Opening The Door To Grief

Jesus wept. John 11:35

IT WAS A TYPICAL fall evening, windy and growing cooler each hour, when my husband kissed me and told me he’d be back late from his elder meeting at our church. Nights like these are where I usually replenish my tank, light a candle, and sit by myself, trying to forsake Pinterest and actually fill my soul.

I love these peaceful evenings, when my children’s chests are gently rising and falling upstairs and I am able to breathe in the quiet of our house downstairs. It’s rare I’m surrounded by such serenity.

That night, as I sat with a book, the candle flickered from the front door opening much too early. My husband walked in, his posture changed. He was clearly shaken.

“The Crawfords are moving,” he said.

“What? Wait. What?”

All of a sudden the room looked a little warped and off-balance. Surely my husband didn’t just say our pastor, his wife, and their four boys were leaving. Our dear friends who helped start our church sixteen years ago, who tore down walls and sanded floors in our old house, who held our babies and came to birthday parties, and with whom I’d worked on staff for the last several years were leaving?

Because our hometown is a college town, we often call it Shipping and Receiving. Students come, plant themselves, bloom, and then leave. Graduate students and their families take root in our community, only to be plucked up a few short years later for another opportunity. We ship. We receive. We repeat. And God had simply called our pastor to another church that was in desperate need of someone with his gifts. So he was answering. Painfully answering.

We’ve learned that this continual loss can calcify the soul if we aren’t careful. If we don’t take time to grieve, mourn, and lament, we will become brittle and crack.

Grief softens the soil of our souls. Shedding tears, fears, lost hopes and expectations are all soul-softening work. And as each wave unexpectedly hits while we’re in our kitchen chopping vegetables or in our car driving to work, we have a choice: We can resist its force, or we can let it wash over us. We can let ourselves feel the wave hit. We can let it move us, let it shift our feet from under us.

This is not easy. We feel out of control, tossed to-and-fro. But we can remember that the King Himself grieved. Jesus wept after He lost His dear friend Lazarus. There was not one emotion Jesus did not experience. He took on the human experience from cradle to grave.

The question we need to answer in our grief is, What direction will we face as we grieve?

Are we facing the light of the Son? Or are we looking down at our shadows, forgetting Him? The direction we face when we grieve matters.

Jesus heard of Lazarus’ death, and in His grief, He turned toward the Father. He prayed. He asked Him for help.

Overcoming with grace looks like being a woman who gives herself permission to weep, who turns toward God in her grief, and who trusts in God and what He is doing, just as Jesus did.

GRACE REFLECTION: What are you grieving today? Turn toward God in your grief. He knows pain. Suffering. Grief. He wants to comfort you in it.