” Yet you get to the rest of the journey and there is another trial, another challenge, another situation. And pain steps in, our soul encounters life and we hurt. Again…and sometimes even again…
I have finally found a new “place” in my new home for me and my Father to talk. I desired that earnestly and have finally found it. So, the other day we were talking and I felt my heart needing to surrender even more pictures of all that I thought life would be. Later that day my friend and mentor, Doctor Albert Lemmons, who I meet with on a regular basis took me a familiar passage in Job. The final chapter where Job repents of his lack of belief in God, and God, after Job has prayed for his friends who have hurt him in his deep places, receives a restoration of double what he had lost. However, Job did not get back what he had lost.
And in that moment the revelation of my grief was so apparent. In my divorce there was so much lost. There was the loss of the healing I desired for my marriage, the sixty years of shared memories, the children that should have been…and that is gone. Never to be a part of my story. And God in His beauty and love has restored back to me double or quintripliciate (I totally made that up!) more than I could ever ask or imagine. And even though it is beautiful…and real…and mine, it is still different from what my picture of life would be. And in that I have grieved.
In Chapter 33 of Job Elihu tells him that God speaks three ways – through dreams and visions, through men and thirdly- through pain. God spoke to me in the sweetest of ways during the pain following my divorce. And in the pain of the remnants of grief that still remain…He speaks again.
I will observe this grief. Experience it. Embrace it. Learn from it. And heal from it. And in it I will hear God speak…
How has He spoke to you in your grief?
