Real-Life Devotions by Lysa TerKeurstSýnishorn

Deep Grief

I stood at the side of a casket too small to accept. Pink roses were draped everywhere. And I watched my mom as she lay across the casket. Within that casket laid part of her heart, so quiet and so still. Her little girl was gone.

It was the type of loss that cuts a heart so viciously it forever defines you. A loss called “deep grief.”

I remember standing paralyzed at the funeral. Just days before we were doing everyday things; suddenly it all stopped. People were everywhere. Soft chatter filled in the gaps of our stunned silence. Eventually people went back to their own lives, and we carried on with ours, bound in deep grief.

I desperately longed for God to fix things. To take away my bloodshot eyes. To take away my anger toward him. To take away my guilt for being the one that lived. I felt I didn’t deserve to be happy, ever again.

This is the reality of deep grief. Even when you love God and believe in his promises, healing takes time.

It takes wading through an ocean of tears.

It takes discovering one day that the sun still shines and it’s okay to smile.

It takes prayer, and a decision to stop asking for answers and start asking for perspective.

Then one day you take off the blanket of deep grief. You fold it neatly and tuck it away. You no longer hate it or resist it. For underneath it, wondrous things have happened. Things that can only come about when Divine hope intersects with a broken world.

And finally you can see years stretching before you once again. You look up, blow a kiss, wipe a tear and find it’s still possible to dance.

By Lysa TerKeurst