When what comes is grief we cannot outrun

I often have a problem. I wish to write but I find I always have the same kind of message. I recall a fellow local blogger reflecting that I write on the same things most of the time. It’s my message.

And here it is here again.

So many people. So many people. But so few in the context of the world. So many people are living through a grief that has destroyed a life as either they knew it, or a vision for life that never was or of a life that has come to be.

There’s a grief we can’t outrun.
God has our attention when the only way is up.

Whether it is cancer that has wrought destruction of a life that was, the death of a loved one, the impact of burnout, the long-cherished dream smashed into smithereens, or an irreconciled mental health challenge. It is my belief that it comes to each of our lives sooner or later. But some, indeed many, lives seem spared. This is not the case.

Somehow in dodging a bullet
they do not dodge the bullet.

The life-rending situation is meant to stop us in our tracks. Whatever it is, it is loss. And whatever loss we suffer — whatever variety of the end of a relationship — we have two ways to respond. Through denial or through derailment.

Blessed is the one who is so poor in spirit
that they simply must reach up high to God!

The fact of grief is this: it stops us dead in our tracks and completely derails the life that was.

There is no way around it. Ours is a life interrupted, a day where that one life we had ended.

What we find about this situation that has come into our lives is that it cannot be outrun. We cannot negotiate our way out of it. We cannot manipulate the reality one iota. We can but cooperate with the forces that be.

When there’s a grief we can’t outrun,
God has our attention. The only way is up.

A slight reframing helps. When we’re chastened by a grief we cannot escape from, finally God has us in the position where we might reach out for help, and in being helped, come to connect such a reliance on God, through surrender, with spiritual growth.

Out of the abyss of grief comes, finally, the open doorway to God’s Presence. Such a suffering that becomes us leaves us without an option. It crushes our self-sufficiency, and it was the best thing ever. But only from retrospect. Only from years down the track.

What the moments hold for us is something too tragic to comprehend. It will cost us dearly. All those future moments where joy, hope and peace are but a mirage. And how on earth are we to endure?

We just do. We get through. If we don’t end it. And we cannot afford to. Think of those ones left beyond when we vanish in despair.

A grief that cannot be outrun feels like it should end our life. But we don’t reckon upon the many fragments of hope God is sowing in simply by holding faith in divinity’s goodness. We must hold on, and that hope, by holding on, we call faith.

Faith is the only option. Hold on. It can only get better. It will get better!

Photo by Eunice Lituañas on Unsplash