The Eternal Disconnect In Loss and Its Connect to Healing

POSSIBLY the saddest of all articles I’ll ever write, this one is steeped also in a joy that all I want to do is describe. I write these words through tear-stained eyes lubricated with precious saline, chest heaving for one’s still recent loss, but able to see that through such a depth of eternity’s disconnect in loss, there is great joy for the hope set before me. I will see my son again.

Yet, my healing is not contingent on something I cannot experience now.

I am healed even as I connect with my loss.

My healing is set upon the very connection with my loss, which is the very eternal disconnection any of us who have lost a loved one know fully about. These two go magnificently together: a loss that cannot ever be redeemed and a healing that takes place as we take that grief into the heart of God.

The two are connected. And everyone needs to know about it. Loss is not the end. It is the beginning in terms of life truly having its correct bearing.

We are missing out on life until we have lived and loved and lost.

Only having lost have we come to know what it is like to go back to nothing.

To go back to nothing is to go back into the Godhead and to gain sense for oneness; for life without idols.

I never feel closer to God nowadays than going there by a very special ritual; to lament the true and eternal sadness that lingers wistfully in my soul for the loss of my second son. My Nathanael, you have given me so very much, and you continue to. And God, you make it possible.

As I pour out my heart, loneliness away from him who will not return to me combines with the safe and soul-soothing Presence of God; sorrow for what he and we went through intermingles with a soul-cleansing I’ve only ever known in my deepest pain.

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We miss out on life until we have lived and loved and lost. The person who strides into the arena of life — with no thought to the pain of loss other than to go into it with God — reaps a rich reward. They do not go into the pain intrepidly, but deliberately, with their God. And God shows them something incredible.

Into the sadness we take the divine. Actually we go there with the Spirit who is already there. The harder, more gut-wrenching our pain, the more we ought to sense the healing touch of God. But we can only experience such a thing if we have lost our life in order to gain it. We might only understand that as a concept if we’ve been through it.

It’s possible that the deeper the pain of loss, the higher the heights of experience of God’s healing Presence.

The eternal disconnect in loss connects us with healing through God’s felt Presence.

Sit there and sob your tears knowing God feels with you; healing is yours, incoming.

© 2015 Steve Wickham.