Why Loss Is Fundamental to Life and Growth

LOSS makes the whole of our lives meaningful, but only after we have successfully traversed all the way out of our grief. Such a thing as loss and grief are hardly more paradoxical. Here is a list of statements for pondering, hope and encouragement:

Loss takes us away from this world where finally God can get a look in. It took so much for God to finally entreat our attention. Now he has it, we are his, holus bolus.

Loss increases our growth by decreasing our joy. Growth comes when times are toughest. It is the solemn consolation — a divine compensation — for what we have been forced to go through.

Loss grants us life beyond love, which is life’s true appreciation of love. We cheapened love so much before we experienced the essential grief of loss. Now our truer appreciation for love has been morphed into a deepened sense for the power resplendent in love. Loss makes us better lovers.

Loss helps us grow up. If we never lose love, we never actually live. If we only gain in life we only ever think of ourselves. When I first suffered, as a thirty-six-year-old, was the first time I genuinely thought of all the suffering in the world. The eyes of my heart were opened to see it.

Loss is so profound that the grief lasts and lasts and lasts. However would we learn otherwise other than to greet the same horrors day after day after day? We humans are characteristically slow learners. We need deep lessons, hard lessons; the same deep, hard lessons day after day to learn.

Loss teaches the rudiments of life; that love means so much it costs grief. How could God counteract the truth of such a wonder of love if not to balance it with something equally profound: loss?

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Loss is a horror of living proportions; a death that has come to life in a dirge of technicolour. It has come as a way of communicating just how much the loss of love means. It rents us broken and vanquished of soul and spirit. It takes us deeper than we have ever been before, into the realms of darkness where only the light of the Lord may shine through into a hope for tomorrow — whenever tomorrow will finally come.

Loss helps us to grow up. It helps us to value reality. It helps us not fear reality. It makes us question what is important and relevant in life. Loss brings us through death into new life.

© 2015 Steve Wickham.