No sooner had I learned the importance of allowing myself to feel and process sadness when grief showed up at my door with all his luggage in tow. And by the looks of it, he was planning on staying for a while.
So, given the circumstances, I did the most logical thing I could think of. I took everything I learned in the last year about dealing with emotions properly and threw it out the window. I told grief to make himself at home but that I had a very busy schedule coming up and we probably wouldn't be seeing much of each other.
At all.
This seemed like an ideal arrangement to me. Essentially, grief moved in and I moved out. And it was all going great until I realized how much I disliked being homeless.
There's an overwhelming amount of research that shows a correlation between unprocessed grief and neurosis—it seems all the scientists agree: we have to feel to heal. So the truly terrible news is we can't just allow grief into our lives and then make ourselves scarce.
We have to spend some quality time with it.
In my valiant attempts to avoid grief, one unrelenting verse followed me around like some kind of holy haunting: "Blessed are those who mourn for they shall be comforted."
When I finally slowed down enough to let those words wash over me, I realized I was missing a crucial part of the picture. (And when I say a crucial part, I mean basically the entire picture.)
Feeling the intensity of our emotions can be a terrifying thing if we miss the promise that comes with it—God's comfort. Broken hearts don't need answers or solutions, they need an experience.
When our lives fall apart, what we need more than anything is to be scooped up into our Father's arms and reminded—through a felt sense—that we are deeply loved and everything is going to be okay. Without this, we hold onto our hurt until it turns into debilitating fear and depression.
And this is why: grief will either convince us we're alone or reveal to us we're not.
The reason we have to feel to heal is because it's only when we feel our pain we can feel God's comfort. And His promise to us is that He's waiting in the midst of our pain to wrap His arms around us. He draws near to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit (Psalm 34:18).
But even more importantly: God's comfort doesn't just heal us, it equips us to become healers.
"Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God. For just as we share abundantly in the sufferings of Christ, so also our comfort abounds through Christ." (2 Cor. 1-3-5)
Because of this, every grief-stricken hour holds incredible value—the comfort we receive is ours to change the world with. These are the moments we become agents of hope to the hurting.
Those who bring healing to a broken world are those who’ve been held by their Father.
Are you willing?
The world needs you to be.