Waking Up — grateful, yet grieving
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.
