On Grief and Mourning

What do you have to say?

That is the pinnacle question for anyone looking to start a blog or wanting to write. Why do you want that, what is it you have to say? I have had a blog since the inception of blogging. You'd be hard pressed to find a vintage blogging platform I don't have some archaic profile on (it's all really bad, angsty poetry so don't go digging it up). I have always had a lot to say. Something would shift in my life and I would think, “I need to write about that.” A thing would happen in our world; a big emotion would over take me; a question would eat at me for days and I would think to myself, “I need to write about that.” But in recent years, certainly since the inception of this site, whenever I felt the need to write about something mostly I didn’t.

For the most part this blog has been defined by fear, by all the things not said for fear of not knowing how to extricate my story from the stories of those that shaped me, how to lay out the truth while sparing the starring players of that truth, how to share my opinions without being mistaken as an emissary for my pastor or church (both of whom I love but would never claim to speak for nor whom I necessarily agree with over every last minutia of scripture and culture because never will we agree with someone on everything).

Over the last year and a half I’ve been on an unexpected road, one that began in an auditorium listening to Donald Miller tell me we would grieve our stories together, and learn to tell them through that grief. I shared about that and about this crippling fear in a blog a little over a year ago. As I wrote it then I thought that post marked the end of that fear and journey of grief, and a turn onto a new, bolder road. I was super, super wrong.

Here’s what I’ve learned since publishing that blog: grief is a holy and brutal tool of the Lord, and it will not be mastered or cut short by any man. It is it’s own living and breathing thing, and as with any gift of God, used correctly, in it's intended manner, it brings about blessing. Since publishing that blog I’ve learned that grief is a tool of freedom. To grieve is to take a sacred and treacherous path to a new life, it is the bridge from tragedy to healing. When scripture says that He binds up the broken hearted, grief is the bandage He uses. When grief is abused, when relied on outside of the Lord, when clung to, grief takes on a malevolent color, as with any abused gift of God, it becomes distorted, all encompassing. When we try to force grief into our time table, into our own terms of success, when we try to push through it without accepting it we become a slave to the grief instead of a recipient of the gift of freedom and healing. After I published that blog I became a slave to the grief instead of a recipient of the gift. And in my fear of talking about my grief, it mastered me until I gave in to it and was led by Jesus straight onto the precarious, broken path called mourning.

So if you read that blog all those months ago, if you read how I said I was going to start being honest and open in all the ways I hadn’t been, please know that when I wrote that I really thought I was. I was trying to shortcut my way through grieving and I had step into the life that comes after grief. I recognize now that I wasn't done with grief. And quite honestly I’m still here, on the path of mourning, I don’t know how long this season of grieving will last, and I think maybe a piece of me will always be here? Maybe at the end of the road of mourning we dig up some of the dirt and carry it with us forever. We live a life full of laughter and wonder and beauty and peace, but there is always the understanding that something was lost at one point, that in the timeline of our life this is the AFTER. Maybe there will always be a catch in our throats at the memory of what once was. But we are not a slave to it. That is the power of grief.

So here is what I want to say, what I haven't said for fear of how I would be perceived: I'm still coming into the power and blessing of grief, still winding my way down the path of mourning. But I know what's at the end of it, I know what comes after, and for the first time I am humbly submitting myself to the process. And if you're here too, if you're grieving and you've tried to make it fit into a mold of your own design or you've tried to shortcut it, if it's lasted longer than you'd wanted it to, know that you're not alone, and there is healing on the other side of it, if only we will submit ourselves and be led by Jesus straight through it.