If there’s a universal struggle that all humanity identifies with, its accepting change that cannot be controlled. Within this challenge is the fact of flow within change that makes change inevitable.
We dislike or hate the fact that certain change occurs,
and that that change is certain to occur.
Certain change occurs and it leaves us feeling disempowered and at a loss to respond. This kind of change is principally grounded in loss. It connects us directly with grief. It is inescapable. If change doesn’t involve loss, it isn’t that kind of change that really troubles us.
Then there’s the fact that certain change is certain to happen. There are times in our lives where one loss piles on top of another, on top of another, etc. But ordinarily we go along living our lives as if the deep change of loss wasn’t ever a thing — until it is! Until it strikes us where it hurts. Then we find we battle for a way out — where the only way out is through.
I don’t know any other way to deal with the certainty of certain change that we cannot control without having the faith of knowing the reality of eternity.
When we face the certainty of certain change — implicating us in heartrending loss and grief — we recognise we need something more stowed to get through this loss and grief, and to prepare for the next lot. There’s nothing more certain when loss and grief break into our lives than the fact it will happen again. Before it occurred, loss didn’t even occur to us.
It sounds bizarre, doesn’t it, that we had no idea loss would leave us feeling absolutely bereft of response. We somehow have the human capacity to empathise at two different levels, one of which is quite superficial, even though it feels authentic. The true level of empathy, however, is acknowledging the depths of pain involved in the grief within the occurrence of loss, and this connects us to an entirely different world within this world.
The grief within loss that comes with certain change takes us to a doorway that we previously hadn’t approached, or if we had there is something new and unexpected about our approach this time. There are nuances of grief in different kinds of these deep losses.
When we approach a new loss that leaves us reeling for response, we can wonder why it is we aren’t better equipped.
Is it the reality of compound loss? Does this loss represent something new? Is there something unique about losing this person or suffering this change that we haven’t experienced before? And how does this loss impact us uniquely from the aspect of our present state of mental health?
Like trauma, loss can seem to pile up, and perhaps we reach a threshold where we reach a place where there is one loss too many. It tips us over into the next level of crisis.
Again, somehow it’s our faith in something that’s other than this world that gets us through that certain kind of change that is certain to occur — that which we have no control over.
When I speak of faith and doorways, just as there is a threshold of how much we can cope with, there is also a threshold that takes us through a doorway of utter dependence on God. Because nothing else works.
When we come to the end of our own power, we begin to rely more readily on the all-sufficient wisdom and power of God. Coming to a place of surrender is coming to the wise place of acceptance; of practising an acceptance of the things we cannot control or change.
Such acceptance is the victory of life.
It has us facing all the problems of life with a completely different demeanour. No longer do we demand anything. We put all our demands aside, recognising within them their futility. And suddenly, in that split moment, peace beckons, hope unfolds, and joy is possible, again.
Acceptance will give us the unique tools of perspective that make us beautiful human beings to relate with. Within acceptance is the capacity to hold space for ourselves and for others, and we experience the blessedness of being a gift to both ourselves and to others. We therefore live in an eternal state thereafter where nothing of this world troubles us to an overcoming or overwhelming degree.
Giving up what we cannot keep,
that is, our grip on a certain safeness of life,
we gain what we cannot lose,
and that is hope birthed in another world.
Loss involving grief is the actual doorway into the life of acceptance.
Acceptance is the secret of a life that gives us power through our weakness.
When we live out of this power brought to us by our weakness, we recognise that the power through strength alone is folly, and that the only true strength is borne through weakness.
When we discover that it was in our weakness that our true strength was born, we begin to realise that nothing in this world can truly defeat us. And that’s because our hope is in the world ever over the horizon — another world entirely, and that world is eternity.
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