on grief

A lesson from my therapist I think the world should hear. 

As I have been living with grief for nearly two years now I have heard almost every grief platitude you can think of. Let me be frank, they all suck. None however, suck as much as the phrase, ‘everything happens for a reason.’ Or, ‘it’s in God’s providence.’ To the grieving person or persons, this makes it sound like God is up in Heaven playing a very heartless chess game with our lives. It made me ask, how can a God that is good and is supposed to love me allow this pain to happen to me even though I asked him to spare us from it? 

The hardest lesson I had to learn, the one that took the longest is that even in the midst of my pain God is still good. As the dust begins to clear and settles, I can see His mercies all around the situation. However, in early grief I could not and it was not helpful for me to try to. It caused me to wrestle so much with my faith until I could bear it no longer and had to ask my therapist, ‘so many people tell me that it happened for a reason…but how can they say that? Why would God do that knowingly?’ 

Her answer? 

What happened to my Mom was not God’s plan. It wasn’t his plan A, or B or even C. Looking at it as such is only indicative of our cultural misunderstanding of grief. We live in a fallen world where sin poisons what God first ordained holy and we cannot change that. We cannot change the painful things that happen to us but we can rewire the way we look at grief, not as a problem to be fixed with platitudes and attempted solutions but as exactly what it is, love that now has nowhere to go. All grief is love, instead of trying to fix grief we need to understand that it isn’t a problem but a part of us to be cared for tenderly and acknowledged and held and felt. We, as a culture, need to understand that a simple, ‘I know this sucks, and you are hurting so much, I hurt with you and I love you’ is so much better than looking at pain through a lens of fear and brokenness and offering up a unhelpful phrases like ‘it happened for a reason.’