Conversations
with a co-worker and Carol this week have stimulated a new thought for me – can
grieving actually become a spiritual discipline?
Richard Foster
describes spiritual disciplines as exercises that place you before God so that
He can transform you.
By this
definition, working through grief – grieving – can serve as a spiritual
discipline if it moves you toward God and puts you in a position where God is
able to transform you. Of course, for
many, grief seems to result in them moving farther away from God, in some ways,
further from his grasp since the intense pain in loss seems to have a hardening
effect on many hearts (understandably so, I might add).
For me though, my
grieving seems to mostly push me toward God.
Sometimes in anger but always in pain, I have a much deeper longing or
yearning for being with God in some relational kind of way. I want to know this being we refer to as God
and I want to be assured that my son is with Him and that my faith and hope in
this assurance is true and permanent.
In my case,
perhaps grieving serves as a magnet, drawing me closer to the source of all
that is good, right, and true about all of creation, including we human beings. In my pain, I yearn to be transformed.
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