Lessons in Grief

Ephesians 3:18

“And may you have the power to understand, as all God's people should, how wide, how long, how high, and how deep his love is.” 

I have learned something as I travel this path of grief. I think I am grasping a new dimension of God that I never understood before. God grieves, all the time, over our sin, our rebellion, our lostness, our pain. Having gone through some truly deep grief gives me a different perspective on what that might look like from God’s point of view. I think that everything is masked in our world. We do not experience anything to the depth that God does but rather we skim through our world, snacking on this and that as we go by, but seldom sitting down and just completely experiencing something. We don’t seem to have the capacity, or maybe the desire even, to really experience at the deepest levels. It is too exhausting, to overwhelming, to intense. But God is not fragile like us, He is always intense, and deep and wide.

I do not grieve with those who are in chains as if I were also… I don’t even know what that feels like. I don’t even grieve when I hear of brothers and sisters being killed for the gospel. To be in church and have gunmen come in and shoot the place up…to survive that and know the fear the loss the horror, I have no touchstone for that; I cannot imagine it because, though the loss of my husband and the way he died is horrific to my soul, it was comfortable and sheltered in comparison. How can I grieve with others when I don’t even know what grief feels like? Now I have had a taste of it. God grieves with us because He knows the grief. He feels it as God and He demonstrated that by becoming a man and feeling it as a man also, not because He didn’t understand it before but because we didn’t know that He did and does.

The love of God that suffers with us and for us at such depth and intensity and… loves so much that, He purposely put Himself in a place where He would also suffer it at a human level so we would let Him love us and love Him back. The sacrificial humble Love of God… it is overwhelming.

Jesus is humble and meek and he is an exact reflection of God. To see Jesus is to see God. Willing to suffer for the joy set before Him, that joy being us accepting His love and embracing Him back…

I remember when Brenna first called me mom. I thought my heart would break with joy and roll right out of my chest. For her it was a tentative acceptance of me… but for me it was huge. For God our every little half baked acceptance of His love is intensely felt by Him….. May we become even more conscious of that, to be driven, not by guilt of doing wrong but by an increasing consciousness of the true, deep, breath snatching, heart squeezing delight that God takes in our returning His love back to Him and of our shining it out on others.