Coping With Grief
I have a dear friend, a seminary professor, who died recently, leaving behind a wife and kids who are struggling with grief.
I have a dear brother whose wife left him for another man just last week. He too is struggling with grief right now.
The death of a husband, the death of a marriage. There are a lot of similarities between the two.
And yet when I read things like this - Libbie's reflections on life after Al - I am hopeful, because there is life after death - God is a God of resurrections. He raises the dead. Dead people. Dead marriages. And those two things - hope in the face of death, and the reality of resurrection - are very, very foreign to this world in which we live.
Libbie is a great example of what that hope looks like in there here and now, and so I find myself wondering (and hoping) whether God might not somehow miraculously save my brother's marriage, or at least grant him the grace to walk through that death the way Libbie has walked through Al's.
I am not sure whether he has any such hope right now, so I am hoping for him, looking forward to seeing what God will do.
posted by Pilgrim in Progress @ 10:40 PM
3 comments
3 Comments:
One of the lines that most struck me from Libbie's post is, "I think that the way God has answered your prayers for me ... is that he’s given me eyes to see what is already the case."
What a great thing to pray for ourselves and for people who are going through suffering of any kind: may God grant us all eyes to see what is already the case.
That struck me too, Molly, and that was kind of what spurred my thoughts in this post - what would it look like to walk through the death of a marriage in the same way that Libbie is walking through the death of her husband, with eyes that see what is already the case in Christ. Obviously there's not a 1:1 correlation here (between a spouse dying and a spouse leaving), but there are similarities, and it seems to me that the call for us as Christians is similar in both - to look for Christ in the midst of the struggle, to see the grieving process as something that might actually be a means for us to draw closer to Christ, rather than further from him. Anyway... not particularly coherent, but those are some of the thoughts running around in my brain right now. Thanks for sharing...
Another stream of thought is coping with the death of our dreams. What is God up to when life takes a turn we aren't expecting. Whether that is the death of our marriage, or never being married when you desperately dream to be. There are a thousand ways we could fill in this "death" scenario.
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