“Good Grief” [A Guest Blog]

Our guest blog is from a client-friend who has endured intense loss over the last year. This is her testimony as she learns to trust and re-experience faith.

My thesaurus indicates that the word grief can be replaced with sorrow, heartache, and misery, to name an unhappy few. In the last year any one of these words could have been used to describe me. It all started with the death of my loveable but dysfunctional brother. In turn this contributed to the rupture of my marriage. For the first six months I was in a state of shock and disbelief. I cried just driving on to my yard. I couldn’t sleep. Despite having been in Christian ministry for years I started to doubt God’s existence. At the nadir point I found myself sitting on my living room floor sobbing and saying, “God I don’t even know if you are real but you are all I have.”

Foolishly, people sometimes think we need to have faith to have our prayers answered. I am happy to report that even when we are faithless, God is faithful. Slowly, gently, God is restoring my soul. He has used nature, the love of family and friends, His word, and occasionally an overwhelming sense of His presence. At times it has almost felt miraculous.

Despite my renewed hope I still have moments of intense sorrow. Just the other morning I awoke alone at 5:00 a.m. and instantly my body was racked with pain and I felt as though my grief would crush me. My mind was screaming out, “How can this be!”

Thankfully I have learned that the intense emotion does dissipate. Instead of resisting it, I acknowledge the loss and let my body release the suffering through tears. Once the emotion is spent my spirit reminds me, “I am not alone, God is real and He is enough.”