Coming back to life after a season (years) of grief

It doesn’t matter what caused our grief, it could’ve been disappointment, betrayal, abuse, trauma, actual loss, or it could be a peculiarity of ambiguous loss, like loneliness. And more…

Let’s have permission here to talk about that spiritual malaise of grief that overcomes our ability to live life to the full.

Before I begin, let me state in no uncertain terms that the compensation for having suffered grief is the gleaning of wisdom that we could get no other way. So, though we are never glad to have grieved, we are left with something of a broader, deeper perspective for having endured such suffering.

Only recently, having had an incredible epiphany, where God spoke a two-worded phrase that snapped me to attention, I came to realise how far from life I really was.

Any non-Christian might wonder what on earth I’m talking about. Does God actually speak? And does God bring words of criticism? Well, in my experience it’s yes to both. But in my situation, God simply highlighted the true state of my heart. And this is the difference between a criticism that we might take as negative, and a criticism that is brought to facilitate the passage to true life.

Perhaps the endgame of grief is that our hearts are compromised, because we are hurt, very often beyond measure. There is almost nothing we can do about this. 

One thing we can see, though, is the outworking of grief to the end of a heart compromised enough that it would feel hurt enough to harden up. This is what God showed me. My heart was sick, and never has the proverb, “Hope deferred makes the heart sick,” meant so much.

To be honest, I can see now how God has been leading me back to life, even as I couldn’t see it, or nor could I see the fact that I was far from life.

Let me clarify at this point what I mean by “life”. Spiritually speaking, life is about the state of the heart. When we are alive spiritually our heart is soft and pliable, and kindness, grace and patience are the fruit emanating from such a heart. But when our hearts have been hurt, we invariably go into self-protection mode, and we may harden the exterior of our heart in order to prevent further pain, and certainly as a response of cynicism to a harsh world that has tainted our perspective.

Coming back to life, therefore, is about seeing what the hurt has led to, seeing the state of the heart, which has been damaged through the carrying of heavy baggage for so long.

We need to see the state of our hearts in truth. For me, I had to see what my heart was capable of. I had to see that I have the capacity to be dispassionate, critical, negative, even rude. I definitely would not want to face that, but for the grace of God, which is the gentleness of revelation which holds no truth back.

God can communicate to us in ways that humans cannot.

Coming back to life, then, is about facing the hardness of our hearts, recognising that that hardness came about because we were hurt.

We did not choose to become hard of heart, but that is our present state, and that is also our opportunity, to come back to life. And we do that by simply facing our hard heart—being truthful with ourselves.

Suddenly in having repented, we find a number of things occurring that remind us what the spiritual life is about. 

First of all, we see God communicating to us much more often in many vibrant ways. Our more recently truncated hearts have been opened again to see!

Secondly, we start to take a childlike joy from the many innocent things of life that we missed when we were harder of heart. Smiles and laughter return.

Thirdly, and this might seem unrealistic to any of us who are presently hard of heart, the past becomes more irrelevant that ever before. This is not to say the what occurred to us wasn’t important, for it was. But we are not plagued by it, which is an answer to prayer for those who have grieved; to just be relieved from incessant pain of thoughts and feelings that indelibly circle, ad nauseam.

Fourthly, we recognise that coming back to life is about seeing life from a newer, wiser perspective. We truly sense that we are living out of a gift. We would not be who we are today had we not endured what we had. We see that suffering ultimately as a gift we would not have chosen nor taken, but that it is a gift all the same.

Fifthly, our relationship with God is transformed again, because it was GOD who did it. We see God’s fingerprints all over our journey now, and we even see the purpose in the entirety of our journey, notwithstanding what and how much we suffered.

This is why we can say again, “God is GOOD!”

Photo by Kira auf der Heide on Unsplash