Skip to main content

GRIEF

It’s been four years + a month since my body crashed and changed my life forever. I’m not sure why I keep this letter, but every time I hold it I can still feel the pain I felt when after three months of testing and interviews I was one of two final candidates and I decided to withdraw because my health issues were so serious that I knew I would most likely be a danger to the people I would serve rather than a help. I grieve what I actually lost these past four years, but the grief of the could-have-beens is what hits me hardest and when I least expect it.

Lately I’ve grown to notice that if I’m criticizing someone or something, odds are, at the root of it, I’m grieving something I’ve lost. That might sound crazy, but for me grief is often disguised as jealousy and revealed as criticism.

I started to write about grief at least five times and then deleted and started over. Grief and grieving is a hard concept for me. I am uncomfortable with anything that I can’t “fix” quickly, and grief is one of those things that even after you think you’ve dealt with it, it still creeps up on you when you least expect it. I don’t know what to do with all my grief yet, but I’m thankful that I do know the Comforter.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Maybe It's Not So Bad....

So apparently I don't learn my lessons very well. I was going back through my recent posts, and they were about thankfulness and giving God control of my life. This past week, I've been bombarded with small and medium sized things that require a reaction from me. And my reactions haven't been very good. Instead of looking for ways that God can use the situation, I've been complaining. A lot. Yesterday, when yet another thing had to be dealt with, I was reminded of Paul. Here I am, worried about how to fix my truck and if I can get all my homework done in time. There's Paul, rejoicing because he GETS to suffer for Christ. And he doesn't just have a lot of homework. Five times I received from the Jews the forty lashes minus one. Three times I was beaten with rods, once I was pelted with stones, three times I was shipwrecked, I spent a night and a day in the open sea, I have been constantly on the move. I have been in danger from rivers, in danger from bandits...

More Funnies.

To continue the "laugh at Moriah" post from like 2011... I went to DC with my college roomie this last summer. We were taking the train in and coming back after dark, and I reasoned that taking my pocket knife (read: 4 inch blade) was a logical step. Museum security checkpoints, however didn't line up with my reasoning. I was told to "get rid of it" if I wanted to come in. So, for the next 4 museums we visited, we took a stroll through the bushes before and after to hide and retrieve my knife. At the end of the day, we headed home. With the knife. Take that, Smithsonian security. Every fall, our school does the TP Game (yeah, my school is awesome). First game of the season, and when we score the first basket, we incur a technical foul by throwing rolls of [clean] toilet paper on the court. Well, the students living off campus usually help themselves to a few rolls of school provided game TP for their houses. We lived off campus, but instead of walking out w...

Remember & Expect

As I’ve been thinking about what I want my focus to be this next year, the two words that come to mind are remember and expect. Currently, I don’t have a great relationship with those words. When your whole life (ok that’s a LITTLE dramatic but sometimes it sure feels that way can I get an amen 😫) seems like it’s been one. thing. after. another, it’s easy to get to a place where you can only remember the hard and you start to expect that the rest of life will continue to suck. You become apathetic. Cynical. And a delightful ray of sunshine to be around 🙄. I was reading Deuteronomy 8, in which Moses reminds the Israelites what God did for them in the forty years since leaving Egypt- forty years that, from a human point of view, seemed like a pointless, dead-end waste of time. It was miserable. It made no sense. And yet, God was in the details: they did not lack anything they needed. Moses also reminded them to expect what God had promised them, even though at that moment they were sti...