Is there any ultimate benefit from Loss?

Photo by Jonatán Becerra on Unsplash

Even in the context of the losses you’ve experienced this year, and I’m aware of several people who have had the worst of years, I wonder if there is a redemptive quality in your processing of your darkest days.

My wondering comes from my own reflections. Having suffered my first life-changing loss fifteen years ago, it completely transformed my life and my outlook. Certainly, as I look back, that breaking of me was ultimately, even for that season, the making of me.

I had a sense of it even back then. It was all I could hold to; the very essence of my hope that my life would not end in loss — that such pain would birth the beginning of something new. I could not let go of such a hope.

Since then, whenever I’ve experienced loss, I’ve had that immediate sense that I had to hold on; that hope had called to me and that I would strain to stay in hearing distance of that thing that pulls me all the way through my living hell.

None of us ever ask for our lives to change irrevocably. And when such change does sweep in like a thief in the night, we cannot bargain God enough to want life back the way it was.

There is some music that communicates the grief of loss far better than words. Such music communicates the emotional peril we experience — the welling, indwelling, overflowing, riotous infinity of emotions.

And we’re left there, thinking what are we to do now? Life grasps our attention in loss and through grief it grips our composure, proving there is an end to that pretence of strength we imagined we had.

I wonder, and this is just a thought, for I might be wrong or only partially right, if the broader gain from loss is the wider perspective we glean in knowing love’s companion is something that will ruin us.

And yet when such ruin rains over us, we’re deepened in our capacity to feel, to know, to love, to experience the fullness of life.

Loss is the grand and calamitous invitation for the affected to enter the gravitas of life. It’s the reality that someone, somewhere has always experienced.

God reminds us of the power in love that we take for granted until we lose that love.

Perhaps the ultimate benefit of experiencing loss is that, in the months stuck there, and through the years as we reflect, an inescapable portion of the deepest reality is given to you.

Not that we glory in our sorrow. It’s more the fact that we cannot run from it. Like in Psalm 139, there is no place we can run from God. In loss, we learn we cannot outrun God. We learn that in life we’re bounded. We learn the lack of value in frivolity. Loss wakes us up and causes us to grow up.

There are a myriad of potential ultimate benefits in the experience of deepest loss. The most important of which, I say, is the hope that both gets our attention and ultimately gets us through.