Yesterday, I spent time at the grave of the only boy I ever loved. I wanted him to have new flowers for Valentine’s Day.
Peace held hands with grief there in that place, and God, ever faithful, allowed me to see the beauty that abounds among the sorrow that obscures.
Years ago, while teaching, I spoke words that proved truer than I could have imagined at the time: “We risk the possibility of pain for the privilege of love.”
I believed it then, but I know it now.
Grief is love’s inevitable cost. It is love with no place to land, and no one upon which to lavish it. It remains in abundance, undiluted and unspent, long after the funeral flowers fade and the world moves on.
Grief weaves itself through anniversaries and ordinary days alike, reminding us not only of what once was, but of what will never be again.
Cemeteries teach us in ways few places do that we don’t always get the fairytale.
We don’t always get the happy ending.
We don’t always get the life we imagined or the outcome we prayed for.
Sometimes, no matter how fervently we hope, how fiercely we love, or how faithfully we plead, the unthinkable still happens.
People die.
Bodies fail.
Hearts break.
We lose what we were certain we would always have.
This is the paradox in which we live:
Joy mingled with grief.
Hope tempered with resignation.
The beauty of the promise muted by the ache of the present.
We live suspended between the now and the not yet, longing for the day every tear will be wiped away, but wrestling with the pain that flares in the meantime.
Until every fractured thing is made whole, we hold this tension between the ache of delay and the promise of deliverance.
I believe in joy. It has been mine in spades.
I believe in hope. It has not failed me yet.
But I also believe there is sacred value in grieving what was lost, what was taken, and what never got the chance to be.
Love, though interrupted, never goes away, and where it lingers, hope can still take root.
So we celebrate our joys.
And we grieve fully our losses.
We turn, again and again, to the One who holds both our sorrow and our future with equal tenderness.
On this day of celebration, blissful for most, but bitter for many, I gently offer what I have come to know since calamity struck and grief moved in to stay:
I have learned that it is possible to contend with life without contending with God. He receives our complaints. He allows our questions. He welcomes our lament.
He is not our adversary.
He is our refuge.
He is our hiding place.
He is the One who weeps with us even as He works to redeem what still lies in ruins.
You may not be able to envision it just now, but take it from one who has walked your painful path: you will not always feel this hollow. Or this bereft. Or this undone.
You will survive what you thought might end you, and you will learn to move forward one breath, one step, one miracle at a time.
God will meet you in the rubble. He will sit with you in the wreckage. The fog, so disorienting now, will eventually lift.
Your anguish will ease, even though the absence of those you love never does.
Life will grow around the ache.
And joy will be yours once more, not as a replacement (no, never that) but as a companion.
So hold on, dear ones.
Breathe.
Be brave.
Be gentle with yourself.
You are becoming someone you’ve never met, shaped by sorrow, yes, but not defined by it.
Still overcoming.
Still growing.
Still capable of joy.
So may you persevere with grace.
May you sense your own belovedness, even on the days it’s hard to see.
And if you’re just plain sad today? That’s okay.
If tears are the only prayers you can muster, let them flow, trusting that not a single one escapes the attention of the One who weeps alongside you.
Joy will be yours, just maybe not today.
Content to wait its turn, and understanding fully what it means to honor and make room for grief, joy will gently make its way back to you, joining hands once more with the sorrow that shrouded its presence.
Until then, we keep going together—those of us who know this kind of love and loss, and those who, for now, can only imagine it.
May we walk gently with one another regardless, honoring both the ache, and the love that made it possible.
Sending so much love to you, my fellow broken and bereaved. I wish this were not our story, but it is. It is not, however, our whole story.
Our Author is still at work, still writing, still redeeming, and the pages to come hold far more beauty and promise than we can begin to imagine on days like today.
God, the author and keeper of our stories, is, even now, putting words to the aches we cannot name and the sorrows we cannot escape. He writes away and writes a way, ceaselessly redeeming every moment, every word, for His glory.
And when He finally writes “The End,” we will see how every twist and turn, every sorrow and every triumph, contributed to the masterpiece that was unfolding all along.
You are loved more than you know.