Living in grief is like living in two worlds at the same time. Eternity is awakened in us even as we walk this physical life where others have absolutely no idea what is going on deep down inside us.
The deepest grief is a place where the only one you’ll find is God. Nobody else has any idea what you’re going through. Even if you have the cleverest therapist in the world, they don’t have a clue, and you’ll know it because they’ve got the integrity to tell you:
Statements like, “I’ve got no idea what you’re going through,” and “I can’t imagine what this pain is like for you” give you the real sense that you are SEEN.
It’s not necessary that a person steps into your shoes in the deepest pain of your grief. But what is heavenly healing is when the person knows they’re on sacred ground around you.
That’s when you know they’ve got you,
and that’s when you know they get it.
The moments we experienced when we first learned that Nathanael had died were beyond this world. For those minutes and hours we slipped into eternity with him. Not there with him like we’d always yearned, but into another world entirely where sounds and sights in the here and now passed away for a time, and God’s sweet presence nurtured the ground we walked upon. Even when we had nothing and no tools to grasp what was occurring.
How do we communicate what it’s like to be swallowed for whole moments and seasons in another time continuum altogether? I don’t know, but I feel captivated in trying to find words to express all of it!
Living in two worlds just about does our heads in.
Talk about being betwixt and between!
What answer do we have for a loss or series of losses
that throws us headlong into the hell of our time?
Consigned to the deathly lurch of satisfying our contemporaries and holding the thin threads of our former lives, we skate between realities never knowing if we’ve even got what it takes for the present moment let alone one hour into the future.
Anxiety upon dread upon the living panic
of “I cannot do this.” Friend, you are seen!
There are many who will read these words and seriously
ponder, “What on earth is this man on about?”
Grief changes you in a molecular way. No longer do you see as you once saw. The old life is over and there’s no turning back. The more you pine for it, the worse the terror gets. And yet you cannot help it. To go ‘back there’ is all that’s palatable.
All that appears in the present and immediate future is horror, uncertainty, all-too-much reality, the frightening concepts of time and tasks, sorrow like you previously never knew existed. Oh, what quadrupling pain!
And yet, for so many of us, GOD.
God lingered there. He was there and was waiting, knowing that tragedy was about to strike. His grace was there, always there, at the ready.
Brought to a place where two worlds merged, suddenly in grief is a never-ceasing prayer, and an eternal compensation is that you find yourself obeying God without even trying (1 Thessalonians 5:17). There are silver linings everywhere in grief, but the enemy hides them from us until we insist upon the looking, searching, scouring.
These two worlds that smash together and stay permanently fused—at least for several months, if not years—are God’s eternity merged with time itself.
The only solace is that God is there. God or a drink. God or a drug. God or some other distraction, idol, addiction, or senseless denial of the incontrovertible. How flipping useless to walk opposed to reality. Flow will have us crushed by the reality of it, and living!
Learning to live in these two worlds simultaneously is tricky; it’s designed to break us over and over again, and each time we find ourselves bundled against the rocks of our grief we somehow find, there it is once more, the GRACE that picks us up and dusts us off—to emerge into the loving arms of hope for one more day.
... one more day.
The secret to living in grace is one day at a time.
Simple as that.
We are kept between these worlds, straddling both, never able to escape either, for a good and godly reason. That is to learn a new way of existing, in the eternal reaches of this life now.
Seriously, though we cannot have back what we had, what has come is eternally better. But it takes time to see it and embrace it. The paradox is, we must allow our grief its time of human wrestling, the anger, the bargaining, the depression, the acceptance, the denial, as a soup or washing machine, thrown about chaotically for a time indeterminant.
But we do emerge. We are deepened.
Somehow, the worst for the best.
I just hope this helps in some small way.
