Grief Is Not the Enemy

Early in the process, I heard myself say, Today was a good day until I felt the grief hit me. Do you know that your heart loves to express itself through your own mouth? Most of the time this is just the way we want it. At other times, hearts can say the darndest things we might never have known we were thinking or feeling. Jesus said that the heart speaks out of its abundance, out of the overflow of what it cannot contain. As soon as those words flew out of my mouth, I realized that deep down I had an entirely wrong idea about grief. That wrong idea was working against me not for me! How did I ever get the idea that grief is an enemy?

By many such subtleties, we unwittingly make grief into the enemy. Yet, grief is not an evil thing. It is good; even better, it is a great good from which blessing is promised to flow. We have it on record that our holy God grieves. Hence, there can be nothing evil about it unless we bring evil into it (remember the contaminants?). Unlike us, our Lord never grieves with anything but a pure heart, but that doesn't mean it is any less painful for Him to bear. Because God freely allows Himself to feel these same sorrows that afflict us, we can know with full assurance that there is nothing wrong with grieving. It is a friend to be embraced, not an enemy to be spurned.

It is simply because we feel pain when we grieve that grieving itself becomes tarnished by negative association. Have you noticed that our hearts sometimes think like three-year-olds? We judge things as if our own feelings were at the center of the moral universe. If something makes me feel good, it can't be all bad. If it makes me feel bad, there can't be any good in it. Such is the simplicity and tenacity of our emotional logic. But this is to think childishly. We need to rise to a higher understanding.

The Real Evil

As painful as it is, grieving is what God gives us to do so that our hearts can mend from the real evil the tearing away from us by the death of someone we love. Death is the work of our unwanted enemy, Satan, and his dark kingdom. This is the evil one Jesus told us about, who comes to kill, steal and destroy whatever it is that we and God rightly love. Naturally, the real enemy loves it if we give him a pass and make God or grief into being the enemy instead.

How crazy is that? If we were carrying a knife wound that required changing the bandages daily, we would be foolish indeed to make the ones tending our wound into an enemy. They may be causing pain lots of it but it is from an honest desire to mend us. How bizarre it would be if we ever shifted our anger onto them, rather than the one who thrust in the knife in the first place!

Yet, it is by such deft ways that the deceiver turns our righteous indignation over what he did, into a grievance over the pain it still causes us. In so doing, he makes our Healer and His ways of helping us grieve seem like an enemy and an intruder. We say, If only the grief would leave me alone, so I can get back to my life. Never realizing that it is only through embracing the grief that we can become fully mended and ultimately be restored to our life.

Prayer

Dear Lord, if I have tended to see grief as the enemy, forgive me. Forgive me also whenever I may have thought that You had acted like an enemy. Never! You gave me a great love in the first place and have always helped me to cultivate it, Now, You have given me grief as a way to transform what the real enemy has done. I choose to believe that You can use the grief to grow me into the next stage of my life down here and that it will be worth it to receive that growth. I, therefore, choose to embrace this grief and whatever it may legitimately require of my time and attention. God helping me, I will no longer push it—or You—away.

Scripture

The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life and have it abundantly. John 10:10 ESV