Ever since I first grieved, I’ve called myself a ‘student of grief’.
This is because grief schools us in things we cannot ever fully know.
We grieve because we love, and with both grief and love we do not see either fully in this life. With both there is an eternal hope that we’ll see all.
Only with God, as far as I know, do we grieve with hope.
That has been my experience. To know, perhaps without always experiencing it, that a future hope will materialise sometime in the future.
The essence of faith is belief that a reality that has not yet come true will ultimately come to pass. That a good will come of it.
Hebrews 11:1-2 puts it this way: “Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see. This is what the ancients were commended for.”
One way to keep the faith in grief is to take the posture of a student — becoming teachable, humble, accepting of the thing we cannot change, the thing we have no control over. An approach that commands humility.
Taking such a posture as a student is the exercise of faith.
Suffering ought to captivate us in reverence for what we do not yet know rather than cast us into the futility of bitterness and resentment.
Understandable as they are, bitterness and resentment are a dead end that lead to the death of a thousand cuts. Alcoholism or other addiction for one. A lifetime of depression is another. A hard heart is still another.
Being a student of grief is about being laid open, broken open; open to a healing that can only come spiritually.
Being a student of grief is about going the opposite way to how the world expects us to go. It’s the narrow road that few take, and it can be lonely.
We take such a road by faith with a faithful God.
Being a student of grief is casting our own common sense away for a wisdom that there is a better way — yet unattained, but believed for.
Read Hebrews 11:1 again —
Faith is confidence in what we hope for
and assurance about what we do not [yet] see.
The spiritual way is the way to be a student of grief. The spiritual way defies what seems true but ultimately isn’t. The spiritual way cuts crossgrain against the world’s ‘wisdom’.
It seems to believe in a dream,
but so many times I’ve seen God
reward faith in a hope not yet seen.
Being a student of grief requires weakness or it makes us weak; a weakness God makes strong — “For when I am weak, then I am strong” as Paul puts it in 2 Corinthians 12:10.
Being a student of grief will make you weak, but you won’t be hardened by it.
