When You Need Permission to Grieve

I first heard the word on one of the podcasts I was listening to recently; Jamie Ivey. The word gripped my heart, but also, just the sound of it made me want to run.

Then I walked through the trenches with Kara Kippett, tasting each of her words, like a morsal of sweetness and bitter, drawn to the theme of her book, “Hardest Peace”, a grace-filled walk of peace amidst her battle with cancer.

Why was I hearing this word “grieve” in podcasts and books, interviews and posts I was reading. It was heard randomly, not selectively. It was like God was telling me, “You have permission to grieve.”

But, I didn’t need to grieve….did I?

Life can sometimes be like a bucket of legos dumped on your head, and you are left to match pieces, make rhyme or reason of the straight edges and deep groves, blinding colors shouting all around.

But I have always liked soft. Soft stuffed animals tears could fall into, soft stories surfacing deep heartfelt compassion, soft songs that carried me along like a sailboat without storms, floating chrystal clear waters where all you know is open sky and a cooling breeze kissing your skin lightly.

But life is often bumpy, isn’t it? Bumpy and hard, storm-ridden and ugly.

Some say, it’s a curse just to speak it and say it’s so. Other’s live in their own oblivious reality that if they just do “right” life will go their way.

But we can’t open a book and close our eyes to the pages. Step into our own story, then make believe it is different. Deny the truth or distain the lessons God is trying to bring us…

And maybe the lessons are in the mixture of good and bad, grace and power most manifest IN and THROUGH the hard…not by avoiding hard.

Maybe the legos grooves and edges, deep crevases and ridges are what help bind us together to God and others.

Have you ever seen anything good build out of round or soft edges?

But legos? They require us to get low…come and enter their story. They need us to bend down and intentionally recognize each peice, thoughtfully hold and own and place them carefully….before we can actually build anything.

As I grab the legos in my life, I begin building….

• My two adult children, both moved out in a span of four months for good (One got married). There is grieving.
• My body isn’t what it used to be. I feel a deep loss of my younger years. Grieving.
• More than half of my children will always experience the loss of their first families. I can’t ever replace or “fix” that. Grieving.
• Four of my kids have trauma or disabilities. Grieving.
• Life has been filled with betrayal from trusted people. Grieving.
• Expectations have been crushed and any control over destiny has been lost completely. Grieving.

Most of all, I grieve the truth that I don’t have all the answers, my plans might not prevail, my ways weren’t always good, my heart, apart from Him, wasn’t always pure. My personal Babylons crushed.

“The heart is deceitful above all else, and desperately sick. Who can know it?” (Jeremiah 17:9)

At times…

• I pushed when I should have waited.
• I resisted, when I should have folded to His graces.
• I gathered together when I should have let Him unravel me.
• I found hope in myself, when I simply needed to abandon myself to His mercies.

Where do you go when the storm takes you to places you’ve never known or even wanted to go? When people betray and love doesn’t go your way and those closes to you, cut deep….

Scars forever lingering?

How do you hide in a world forcing reflections, needing perfection, demanding complete healing? When man says, “Pull yourself together” and religion commands, “If you just have enough faith” all will be well?

Only the broken on that cross, bleeding and scared, can indentify with all your suffering.

Who do you thrust yourself on, when the loss echos a thousand times a day, like a banging gong inside your head, and your heart bleeds from all the fleeing…

When the cutting, merciless masses rip apart a place of trust, crush a soft tender heart that has always feared the trusting?

How do you hide, when there is nowhere left to run? When you find, a lifetime of grieving can’t be done without a soldier spirit rising up inside with unearthly courage and unparrallel trust.

Yet, you haven’t seen your sword in years?

When do you come to THE ONE also with a wounded side, confess the loss and grieving, give up the fight and lay, at last, lifeless in the soft of His arm?

Where do you turn, where can we run, but the gentle Father, the Holy One who knows our weakness and has experiences such defeat, betrayal, loss, and heartache, just before His resurrection.

Oh God, I never knew the depths of my pain, the extent of my loss, the weight of such grief. Yet, you show me, lead me, guide me to this place….

And I want to embrace your complete healing, your full redemption, your mighty mercies as I walk through this valley of the shadows of death, instead of just seeking mountain top experiences or cowardly denying all grief in the first place.

Because a wound can try to heal, grow a scab…the blood and oozing will ceasing, for a moment. But….

Unless we painfully remove the dirt, allow the Finger of God to touch the deep wounds in our life, we won’t ever fully heal or find full life-giving freedom.

And we all  walk around infected, at a loss, denying our own deep-hearted filth, daily. Don’t we?

God, make us an instrument of your peace. Let us know it is in times of hardhsips and deep trenches where we have not failed and you never leave….

It is in the heartbreak

of it all; the apple, the sin, the pain, the betrayal, that you have cut down the brush, made a way, took the pain of such a sacrifice for us…bore all the weight of sin.

Thank you that we can, this day, lay honest at your feet.

And you won’t turn us away. You won’t blame or “give lessons” or instruct us in our pain.

You just wait. Sit, wait, listen…and let us heal. Healing us by your stripes. Heal us, because you are good….

Even when we begin to learn…the world we live in, is not.