My recent trip "home" to England was emotional, but also very comforting. I felt an affirmation that I had not expected, and initially I did not feel. I started out with a great deal of anxiety as I addressed the place I had lived in my first year of marriage. It was hard to be there alone, and to experience the wisps of memory from that time. I walked away from that place without regret, but there is still an affection for the little flat we made our home, and the village where we stayed for almost a year.
Deep in the darkness of my heart, I felt again that sense that I am not the beloved wife that I was. I am not comfortable with myself as a single person. I feel old, used up. I am unhappy with the way I look. I see the sadness when I look in the mirror. I also see myself with such a critical eye that my husband never applied to me when he looked at me.
It's hard to believe that such darkness could come upon what was a happy, contented marriage. But it has. And, gradually, over the last year, I have grown to accept that. It doesn't make me happy about it, but It Is, and I have no choice about it.
So, here in the darkness I sit.
Part of that package is a terrible anxiety that doesn't really have a form. It sits over me in a cloud, and influences my ability to reason. I know where it comes from. I've fought it before.
Each step of the way, there were the little blessings in the details: things that worked out well, paths cleared, difficulties smoothed.
In the midst of it all, I felt the whisper of love. I long to bless you, for you to rise up and be called Blessed, to be blessed in your own eyes again, for You are beloved.
I see this same pattern in other bereaved wives I know. We are all too aware of what we have lost, yet we are also aware of the immense grace and mercy that has sustained us through the most difficult days in our lives. We can say "I have lost much and I am grieving, and God is the power and the love that has enabled me to get this far." There is no other way we could have done it.
God spoke these words:
Your focus is in the wrong direction. You look back and down. Looking back is part of grief and cannot be stopped as you must go through it. Looking down, you will see a sad woman and a grieving wife, a woman who has lost her love and doubts that she could ever live again. But when you look up you see me - full of possibility. I bring out your potential. I raise you from the pit. In time, I enable you to look forward, but you don't go there on your own by yourself. It doesn't happen over night five minutes after your husband died.
You are not over. Not yet. But take each piece at a time and don't rush to accumulate what you are not yet ready to handle.
Take in what I have for you and enjoy what there is to enjoy. It is not all grief. Allow time and space for the grief, for it must be released when it needs to be.
There is still hope in the midst of all this. It is there like a grain of wheat, dying and then slowly, gradually bursting into life. Life doesn't just "happen". It comes along while you are doing other things, while you wait, while you long for it. There will be more life ahead for you.
And that is why Jesus came - to make us a way to life, and life to the full. As I heal, I will develop the ability to embrace it again, without my husband, but with my Jesus.
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