In her excellent book, Prayer in the Night, Tish Harrison Warren writes:
“If we do not make time for grief, it will not simply disappear. Grief is stubborn. It will make itself heard or we will die trying to silence it.
If we don’t face it directly it comes out sideways, in ways that aren’t always recognizable as grief: explosive anger, uncontrollable anxiety, compulsive shallowness, brooding bitterness, unchecked addiction.
Grief is a ghost that can’t be put to rest until its purpose has been fulfilled.”
I love that last line.
Don’t let a Victorious Christian Church Culture pressure you out of a grief that permeates the Psalms, the whole Bible, and Jesus’ own life as a “man of sorrows.”
There’s a strange fusion of Victorious Christian Church and American Optimism at work in most evangelical churches today, wherein you have to always be making progress towards success.
In this case, success from grief.
So they’ll try to find all sorts of ways for you to short-circuit the process.
But grieving itself is the balm for grief. It is not the problem.
As she says, “Grief is a ghost that can’t be put to rest until its purpose has been fulfilled.”
Amen.
