Dear Mom,
I hope that this letter finds you well in body, if not in spirit. I hear that your grief journey has taken you into the darker portions of its depths. I am sorry to hear that you are grieving in such a fashion this year. I cannot know how hard it is to look at pictures of the past and not be able to touch your beloved. God has comforts for us when we traverse these depths, I am sure that you have experienced some of them. Some of the questions and difficulties that we experience in these grievous days of bereavement, tongue cannot even create a word to describe. I have told you that sometimes I would want to wrap my entire body in gauze like a mummy and say that I couldn’t feel worse, if the pain was to my entire body. Your soul hurts, when the loss is a child. Your mind goes from stem to stern looking for the rightness of it. Sometimes, I look at people and want to say, why are you here, when my son isn’t. It can’t be rectified, if every other person were gone and my dear son reincarnated and placed into my bosom. In the book of Ruth, Naomi stated to her people, call me Marra, because grief has enveloped me and I can’t get out of it. The people kept trying to steer her eyes to the blessing that God had given to her, in Ruth and baby Obed. But, I do notice that though there is restoration, to her, she is still speaking in grief mode.
I love how Jesus embraces the women, Mary and Martha in their loss and grieves with them, though their unbelief was too much. “If You had been here, my brother would not have died?”
I translate that as, What is up with healing people you don’t even know and leaving your best friend to die? Jesus embraced them in their sorrow and wept with them, even though He intended to raise Lazarus from the grave. I feel with you, He said to His beloved. I feel that pain of loss, even though I am the Resurrection and the Life. Death touches me. Death has touched and continues to touch me.
In our love for Him, sometimes we feel that the only response to grief is to recoil and to close ourselves off from people, until we have a sufficient answer to justify the goodness of God with the grief of our souls. There is no answer for our loss. There is no amount of time that we can close ourselves off and find comfort for the loss of a child. A piece of our hope and heart and soul is gone and there is no restoration of that, until we unite in Heaven. We can’t talk about it, because people will say that we don’t trust God. People get up and say stuff like, have you ever seen God fail you. You feel like raising your hand and saying, Yes! Absolutely yes! There is no way that God would have let my son die, and still be my friend. But He is still good, isn’t He? He is still our friend, isn’t He? He is still great? He said to His best friends, I am the resurrection and the life. And to Thomas, blessed are they who have not seen and still believe. I believe, though I have trusted and He has said no, to my deepest and only real request. Keep my children safe, Lord. What else is there?
Blessed and deeper friends are those who know that God is good despite the deepest disappointments. I pray that no one would ever feel the pain of that loss. Death is horrible...
"Heirs together of the Grace of Life"
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