From Pain 2 Purpose: Begin to Process Loss and Forge AheadSample

The Faces of Grief

If you have just suffered a major loss, you have probably begun the emotional roller coaster ride of feeling your own grief. Your grief—which descends on you as overwhelming feelings of loss—can reveal itself through several faces that can leave you suffering in any number of ways. Here are a few.

Suffering a major loss can leave you with a broken heart.

When you say you are heartbroken, you may be using a metaphor, but what you are experiencing is real suffering and grief. Heartbreak over a major loss causes excruciating pain. Overwhelming grief can make it hard to breathe. It can leave you physically and emotionally exhausted.

Suffering a major loss can leave you struggling spiritually with a lot of unanswered questions.

Major losses usually make no sense—the loss of a home caused by fire, natural disasters, the divorce between two people who once loved each other, the death of a loved one, or a global tragedy like the coronavirus pandemic of 2020 that brought financial disaster, uncertainty, and loss to so many. It all seems so cruel, wrong, and unfair. You may even question where God is during all this. That’s a natural response. Tragic losses tend to cause fear and shake one’s faith.

Suffering a major loss can leave you feeling lost, alone, and incomplete.

Grieving a deep loss can also shake you at the very core of your being. Suffering a loss, especially the loss of a loved one, can make you feel that a part of you has been torn away. It can seem like your loss has left a hole in your heart. You may even feel a loss of identity, a sense of incompleteness, and the feeling that you are no longer a whole person. Emotionally disconnected, you may feel adrift, without an emotional anchor.

Suffering a major loss can leave you deprived of emotional peace of mind.

Grieving can cause emotional distress. Disheartened, you may feel an inward discontentment and frustration. You may find it difficult to rest or sleep. The gnawing ache in your soul can sap the joy and peace out of life.

Suffering a major loss can leave you with a clouded sense of purpose.

Grief-stricken, heartbroken, and disheartened, it’s hard to imagine how to move forward in life after a major loss. Life may seem colorless. You may feel enveloped in an atmosphere of gloom, and it’s hard to see past it. Tomorrow may show up, but it doesn’t feel much like it offers you a meaningful future.

Rationally, you may know you must somehow move forward. Yet emotionally, the fog you’re in may feel too overwhelming to try. If only you could reverse time and avoid the need to grieve. But you can’t.

When our son Austin died, what we personally needed as a family were the same things most people who are suffering a major loss need in order to move forward in life. Those common needs are healing of a broken heart, spiritual strength, a renewed sense of wholeness, emotional peace of mind, and a renewed sense of purpose. While all of that is eventually possible, none of us has been prepared in advance to obtain it. In fact, many get bogged down in their grief and find it very difficult to move forward.

Take the next few moments to stop and give yourself the time and emotional space to reflect on this question: What do you most need in order to move forward in life? Do you need more healing for your broken heart? A renewed sense of wholeness? More peace? A renewed sense of purpose? Or something else? Consider the promise of Jeremiah 29:11 then write your reflections and prayer to Jesus.