The Anguish of Love Lost In Grief

TEARS are the attempt at reconciling such a depth of emotion that cannot ever be understood. When that one is lost – that father with a young son, the father who was needed for some decades to come, the father whose life is cut way too short, so suddenly – it leaves us completely bereft of viable response. What can be done? What can possibly be done.

Nothing.

Nothing can be done in the midst of anguish; love lost, to the point of everything, in grief.

Life is a tragedy waiting to happen and we can very well wonder what is going on. We can wonder what point there is. We can wonder what God is doing. Why is life so hard, so enticingly perplexing, so bitterly ingratiating?

We have no have answer for the life ripped right away – except the cold comfort of glory. I say cold comfort because it is good for the one we lost to be away with the Lord – HOME – but, as we remain in the body, it is grief we are left with.

The anguish of love lost in grief is unparalleled as a flipside for all the best things enshrined in love.

It is always children that bring me to tears out of loss – a parent gone prematurely, and why? We can well ask. Those innocent children. They grow up without a dad; the one who loves them like no other person possibly can. And what about what he misses out on? It is unfair.

But there is a point in grief.

Grief is the requiem of love gone wrong, for all love that is lost is somehow wrong to our human sense for things. Anguish is passion taken all the way to its extremities of pushing the human will to survive. Anguish strains every emotional sinew to breaking point.

But anguish is just the thing that can bring us into the definitive Presence of the living God. Only as we are touched with the death of Jesus can we begin to see his life. And we see that in grief. As loss occurs to us and we grieve there is an untenable anguish that catapults us to God; the fool resists what should never be resisted.

The only way death can possibly be understood is through the eyes of God.

As anguish is revealed in the form of loss, and the blackened clouds of grief roll in, there is an open door to God; to receive a healing dose of his Spirit that will eventually help us understand – why this, why now.

© 2014 S. J. Wickham.