I’ve been thinking a lot over the past few months about the experience of grief. The Oxford Dictionary describes grief as, “deep sorrow, especially that caused by someone’s death.” It’s not a surprise that The Oxford Dictionary associates grief with death. Whenever most of us hear the word “grief” I imagine we do the same. But to confine grief only to the realm of death does not give the full spectrum of grief its due.
The feeling of grief, in my humble opinion, is captured best by a quote from author Katherine Webber, “Life seems nothing more than a series of losses, from beginning to end.” Webber notes that humans grieve many things over the course of our lives that aren’t, specifically, death. We grieve the loss of babyhood when our babies turn into children. We grieve the loss of childhood when our children turn into adults. We grieve the loss of our own childhood when we take on adult responsibilities. We grieve the loss of meaning and purpose when we make professional changes and/or move into retirement. We grieve the loss of ability as our bodies age. We grieve the loss of relationships when friendships change, or friends move away, or we move away from locations and homes and people we’ve loved. With all that in mind, maybe The Oxford Dictionary has it right after all. All those changes are like little deaths. In a way, grief does mean something has died.
One of the things that makes grief so hard is that it's coupled in the human heart and mind with a very feisty, natural human desire for permanence. Inasmuch as we grieve loss, we long for permanence. We long for relationships that won’t change, bodies that won’t age, children that always want us around, and professions we always move in well. It seems God has created us between a rock and a hard place. We long for permanence…but we live in a world that never stays the same.
As a Christian, I’ve learned it’s important to notice feelings, for they are one of the ways God speaks truth to us. It’s important to notice our burning desire for permanence in a world that’s always changing. That feeling tells us God has made our hearts and minds to cling to something for all eternity. We are supposed to be permanently part of something. Grief, however, is that constant reminder that whatever that “something” is, it isn’t of this world. We won’t find it in our work, we won’t find it in our human relationships, we won’t find it in our abilities, we won’t find it in the next location, we won’t find it in the next accomplishment, we won’t find it anywhere if we’re looking at the puzzle pieces that make up our lives. If we think our lives are like a flat 1,000 piece puzzle, grief reminds us life is more like Jenga. Everything gets moved around all the time and when it falls it gets re-stacked again. Wash, rinse, and repeat.
Perhaps the permanent thing God has made us to cling to—the only thing that can fulfill that human desire for permanence—is God Himself. God who is the giver of all our gifts. God who remains after those gifts are gone. God who is still there as new gifts enter our lives. God who remains as those new gifts become our next losses. God who birthed us from the womb. And God who welcomes us in death.
Our desire for permanence means something: God has made us for Himself. Our grief is an ever-present reminder that the gifts God gives are not gods themselves. As we grieve loss in the different seasons of our life, may we remember we will never lose God and God will never lose us.
