The Sacredness of Grief

I recently shared my story at a grief group in rural Missouri. Six years have gone by since I last held my boy on this earth and yet I can’t even get one word out of my mouth before the tears come. 

I listened to the stories of everyone else in the room first. Some grief is fresh, a women suddenly widowed, a lost child. Some grief has been simmering for years, lost parents, several lost loved ones. Everyone in that room had a personal story to share. A pain unique and raw and real. 

I remember the first time we walked into our Grief Share group after Mason died. It had only been a few months and I was still in the weary mode of not wanting to leave the house. Everywhere I went I was the target of those looks of sorrow. (Sometimes pity.) People constantly asking me how I was doing. (Um, how do you think?) I was continually met with someone else trying to process the shock of Mason’s sudden death and honestly, I had my own grief to deal with. And my children’s grief. While many aspects of it made me feel less alone and I certainly appreciated that people cared about us and my boy so deeply, I just didn’t have the energy for yet another person’s need to process while cornered in the dried fruit aisle at Trader Joe’s. 

Leaving the house was exhausting. Staying at home was exhausting. 

Living was exhausting. 

Getting out of bed each day and facing the same routine without all my children was impossible. Some of those days are a blur. Yet God’s hand is so clearly seen in the rearview mirror of life. He sustained us. He provided. Meals showed up. Groceries arrived when I couldn’t bring myself to make it to the store. Play dates for my kids. Moments of grace and laughter and acres of rooms to grieve and process pain and miss Mason. 

Grief Share was one of those places I could walk in and not have everyone rush to look at me with sad puppy eyes, insisting on hugging me. Or patting my arm. Everyone else was suffocating under the weight of their own grief. We were all in this together. 

Originally I thought this would be such a depressing place. Wait, everyone here buried someone they love? And now we are all going to sit and cry about it together? Sounds awful. 

But the truth is, life was already awful. And no amount of denying it was going to make it go away. Maybe there were some tools there to equip me. Maybe sitting with my grief with someone else sitting with their grief is exactly what God calls us to do when we have these heavy burdens to carry. No one there was trying to give me Bible verses to brush away the pain. We all just sat there and acknowledged how immensely difficult it was simply continuing to breathe. And there was no judgement. Just acceptance and passing the Kleenex box.

Grieving is a long process. Sometimes it’s a lifelong process. It lasts longer than those couple weeks after a funeral. And it stretches beyond that dreaded year anniversary. It lasts way longer than those around the griever ever anticipate.  

I just don’t think we do the world any favors when we try to rush the process. It appears to me that we have a hard time sitting with the hard. I mean, who wants the tension of unresolved pain? Our Christian culture often wants to fix it. Make sure someone hurting has the right arsenal of scripture so their faith doesn’t waver and they don’t get too sad or the pain doesn’t make anyone else too uncomfortable. We forget that the severity and longevity of suffering doesn’t erase the promises of hope. 

In fact, if we let it, it will even amplify it.

The reality of pain doesn’t threaten the truth that God is good. On the contrary, it’s in those dark places that the power of God is so tangible. So overwhelmingly powerful. 

When God came down to meet his chosen people, his presence was found in the thick darkness surrounding the mountain. “Moses drew near to the thick darkness where God was.” (Ex 20:21)

And how did he come out? “The skin of his face shone because he had been talking with God.” (Ex 34:29)

He had gone into the great darkness where God was and he came out glowing. 

It’s significant, the ability to radiate light when there is no earthly source of it. 

Grief. Pain. Suffering. They are all found under a cloud of thick darkness on a lonely mountain. Where very little earthly light is found. And in these places of lonely darkness, of deep pain, God’s presence is waiting in ways we won’t experience in the bright sunlight of happier times. The darkest pits contain the deepest promises of God’s light. From these places of suffering, we too have the opportunity to come out glowing. We can radiate hope. 

I certainly wouldn’t willingly walk into thick clouds of darkness on a desert mountain. Sounds unknown and incredibly scary. I also would never chose to walk the path of grief. Of burying my child and watching the years stretch on endlessly without him. But never was the presence of God felt so strongly in my life than when thick darkness threatened me from every side. 

And while I sat with the grieving in a small town in Missouri, I was reminded of the sacredness of grief. That better is it to go to a house of mourning than a house of feasting. (Ecc 7:2) There is great clarity in such a place. 

Earthly rejoicing is just that, celebrating blessings on this earth. Which are beautiful, yet fleeting. 

But earthly mourning is a looking glass to a better country. A beautiful peephole into a world beyond all the pain. A promise of hope… a forever kind of hope. That has no more tears and no more endings. No more darkness and no more goodbyes.

Grief keeps me searching for the presence of God. Grief keeps me clinging to hope.

Grief keeps me longing for home.