Could grief and situational depression be blessed gifts?

Absurd thoughts sometimes work in absurd situations, and if there’s an absurd situation from life’s viewpoint it’s the situational depression in grief.  But because grief happens, and because it is a situational depression that causes us to dig deepest for resources we never thought we had, grief is an unenviable but inevitable opportunity to become stronger.

This is not to say that we ‘fix’ grief through some egregious prosperity gospel.  We can’t and don’t fix grief.  That’s exactly the point.  It’s a central biblical principle that what breaks us makes us.

Yes, you read that right.  What breaks us makes us.  Look around at every single hero and redemption story, and indeed the story of the Cross.  Victory comes out of the jaws of defeat.

But how does this operate when the conquest of darkness hangs over your very life?

Just like the fact that grief breaks us, we must always hold onto that faint hope that it will all be worth it in the end.  This is centrally about what we tell ourselves—by faith.

What the psychologists call cognitive behaviour therapy is actually a tool of faith.  We simply loan the best-case-future-reality and believe upon it in the present.  I mean, what have we got to lose?  On the contrary, grief’s situation makes us desperate to gain anything.

No matter how bad things get, if we hold onto the hope that we WILL make it through, even though we WILL be broken many times, we find a way to be realistically stoic in the heat of the battles of grief.

To do exactly what I’ve mentioned above, it’ll mean being humble enough to draw on wise support.

It’ll mean being prepared in advance for many heartbreaking hardships.  Bearing such a struggle takes massive humility, so if you’re doing it, going without in every single way, you’re doing it and you ought to be proud of yourself.

It’ll mean risking your belief in the good coming.  What I mean by that is there will be times when you’ll feel foolish for trusting that good can come from the very worst of situations.  Where we’re most tested in grief is in the longevity of it—it lasts and lasts and lasts.  It threatens our hope and pushes us to the brink of despair.  But believing in the good coming tends to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

It’s important in grief and situational depression to reset our expectations.

Our hope needs to be reset in the reality of a new normal.  That old normal is gone, and that’s the hardest thing to come to terms with.  Even as we arrive momentarily in that cherished hope of that grief stage of acceptance, we enjoy that reality trying not to insist that we’ve landed there.  Grief is a convoluted and very long journey.

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I started by talking about the absurd.  What is absurd is the thought that grief and situational depression could be a blessed gift.  But things in the economy of the Kingdom of heaven tend to turn worlds upside down.

Consider that the very thing that threatens our identity actually deepens us in our identity.

But to be deepened is not an overnight process, and it relies upon a humble and consistent trust that gradually emerges over time.

Bargaining, while it’s understandable, proves ultimately to be a waste of time, and though anger is also understandable, it tends to exhaust us.  Grief and situational depression are the long game.

The hardest thing about grief and situational depression is that they feel so final.  The paradox is it’s terrifying to let go of the old self, but in letting go of it, what comes is a better, deeper, more compassionate version.  This is a blessed gift; not in the process of grief and situational depression, but afterward.

Be gentle and patient with yourself because ‘afterwards’ takes longer than we’d like it to, but afterwards is also inevitable.

Here is an assurance of the hope expounded here.  I know so many people who have practiced this craft of grief, and they all attest to the truth that what breaks us makes us—if we journey by faith.