A hope beyond the despair of loss

“… everything around us is in the process of being taken away.” — Paul Tripp.

How do we know this? The Bible tells us that this is the way life works. Tripp goes on to say, “God and his love are all that remain as cultures and kingdoms rise and fall. Comfort is found by sinking our roots into the unseen reality of God’s ever-faithful love.”

Anyone who has studied the Bible at seminary will certainly have come across this phenomenon: that God alone remains when cultures and kingdoms and powers and authorities pass away. The trouble for us, being so buried in the minutia of life, is we often lose sight of how transient life is.

Loss is inherent to life. We’re forgiven for thinking we’re blessed in seasons we’re ‘favoured’ i.e. where there’s no loss, and cursed when experiences of loss abound. But that thinking is wrong, and it won’t stand up to the scrutiny of time. Loss will come and, when we’re ill-prepared for it, it will cast us into an oblivion of despair. The good news is, from such a place we can truly meet God. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

We can think now, while things are well,
about the meaning of loss and purpose in grief.

It is an utter paradox that only God could think up that out of loss is a hope beyond despair.

If we’re open to being taught about the nature of a life we think we know everything about, but don’t, we can begin to see that life literally starts (again) from loss; that loss is not the end, but the beginning.

Loss leads us back to God, as we see how far we’ve strayed from depending on our Lord, and our Lord alone, if God is our Lord overall.

Amid being led back, we find that we begin to let go of the dependencies of this world, because we see how faulty and futile they are. They cannot save us. They cannot help us in our time of need. As we sink our roots deeply into the One who is never overcome, we begin to found our lives on the rock that cannot be moved, instead of the shifting sands that prove unreliable and hopeless as we encounter future loss.

The best thing about loss
is it’s an equipping for future loss.

There is nothing like a present grief
to give us hope for a preparation for future loss.

All because all of life is now framed in perspective.
The world and everything in it is passing away.

But God, and who God is, remains forever.
And so do we!

Now is the time to dig deep, to learn how to suffer with support, to surrender into the arms of God and others who can hold us, and to avoid wandering off into distractions that limit and damage our possibilities for growth at such a tenuous time.

This hope beyond the despair of loss is ever real, ever reliable, ever pertinent, and ever good path.

Finally, we may be able to see that loss was actually what brought us to true strength, which is power out of the very nuances of weakness we learned to hold and contain and bear.

The hope of the world is a God who,
through loss,
can take us to an impenetrable faith.

When we neither resent nor deny our grief,
we land in a third place of growth through loss.

** Quotes from Paul David Tripp, Instruments in the Redeemer’s Hands: People in Need of Change Helping People in Need of Change. CCEF, 2002. Available here.

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash