GROWING SEEDS: JOURNEY OF GRIEF

 

"The journey of grief has mile markers. 
The first mile marker is:
 Believe - It - Really - Happened." 

My friend, Mike Tucker, wrote those words above.  Mike knows a thing or two about Grief.  He is smack-dab in the middle of his Grief as the days tick by.......bringing him closer and closer to the first anniversary of his deeply loved wife's death.  You never saw Mike when you didn't see Gayle.....you never saw Gayle when she wasn't talking about Mike.  She was given a little less than a month from the time the cancer was revealed to the day he stood at her grave saying goodbye.  That one-year deadline is quickly approaching.

Gayle's death broke Mike in a million pieces that day. 

And as I've watched this man grieve over the course of this past year through the words of his journal......felt the moisture of his tears as they fell on words he bravely wrote on his journey to healing....I've discovered that Grief is as necessary in this life as Happiness.  Reread that, friends.  Whether this grief that breaks our hearts wide open comes from the death of a loved one, or maybe we find ourselves broken from the sheer brokenness of this evil world we live in.......It - Is - Necessary.....for a time. 

The woman at the well the day Jesus showed up in Samaria....she knew about Grief.....and she knew the pain of Brokenness.   Married multiple times, living with a man not her husband, the women in town gossiping behind her back.....the constant wondering, "Why can't I find the right person to share my life with".  It was in her brokenness that she met Jesus. 

But here's the deal:  God LOVES the broken.  Christ CAME for the broken.  It's the broken and breathless who long for the Spirit to blow life across their wounded hearts.

“In Gethsemane, the holiest of all petitioners prayed three times that a certain cup might pass from Him.
It did not.”
― C.S. Lewis