Grief is godly. The three short words jumped from the page and imbedded themselves in my thoughts. Grief is godly. I could not deny it, although the statement did seem to give grief a bit more credit than I thought appropriate. I accept grief as a normal human response. A God-given, normal human response. But does that make it godly? We are much more likely to question its presence. To be sure, initially the loss that brought the sometimes horrendous weight of grief is significant enough to warrant the horrid weight of grief. I was still a very young mom when my own father was literally crushed in an accident at work. My dad had disappointed us as siblings and disrupted our lives when he walked away from our home many years before, but still, we loved him. Receiving the long distance phone call that he had died led into a week of intense grief as a family, a grief complicated by our disappointments, but a grief still that brought us back day after day for a full week to sit by his casket and mourn. Physically, my grief plundered my energy and my thinking. Grief is godly? It was a week that did not leave me feeling godly.
Neither had I felt godly when our newborn entered the world without the capacity to sustain life. It was complicated grief as well, but complicated not by the actions of another, but complicated by my own sense of responsibility. And it was a grief whose dark heaviness did not depart even when healthy children entered my world, captured my heart, and filled my days. Through the years, my heart ached for my own loss, even while it ached for the losses of others, especially when that “other” had lost a child. And connecting with those others, I began to realize that for many of them, grief held on tenaciously, gripping not only their emotions, but distorting perspective, paralyzing responses, thwarting a forward pathway. Where is the God-likeness in all of that? Grief is to be owned and accepted, and then by virtue of our Christian beliefs, we move beyond it, overcome it, and then we demonstrate our godliness because we have been strengthened by all we say we believe. But, grief, in and of itself, is godly?
And because I don’t stop thinking when such thoughts are imbedded, I looked instead at what grief says and what grief does that we don’t always think about. Grief says, “I have loved. I have valued. I was gifted with a life and that life, however short it was, was God’s gift to me. My love cared and my love gave.” Is that not what God calls us to when He gives us the peoples of our lives, even those who only live within our womb? Grief is godly. And in our broken wretchedness, we go to God. Every fiber of my heart and my being cries out to Him for His presence, His comfort, His enablement. God longs for such utter dependence! And my grief brings me to Him. Grief is godly. And the heart that cries out is softened – softened to feel, to understand, to literally pulse with the grief of another. Grief is godly. I don’t ask for it. I don’t want it. But because it is godly, grief itself is also a gift.
– Bev
(Related Bible reading: Matthew 5:4; Revelation 21:4)
