Recovering from loss is like finding our way home from hell

Life is a search for home, somehow knowing, tantalisingly so, that home is still one horizon away.

Whether it is the right school, or area to live, or company to work for, or career to sow into, or church to call home, we all strive for this ideal of completeness, forever unable to find enduring homeostasis.

We constantly search for home, and even when we find it in a facet of our lives, there are other facets we’re not home in, and those facets we are home in don’t stay that way forever.

And, even though life is about reconciling times and situations where we don’t feel home, there is an entirely different reality in the circumstance of loss. We feel so far from home as to be in the most hellish of places.

From such a desolate place we feel that life itself has ended and we’ve been placed in an interminable nightmare.

This leaves us frustrated at the very least and certainly bewildered, depressed and despairing. I think for a moment about two times in my life when I was farthest from home, cast deep into the caverns of loss, but where both times I found home ultimately WITHIN that foreign place. I learned that I couldn’t escape the situation of my circumstance, but that I could enter into something far deeper still.

That ‘far deeper still’ was the home I’d always searched for.

In a yesteryear day, when perhaps a previous version of ourselves had imploded, we were left with a brand-new life overnight that we really didn’t want. We called it loss. It was a barren wasteland of pain and self-pity initially.

It was a change brought about against our will—it took us far from the comfy home we’d made for ourselves. Our lives during such a season resembled Job’s life more than anything we’d ever experienced.

We may have lost a child or access to our children. We may have lost our home, or we had to relocate, or job or career or social standing, or perhaps we’d lost our partner or a parent or sibling. Though perhaps we didn’t have sores, we may have developed clinical depression, had anxiety attacks, and suffered suicidal ideations.

Yet, in losing everything that had come to mean “home” we paradoxically may have eventually found the home we’d forever searched for but hadn’t been desperate enough until then to find.

You see, we finally found God through being desperate enough to “accept” him in the only way we can accept God—to actually follow the disciplines of God, because there is no other way.

It led us to a place where home had to be found in the hellish place of loss. Broken by that circumstance, we had just one choice left. God, it seems, made GOD the only viable option.

We found home from the strangest, most foreign place we’d ever encountered. That’s where home is found. We cannot get home from a comfortable place. We only find home when we strive to get there from far away.

The great lesson in finding home from a place resembling hell is it teaches us that it’s possible. When we find ourselves there again, later in life, we panic less, we have more faith, we recognise that adversity doesn’t equal disaster, and we know we can trust the faithfulness of God.

This is why loss is good. It teaches us an operating system for life that does not fail. Grief teaches us as it leads us—inevitably into the Promised Land of the Kingdom that is God’s Presence as we find our way out of the veritable hell we have endured.