Grieving with hope

The deeper healing of our grief is in God’s hands.

All cures are temporary.

Healing is eternal in character.

Cure is particular, focused on a specific issue.

Healing is comprehensive.

That is why therapeutic approaches to any of our struggles — grief included — lack the power to address some of our needs at the deepest level.  Therapy can teach us to “cope” with our losses or “manage” them (and that’s a good thing), but the losses remain — and they await a resolution that lies entirely in God’s hands.

But Christian understandings of the spiritual life are not entirely future-oriented.  Eternal life — life lived out in God’s presence — is described using the present tense as well as the future.  Our spiritual lives are present possession, awaiting fulfillment.  Perhaps the best image is of the rising sun at dawn — the light breaks across the landscape.  There are still places where darkness and mist still remain.  But the light is on the way and there will be a point when the landscape will be filled with it.

So, we grieve, but not without hope.  We are living with the dawning light and — even in our grief — we continue to live, laugh, and love, confident that our lives belong to God.

We can stay involved in the lives of others.

We can learn to re-invest ourselves in life.

We can practice being present to one another.