There’s HOPE After Loss – God Has a Plan for Your Grief

• Let’s just pause for a moment. Let’s be perfectly, wonderfully, painfully honest. There is a place you find yourself in after a loss that feels so utterly foreign. It’s not a city of familiar streets. It’s a wilderness. The landmarks of your old life, the laughter that used to echo in the kitchen, the phone calls that would always come at just the right time.
• The shared dreams that painted your tomorrows, they’re gone. And in their place is a vast, quiet, aching expanse. And in that wilderness, the first and most common question isn’t even a question of theology. It’s a question of feeling. It’s a raw heart cry that whispers in the dark. Does anyone see me here? Does God see this? Oh, my dear friend, I want you to hear this with every fiber of your being. He sees.
• Your grief is not invisible to heaven. Your tears are not lost in the chaos of this world. You are not a solitary wanderer in a desert of sorrow that God has forgotten. Before we can ever talk about a plan for this grief, we must settle this eternal truth in the depths of our spirit. God meets us in the wilderness.
• He doesn’t wait for us to be cleaned up, to have our theology perfectly straightened out, to have stopped crying. He comes to the very spot where we feel most abandoned. Look at the life of David, a man after God’s own heart. He didn’t pen polite, tidy little prayers. When his soul was in anguish, he would cry out, “How long, oh Lord, will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me? That’s in the Bible.
• That is holy scripture. It is a man in the wilderness of his despair, feeling utterly forsaken. And yet, and here is the miracle. He is still talking to God. He is bringing the raw, unfiltered reality of his grief and placing it right at the throne of grace. God didn’t strike him down for his honesty.