Healing

"Grief" was the topic for the sermon in church this past Sunday. The idea was to stop talking about grief and instead allow yourself to feel it--the deep gut wrenching, can't breathe feeling of being pushed down under water kind of grief. The grief one feels from a loss--divorce, death, relocation of loved ones. I have felt this kind of weight many times from the loss of my dad and my husband, and from moving away from homes where I had felt safe and loved.

Sunday, the word "grief" held a different meaning for me and what it means in my life now--at this moment. I'm holding tight to this feeling because, as I have learned time and time again, you never know what tomorrow or the next hour or the next minute holds. I don't mean to sound pessimistic either. Rather I suppose I want to convey to people--especially those grieving a loss--that it does get better and it does get a bit easier and it does get happy again. These are concepts I desperately hoped for when I was feeling loss the hardest.

I think when we are hurting so deeply, there are times we rush to get through the pain. We try so hard to "get over it". In the end we find ourselves in situations where we haven't fully recovered and we haven't fully learned what our loss is meant to teach us. We read or reject self-help books from well-meaning friends and family. We shut out God in some instances--in my case I told my pastor that there was no God, and that the Bible was just a really nice story that someone wrote. Pain and grief turn us in many directions. For me, I see now how God never left me for an instant. I left him, but He was there every step of the way--never failing me. Sometimes we even find ourselves turning to the wrong people--thinking that this person is the one to fill the void--for whatever reason.

A counselor once told me to be careful of distractions during the grief period, because they keep you from working through the loss. I had so many distractions after my husband died--some I had to deal with, like resolving and closing our business; as it turns out another type of loss and another form of grief. A lot of the distractions I brought on myself, like allowing people into my life that were hurtful to me and my children. We feel this need to be whole again and that is just something that is going to take time.

In August of this past year, I took my daughters to the beach. A place I had gone before to heal and a place I turned to again for peace. Standing there listening to the waves and hearing their healing rhythms and feeling the strength of one of God's most powerful creations, I felt whole again. I knew I had healed. I knew that my children would always love their father, but that they were healed. I felt God's embrace in the same way I would have felt my Dad hold onto me and tell me it would all be okay.

In church Sunday, as I listened to the sermon on "grief", I looked around and noticed another young family who had lost their husband and father a couple of years before we lost my husband. The young mother sat with her two young children, but next to them was the man who came into their lives to make the healing complete. They had come full circle in their grief. I also looked down the row at my family--my two daughters. Three years ago we sat in church enveloped in our grief as my late husband battled cancer. I never expected to be sitting there three years later feeling that we were healed--feeling God's complete love for us. I am so grateful