the start of a new process...

I was reminded today of something I wrote over 6 months ago. I really don't know what was going on at the time, or really what possessed me to write such things, but they are in fact still very true, and very relevant.

Here is what I wrote so many months ago....

"I feel like I am in this crazy season of life where things just keep on changing...and as we counselors know, "all change must be grieved." Yet do I do that? Do I grieve the changes in my life? I think a better question would be; do I allow myself to grieve? I always say that I could never do grief counseling because I don't have experience with grief - I'm starting to realize this is quite the lie. The truth is that I have a box around grief...almost like in order to grieve something it must first fit into this certain box, otherwise it's just something I have to get over. I usually try moving on with change and life transitions without grieving. So here I am thinking about all the things in life I haven't grieved - should I grieve them now even though some of it is long lost? Or do I simply keep carrying it around, all the while trying to find ways to keep it locked up tight? And how does one even begin to grieve things they think/feel are so long lost? Now here I sit trying to figure out my epistemology of grief - why do I believe what I do about grief? How did I learn to create such a "grief box?"

Step #1: Ask God to reveal things I need to grieve...what comes after that? I guess I'll have to wait & see..." (Sunday, June 7, 2009 @ 3:07pm)

Reading over this once again I'm somewhat amazed by that piece of me that was seemingly willing and ready to start asking the tough questions about grief. Yet here we are on December 11, 2009....I'd like to say that I have answered all of these questions, but I haven't. In truth and honesty, I have only begun to scratch the surface of a very complex and painful process. I'd like to tell you that after I wrote the above on June 7, 2009 I instantly began the pursuit of grief and it's intricacies, but alas I did quite the opposite; I shut it down. It has taken me months to say that I am on an active perusal of grief. It has been one of the hardest things I have ever had to do. Yet its even more difficult to embrace the idea that as we lose, we must too grieve; we must grieve it all.

At the moment this is still overwhelming and produces large amounts of anxiety, but in all honesty holding out on grief hasn't worked very well either. If my friend in her description of grief, redemption will be found. Thus without grieving I may lose out on my chances for hope of redemption. This cannot happen, actually I should say, this cannot happen anymore. I don't want to miss out on God's redeeming hand of hope and restoration of the loses I've experienced. Hopelessness and despair are dark places to be...even though ironically grieving sometimes puts me in the raw cold darkness.

I must believe then that the look of grief changes as we look through the lens of hope, or through the lens of despair. Yet how do we change lenses? How do we make the paradigm shift from grief as despair to grief as hope? In asking this question I am reminded back to the idea that grief may actually be all about restoration and redemption...which leads me to ask questions about how God made us??? If before the fall, all was perfect, then I must question whether we were truly ever created to grieve in the first place? Did God design us from the beginning to be grievers, or is grief merely a consequence of the fall? Not only is grief a consequence of the fall, or did God create the idea of grieving as a model for the redemption of us all?

Maybe then grief begins with God? When I think about the Fall, I'm very quick to think about how much my life has been seemingly destroyed of the perfection God intended for it to have, but really it's not about me and what I lost...It's about what HE lost. God lost; He lost everything....this is at the moment quite profound for me to even be thinking about...He lost everything...Therefore it must be safe to say that God has been grieving for 7,000 + years (give or take how old you think the world is of course)...and that if grief is the model, then is redemption the goal? God lost and still loses; God grieves; yet God is redeeming His magnificent lose through the Life, Death, and Resurrection of Jesus!

In John 10:10b Jesus says "I have come that they may have life, and have it to the full." In some ironic, uncomfortable, painful, and difficult way is our willingness to grieve and let God redeem our loses a part of that life that Jesus is referring to? Can we have that life, then without grieving the losses that the Fall has protruded? Will we be stunting ourselves from a life, a life to the full, if we don't grieve? I don't know, but sometimes I think that is what I have done to myself; I have blocked myself off from having that life that Jesus promises because in the past I have chosen not to grieve, not to acknowledge and feel the loss, and even possibly blocking God from redeeming the loss???

How ironic it is knowing the hours of my life that have been spent begging and pleading with God to fix and redeem the hurts in my life, when all the while I was refusing to grieve...For years I have prayed, and tried many things to fix and redeem the hurts and loses in my life by myself, thinking that if God couldn't fix it then somehow I must be able to do something...I did and tried seemingly everything, everything except I never grieved. As I have begun this pursuit of grief I am thinking, learning, experiencing, and feeling so many things; things that are scary and difficult to remember, and very painful, but something weird has been happening too - God is redeeming. Some of the redemptive pieces have been small, while others beyond my imagination, and yet there are still other redemptive pieces that I have yet to experience....

I'm not here to say that by grieving you have found the secret to all of life's happiness, because I don't believe that. But what I am saying is that for me this journey and process into an active pursuit of grief has begun to change my life. Although I say that beginning to grieve is changing my life, I cannot begin to not share the fact that although there are some beautiful and amazing things happening, this process is one of the most painful and difficult things (experientially speaking) I have ever participated in. Honestly saying that this process thus far has been painful and difficult still seems like an understatement, I don't know if there are words to really truly describe this process of grief...but I am learning it is a process, a life-long process, that I have only just begun. I'm 12 weeks in on one of the most difficult journeys I have ever taken, a journey that will probably last a life-time, but will change scenery along the way.

Seemingly if grief is a life-long process then we might ask why even bother? That was my stance, why grieve if it will never be complete in this life-time? It probably won't be complete in this life-time, but I'm learning to believe and experience that my ability to living life, a full life will be far greater then when I refused to grieve....