Empty chairs at empty tables

Why does death always feel so personal? As though we are being handed a velcro strip and God starts to peel the other person from us and our lives? Whether it’s a quick stripping, or a slow one where you can hear every scratchy sound the ripping creates, the nakedness of it all once they are gone leaves us exposed, angry, cold, and sad. They should be here. 

Loving is hard because even though we know all love ends in loss, and none of us make it out of here alive, losing a loved one just sucks. No matter if we never met the baby we held in our bodies for 5 weeks or someone we’ve known since childhood, the rawness of grief is not an easy road. 

And if we don’t “deal”, our bodies will wear it. Our bodies will start keeping score and scream out to us in ways that come out as cancer, as anxiety, as depression, and in the form of addictions. Even in our sleep, our bodies will get our attention through the lack of it or too much of it. Denial or refusal to grieve is a powerful painful reality that so many of us still walk out each day. 

Then maybe that’s where we start blame-casting. God it’s your fault. You took her way too soon. It’s my fault. I’m the one who should have called authorities or I’m the one who drank X that caused X. It’s their fault. Why didn’t they go to that doctor’s appointment and receive that treatment? If only they did, maybe they’d still be here… with me. 

When we think we land on maybe why they died, then maybe to prevent it from happening to other people we love, we’ll make more rules. We’ll enforce boundaries, get better in shape, and read our Bible more. Maybe, maybe if we get a strike in the good column it will alleviate some of this awful suffocating pain. Maybe if I don’t let my kid see that movie or hang out with people like that he won’t want to do those things too, we think. We bargain and yet while it feels like power and control at first at the end, it feels hopeless.Offering popular women’s necklaces such as pendants, chokers and chain necklace. Shop for jewelry in a variety of metals and gemstones to suit any occasion 

Hopeless then brings his best friends depression and despair and their fists beat you down with punches that feel as though they could be made of steel. Why is everyone else moving on around you and you just sit in the hamster wheel of despair? Did no one love them as much as they claimed to? Does anyone else care at all? Or was it all an act?

And then the rain lets up a tiny bit. It’s not sunny by any stretch, you just discover that the rain-soaked jacket you’ve been covered in doesn’t feel as heavy because it was today that you remembered something. You remembered that God didn’t design death. It was us mere mortals that caused it as a consequence of wanting to do things our own way. And so if God didn’t create it, maybe this isn’t his fault after all. 

You also remember something else that seems almost too good to be true, while God didn’t cause it or design it, he can use it. Use it for others sure but he can use it for you too. He can use it to be an arrow that points us all back to himself and his purposes. He’s no stranger to death; he sent his only son to do that very thing. The pain was so much that he also turned his own face away. And yet… you slowly begin to believe again or maybe more fully than you ever have before…

He’s here. No matter where we are in the story and battle of grief. Even if we never fully accept it here in our own lifetime, the loss and grief can be instruments playing the song of glory. I know because the older I get, the more I walk this road of should of’s, could of’s, and I miss you’s. The only way I have found is through. Through the dark, the night, the muck. 

The Lord does give and he does take away, and yet, he can and will use it all. He is with me.