Monday Musings

“When will it not hurt Denise? When will I ever not feel this pain again?” Her voice was desperate on the other end of the phone. In a little less than a year she had lost her mother and her husband of eleven months had walked out the door with no real known rhyme or reason. And her heart was breaking. And mine broke for her. 
     You know, there is no timetable for grief. It has no etiquette I often say. It shows up unannounced. Stays as long as it likes. And often leaves a sloppy mess. But then gradually, piece by piece, day by day, the ache in the soul grows farther and farther apart. I heard someone say one day, “Grief never goes away, it just explodes less often.” And that is very true.  And I think there may even come a time where grief is no longer the appropriate word, but instead a subtle sadness over what was lost. 
     However, you can find that God can do extraordinary things. I had just come out of the most horrific season of grief. It was my first holidays after my divorce and I remember sitting there with Ken and I said, “I’m afraid I’m not going to come out of this. I haven’t had something settle over my soul for this long.” We talked through the fear, the pain and slowly I found myself coming out of the black hole. But the grief still sat heavy on me. The pain of what could have been. The pain of what had happened. The pain over what was. 
     But one day on a drive back from Atlanta where I had been with some friends, I had a Praise and Worship CD on in the car and I just began to worship the Lord. I don’t know how to describe to you what happened that day, and honestly it was so personal that I don’t really want to. All I know, is when I pulled into my drive-way three hours later, that heavy grief has never been felt again. Supernaturally, God delivered me of that heavy grief. It was as if all the prayers that had been prayed for me by my precious friends and family, finally had finally accumulated to such a point that the hot air balloon had enough power to lift from the ground.
     Now have I cried again,absolutely. Has my heart ached at times. You betcha. (Have wanted to find a place to say that for a year) But never again has that heavy, aching, air depleting grief sat over my soul again. 
    I am praying for you. I am praying that if this is a season where the grief feels so consuming that God will in his kindness, give you an experience to remove that place of deep grief. But the other part of that is you have to be willing to let it go.
    One of the greatest dangers to grief is allowing it to grow to a place of self-pity. Oh my friends, I can’t tell you the danger in that. Grief brings with it an element of attention. People ask how you are. Want to help you. Stay with you. Feed you. But then they eventually return to the life they are living expecting you too as well. Now, granted they will do this much quicker than our healing process allows, but often the enemy uses self-pity as a means of keeping us in our grief. 
    See, self-pity says, “I deserve to stay here after what I’ve been through.” 
    “If I stay here I’ll get more attention.”
    “I should have never had to have gone through this.”
    “Someone should have stepped in and prevented this.”
    Self-pity resonates nothing about who God desires to be in the difficult situations of our life. Sure, what we’ve gone through might have been unfair, hard to understand, even traumatic, but it is still ours. Claim it. Realize that when your heart is God’s, there is not one thing He isn’t going to turn around for your good. 
    So, first, you have to admit it. You have to admit that this is where you are, stuck in a quagmire of self-pity. And I’m challenging you to get brutally honest with yourself. Bring it before the Lord and ask Him if He sees this in you. Trust me, He’ll tell you. And if you don’t feel like you can hear His answer ask your real friends, if they’re real, they’ll have no trouble telling you either. And then repent of it. Yes, I said it. Repent. It is as much a sin as any other. Because it has that internal eye focused on us and not on Him. And then move past it. The best way to do that is to praise. When we praise it is all about what He has done and who He is and is nothing about us. 
    And in that place we will discover a deep healing of our soul.