Braiding Grief and Joy

I've written before about the things I've learned over the last few years around dealing with grief. For most of my life, grief (along with any other emotion deemed to be a negative emotion) had been something that you dealt with quickly and moved on. The ability to move past in a reasonable time frame is seen as strength, as trusting God. Lingering in grief beyond what others are comfortable with can often be seen as doubt (also an unwanted emotion), as a lack of trust. 

I haven't believed this for a long time. I've talked about what I've learned about the value of sitting in these hard emotions. Grief. Anger. Doubt. To face them fully. To feel all the feelings and not consider them bad or negative. 

I've recently realized that while I have changed and this has become part of who I am, I've also held some sense of feeling like once I've done this sitting and facing and processing that I would THEN be able to move on without them. But this is no more true than my earlier beliefs. Many of our more challenging emotions will never truly go away on this side of eternity. Not our anger or our doubts, certainly not our grief or fear. They will always be a part of this journey. I spent much of the last few days struggling with when this grief would lift, feeling as if I was losing some unseen battle because it still lingers. The Bible is replete with examples of people that never saw the end of what we consider unwanted emotions. We say we believe He is the God of comfort, yet in practice, we seem to expect to rarely need Him in this way. 

Pull yourself up. 

Get over it. 

Stop whining. 

Are they still crying? 

Why can't they just let it go?

They just need to think more positive!

In practice, we do not seem to believe.

Then yesterday morning, as I prayed, as I asked Him basically, "How long, O Lord?," I felt like God was telling me that it may never leave me. This situation, this loss, these circumstances, may never change and I may never not be grieving that. But He will be sufficient even in this. Later in the morning, at church, my friend (knowing nothing of my recent struggle) said that rather than trying to avoid it, we need to turn fully to it, embrace it. And that as we face it fully, we simultaneously embrace gratitude. 

This mental picture resonates with me - this braiding together of the difficult with the good. 

‬The realization I'm coming to is we must both sit in AND move on. I've had some false sense that I couldn't move forward until I processed this grief fully and then somehow, magically, left it there as I moved on. That I would deal with my anger and then move on. Deal with this doubt, and once it's gone and replaced with a new certainty, move forward. But this is not the case. 

Both. And. 

How do I hold my grief and my joy simultaneously? How do I hold anger and love? Doubt and trust? This is the road of following Jesus - this tension of now and not yet. I can indeed move on, even as I face fully that this grief will move forward with me. As will Joy. God is with us, in the midst of. 

Grief and joy.

Anger and love.

Fear and courage.

Anxiety and gratitude.

Doubt and trust.

God with us. Emmanuel.

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"We now have this light shining in our hearts, but we ourselves are like fragile clay jars containing this great treasure. This makes it clear that our great power is from God, not from ourselves. We are hunted down, but never abandoned by God. We get knocked down, but we are not destroyed. Through suffering, our bodies continue to share in the death of Jesus so that the life of Jesus may also be seen in our bodies." ~2 Cor. 4:7‭, ‬9‭-‬10