Defined by Webster's Dictionary:
- Deep sadness caused especially by someone's death
- a cause of deep sadness
- trouble or annoyance
It's pretty inconvenient. In fact if you aren't aware of it's arrival it may scare the heck out of you, and everyone experiences it differently. I didn't realize until recently it had snuck up on me and I was trying to ignore it. Dumb things happen when you ignore how you feel.
As I looked over the last year and a half there was a recurring theme of things to grieve, not being who I thought I should be, and ch-ch-ch-changes. There was the fulfillment of a lifelong dream only to let it die again, a literal death, the reopening of some large wounds, homeschooling, driver's ed and driving with my teenager, several injuries prevented me from exercising, at the end of the year several more deaths and one huge bomb dropped over Christmas. Truth be told it was more than my heart could bear. It would be more than a lot of people can bear, and that's the point of this blog today.
There are going to be times in life where life itself is more than we can bear. So what.
Well if you are a Christian somebody might say something cliche like, "You know God never gives us more than we can bear." However, I completely disagree with that. In fact at a recent leadership conference speaker Jean Millikan agreed that God often gives us more than we can bear, but NEVER more than HE can bear. That statement made me mad as a hornet at first. Thanks a lot God that's super nice of you to give us more than we can handle! Then a verse came running into my mind,
"My grace is sufficient for you, my power is made perfect in your weakness." 2nd Corinthians 12:9.
Here's one way to interpret that during a season of grief: Change is our constant companion whether it is good or bad, sudden or expected. Change isn't simple and takes it's toll. If we try to bear the pressure of the ever-changing nature of our grief alone, eventually it will overcome us. It's when we remember who is truly in charge of things that relief begins. It is in the realization that while we may FEEL out of control in our daily lives God is in full control, and has actually given us control over some pretty big things. For example we have authority over the enemy. That is kind of huge. We have authority over the management of our own minds and bodies. We are privileged to have authority over our children and we have authority over temptations all because of the power of Christ in us. That's kind of awesome....He's awesome.
God allows us to endure seasons of hardship to come out of them closer to Him. It's a lot easier to focus on clinging to God when times are difficult and not so much when the road is smooth and simple. That's just my own experience. Our job during these seasons of grief is to cling to Him with all we are and live daily in the authority we have through Christ living in us. This is what draws us into seasons of victory in God's timing.
Perhaps grief arrived when the famous first couple got booted out of the garden. I'm sure that God himself grieved that humanity chose to question His motives, at the suggestion of a liar. He is only motivated in love. He loves us, and He is with us even in our grief. He will never leave us, and He will NEVER forsake us. Never.
The good news is that grief may be time consuming to work through, but with Jesus' truth over it, it eventually fades.
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