In loss, nothing can separate you from God’s love

Having had an interest in grief for nearly the past 15 years, I have begun to appreciate both the enormity and the simplicity of the role of loss in our lives. I can only go on, and write on, my own experience.

Not unlike other conflicts in our lives, the relational kind I mean, or crises we have in relating with God, loss itself brings a crisis of enormous tensions, and grief is a conflict like no other.

Just like conflict in our relationships is an opportunity, the conflict in grief brings us to a precipice, and it is verily the means for coming into a conscious contact with God. If we can endure the search.

Believing that a conscious contact
with the living God is possible,
we endure in faith.

So many people believe in God for years and decades, serving diligently, and in walking the walk of faith, they have a kind of private crisis going on — in the privacy of their own heart they know they don’t know God. (Most honest Christians will resonate with this feeling. It is not an ungodly thing to need to know God more. Yet, many harbour fears privately that they do not know God.)

This is where grief comes into its own. In the opportunity of loss, which takes us in our experience fathoms down further toward an ocean floor of suffering than we never knew existed, the true knowledge of God is found. God is a Presence. He is to be related with through conscious contact. And every suffering moment is pregnant with the possibility of experiencing our Lord with us, even as we are swept over the precipice into the abyss of darkest pain.

What I talk about here is possibility,
not probability.

If we seek God,
if we knock,
if we call out in desperation,
He will answer us.

And faith it is that continues to call,
even when we do not hear an answer.

Nothing can separate us from God’s love, especially in loss, especially in grief, and in the pain of confused and overwhelming season. The confused and overwhelming season, replete with days of shattering hardship, is actually how God births true faith in us through the experience of His Presence.

To know this in our minds
is to invite this reality into our hearts
by experience, in God’s time.

Nothing can separate us from God’s love when we truly appreciate how much God loves us. And to imagine this, even in this pain that causes us to question why God would even allow it, fortifies our faith to the extent, that in humility, we rest in the acceptance that suffering in this life is a mystery.

Somehow by His Presence, as we hold on in faith, holding onto our hope each day the best we can, God does purify us for a time when our suffering will mean a world of meaning to us.

Yes, strange and ironic as that sounds,
pray for a day when what you suffer now
you can be thankful for then.

Nothing can separate us from this aspect of God’s love that holds us through cataclysmic turmoil. Yes, even in this mode of life that seems so foreign to life, God is making good of what should not be possible. Even out of these ashes rises a new hope born of compassion and kindness and gentleness of Jesus.

Somehow by His Presence,
through the gasping mouth of terror,
as we hold fast to trust,
day by day He gets through.

Even in loss, most especially in loss, we can come to know that nothing can separate us from God’s love. And perhaps you, like me, make come to find that it is loss that proves to be the way that God shows us just how much He loves us.