With so many apps and tools to help us get places, I still like to see a large map that tells me where I am. I like to see the dot that says, “You Are Here”. I can see exactly where I am, what’s near and find the way to where I’m going. Similarly, it’s the same for our grief journey. In the blur and haze of the first months of grief, it can be hard to see where we are. For me it was like being on a train that stopped. I could see and hear the other trains speeding by me. My train stopped suddenly. It was where I was. It was to be expected. My life stopped, but the rest of the world kept going.

There will be feelings of frustration and fear in our journey of grieving. We want to be somewhere besides where we are. There will be a time of waiting in the dark.

Last year a friend sent me the link to a poem by Sarah Bourns called, “The Darker the Dirt, the Richer the Soil.” Here are the last few lines of her poem.

Your way seems dark.
You feel as though you are being buried
down in the deep.

Jesus is there too,
waiting with you.
In the dark night of the soul.

In the deep dark of the soil.

And sometimes,
He doesn’t turn on the light.
But always,
He is with us through the night.

And He says,
Dear one, there’s a depth that comes in the darkness
you can’t find any other way.
There’s a peace budding quietly within
that sustains you for today.
There’s a beauty hidden in the fog
if only you have eyes to see.
There’s a richness buried in the waiting
that only time reveals.

And perhaps, what feels like a burial
is more of a planting.
And perhaps, what seems like dying
will one day be resurrecting.

And perhaps, what looks like darkness
is simply the moment
before
the dawn.

Waiting in the dark is sometimes where we are. But where we are is not where we will stay. As Sarah says, there’s a richness buried in the waiting.

The link to the entire poem by Sarah Bourns is here:

https://www.cmalliance.org/alife/the-darker-the-dirt-the-richer-the-soil/

"Grateful Yet Grieving"

FREE ebook by Pam Luschei | Click HERE To Download

It finally happened. The words that have gone unspoken by women who know me. Last week, a dear woman said, “You are living my worst nightmare, Pam.” She graciously offered some kind words that followed. Her courage to say the words out loud led me to come to some conclusions.

For the past three years, since my husband died, I’ve had a sense that women cautiously approach me with the nagging thought in the back of their heads: “if it can happen to her, it can happen to me, too.” It’s the elephant in the room that’s not hard to see. The sudden loss of my husband took me to the place where I was living my worst nightmare.

In the book by Jerry Sittser, “A Grace Disguised”, he shares his painful journey following the devastating loss of his mother, wife, and daughter in an unimaginable, tragic accident. He says, “We will not be delivered from suffering but with God’s help we can be transformed by it. The apostle Paul wrote that nothing can “separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Nothing. Not even our losses. That is the promise of true transformation, that is the power of the love of God.”

Loss takes us to the depths of what looks like it might be unsurvivable and transforms us. We go through to come up and out of the despair and see a different landscape. The experience of loss will touch all of us at some point in our lives. There’s no escape. But there is hope.

In my journey, there has been a slow and gentle process of coming out of the fear, sorrow and grief into a place of hope, comfort and solace. My faith, identify and growth have ushered me into a deeper sense of God’s love for me and amplified my relationships beyond the surface. It is possible to go through your worst nightmare and come forth to a spacious place of healing and restoration. The words of David in Psalm 31:7, 8 give a sense of the process; “because you have seen my affliction, you know the troubles of my soul and have not handed me over to the enemy. You have set my feet in a spacious place.”

There is hope beyond the present pain and a path forward to a spacious place as we grieve.