The Act of Grief

Mourning.  According to Wesbter grief is the keen mental suffering due to a loss or distress or affliction, sharp sorrow, painful regret.  Grief is an experience you can feel deep in your chest to a point where breathing is so impossible you feel that rending your clothes wouldn't be enough.  It seems the only thing that would allow oxygen to fill your body would be cracking open your chest.  Many of us have experienced a hurt so deep the weight was crushing to a point of our decimation.  Did you allow your pain of grief to take you to your seeming destruction - ash?  Disintegration is painful and scary!  Especially if you wallow in your anguish.  There are steps to grief developed by psychologists.  Shock & Denial, Isolation, anger/pain/guilt, Bargaining, depression, acceptance & Hope and finally reconstruction.

The beginning to healing is admitting that the grief you are experiencing is real.  Anger comes with the realization that to cope with the grief is to usher in change.  When in life do we come up with the idea that living is stagnate, consistent, mundane, safe predictable.  This mindset causes us to run through the steps to grief in varying degrees frequently.  Accepting the idea that the grief we have experienced is going to change who we are to become brings a mourning all its own - depression.  To live is to grow and change. It is only there when you make the choice to give God control and trust His promises 'to never leave you , nor forsake you' (Hebrews 13:5&6), "His plans to prosper you, not to harm you, plans to give you a HOPE and a future." (Jeremiah 29:11) and His gifts are good (Matthew 7:11). 

God told us to expect trouble (John 16:33) but not to lose heart because if we choose to fix our eyes on Jesus, though we are inwardly wasting away, an eternal glory is ours in Christ.  (2Corinthians 4:16-18).  King David was a man after God's own heart, who experienced all kinds of trouble but YET he chose to praise God despite his downcast soul (Psalms 42&43).  Accept this grief as part of His plan and see what comes next.