A grief that abides as fellowship in loneliness

I’m hoping this helps with hope for those who are yet still oppressed by a grief that abides. This is about a grief that abides beyond the pain, as a fellowship that gives us a sense of spiritual companionship in our loneliness.

Do you know when I feel most lonely these days? It’s when I’m misunderstood, underappreciated, jaded, exhausted, taken for granted, and betrayed. Less than fighting back against these things, as if resisting them or the people involved would help, I’m more apt to give up temporarily.

I’m prone to brief periods of cataclysmic discouragement, especially when people want yet more out of me, when I’m already giving the proverbial 110 percent, or when people cast me off into the nether land of a category that suits them, or when I’m just exhausted, which tends to happen usually once a month.

But my experiences of grief have given me something of a fallback. There is something about having been thrown into the deepest grief that abides well into loneliness. It’s like it’s only in loneliness that a spiritual gift for bearing such loneliness becomes apparent.

How do I explain this?

In having learned an acceptance for things one cannot change, and we only learn that when we’re in positions of helplessness for days and weeks and months at a time — (see the value in it?) — whenever we feel this again, that capacity to bear what seems hopeless comes into its own again.

Grief suffered all the way through, certainly to the point where we learn, or accept finally, that we cannot control some things in life, helps us abide the grief of a bout of loneliness.

The loneliness in view is the apparent disconnection we feel from the world that seems not to understand or appreciate us, or the world that rejects us. In those terms, this loneliness takes us straight back to a fellowship we could only enjoy with God when God was all we had.

When all else is stripped away, and there is nothing that connects us with this world, where we really feel like a foreigner in a very strange and desolate land, we have access to a fellowship with God that is only available when we feel this way.

There is a great truth that we cannot deny. Grief has bestowed on us the truly great gift that we’re no longer crushed by this world or this life, because our trust is in something and Someone far greater.

This is I’m sure why the apostle Paul could say, “When I am weak, then I am strong.” For me, the spiritual progress of “accepting a hardship as a pathway to peace” is most definitely the spiritual perfection of Christ. This is not only possible, it’s miraculous, and the essence of true salvation experience.

The endgame of grief is transformation to the ends of a fellowship felt most in loneliness.

Photo by Edu Grande on Unsplash