Grieving With Hope Sample

Grief Explained

Simply stated, grief is a sadness we feel when we experience loss. It’s an unwanted affliction, an intense anguish, and an extraordinary sorrow we endure when our longings go unfulfilled. 

Because grief is a human experience, no one is immune. It doesn’t respect people and can strike at any time. It’s not something any of us want to experience, but we’ll all have to endure it at some point in our lives. We experience grief when someone we love dies, when our dream doesn’t materialize, and when we move from one season to the next in our lives. And we often grieve when we look back on what could have been. 

Experiences we never got to have
People we didn’t get to love
Dreams we failed to accomplish

Nobody wants to grieve, but everybody has to. That is, if we want to feel better and begin to experience life again. If we don’t, we’ll be stuck in the same day for the rest of our lives, hoping and praying that what we lost will somehow be reversed. 

The shortest verse in the entire Bible is found in John 11:35, and it simply says, “Jesus wept.” It comes after Jesus was told that his dear friend, Lazarus, died. Was He grieving the loss of his friend? Was He being empathetic toward Mary and Martha, Lazarus’ sisters? We’ll never fully understand the entire context, but we can be assured that our Lord was compassionate and experienced sadness while He walked the earth. This two-word verse seems to give us permission to grieve. After all, our Lord and Savior did, and He knew the outcome of the story. 

Over the next four days of this Plan, we’ll learn how to process our grief in a healthy way from the different kinds of losses we’ll experience on earth. As we process, we’ll begin to see ourselves healing from the inside out.