How God's Love Changes Us: Part 3 - Overcoming Grief, Achieving ReconciliationSample

Because grief requires us to acknowledge and surrender to our throbbing, it is easy to have contempt for our pain and resist grieving it. We all have deep caves of sadness within our hearts, but few of us choose to take the courageous expeditions into ourselves to face and address these shadowy caverns in redemptive ways. It is easier to play it safe, to escape or get addicted, or get furious and entitled.

But the Father invites us into a realm of lament and joy as the redemptive response to suffering. It is within the abyss of heartache that we find the hope of resurrection, and avoiding pain denies us the very liberation we so desperately desire.

Facing such heartache never comes easy. I imagine this process much like Jacob wrestling with God in Genesis 32:24. We wrestle with grief until we are exhausted, and it marks us. We never truly get over it; we learn to go through life with a forever ache. Grief will come to us all. We don’t choose grief; it chooses us.

We must choose what we do with grief when it inevitably arrives. Grief always exposes who we are. It’s a magnifying glass that enlarges our greatest failings, our fullest glory, and who we are meant to be. We must surrender, as the father did, to what makes us most human: this capacity to touch, smell, see, taste, and hear the depth of loss when we have put our love on the line and wound up empty handed and bewildered.

Are you aware of what glory will come when you enter the suffering of your story? Write down a description of it or create a piece of art that depicts what you hope to find.