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Saturday's Sayings
"A Response to Grief Advice"
Tommy and I have been away for several days attending a Trauma conference in Atlanta, Georgia. We continue to learn amazing things about this trauma through which you and we are walking; hopefully we will share more about it soon. So here it is Sunday, and I am finally posting "Saturday's Sayings"! I hope it ministers to you.
"A Response to Grief Advice"
by Marsha Bell on Saturday, September 17, 2011 at 9:43am
I am stricken when fellow bereaved parents report outsider’s advice on grieving or when I get a taste of that myself. I would ask the outsiders …move on? To what? No grief?
IMPOSSIBLE!!!
Feeling no grief for our dead children will only happen when we get to heaven and have our tears wiped away from the Lord, Himself.
Our children aren’t lost… like a pet. We have hope for where our children are, which is heaven, and we hope to join them; soon. And short of that hope, there is nothing we can do about where they are or aren’t but grieve for what we can do nothing about.
We mothers and fathers were created to create and to care for the creations God blessed us with as we glorify the Lord in fulfillment of that mandate.
Sin messed up the original plan, but we must do what we can to make the best of God's plan in a sin-laden world. I say, "we must", as we are not in charge - God certainly is. And God is good.
I don’t think we work through grief as if we could possibly get to the other side of it. I don’t think it’s going to end or be resolved. We don’t work through it; we work with it.
Storms have a season. While a storm is raging we seek shelter. We wait until the worst is over then deal with what remains. We pick up the pieces and sort through what’s worth keeping. Sometimes nearly everything has been destroyed and we must completely restock and rebuild. Sometimes we’re just in the eye of the hurricane and it seems calm for a while, but the rains still come; tornadoes are spawned; floods inundate and the banks are perilously crested.
But it’s still storm season; clouds will return and with them another round of storms. What’s more, when this season is over the next season will come in its due time. That’s life.
That’s life for a parent stricken with grief over the death of their child.
Grief isn’t an illness, chronic or acute. It isn’t a scabbed over scar that gets re-injured on holidays… it’s an intensely painful open festering unhealable mortifying wound. The only cure is heaven itself.
If we look rational or even happy on the outside… we’re just trying to spare YOUR feelings. We think YOU can’t handle it. We are. We have no other choice but to look for and count on the rainbow. It will come. God is good and he is faithful.
