God is with us when we grieve.

Grieving can be such a hard thing to go through.
Audra, a childhood friend of mine said it very well when she said, "Sometimes our grief and loss isn't a person. Sometimes it's a pet, a job, a home, a relationship or anything else that we were attached to. In our grief we learn that what really matters is God's love for us."

Below is something I wanted to share that I discovered while grieving the loss of my precious mama...

We cry out to God, when we lose someone we love...
The very God we ignore or deny in a million little ways every single day.
We may think that we keep Him near but in reality if we kept ourselves in the awareness of that nearness, we would know that there is no reason to doubt that He fully sees, feels and understands the intensity of our grief and sadness.
Tears come at the most uncomfortable times, leaking from our hearts and souls finding their way into our eyes washing our faces with a flood of our deepest emotions.
We wail to Him in the midst of the unfairness and pain,
not understanding, not even really wanting to understand,
just wanting and needing the sorrow of our hearts to lessen.
Our simple tears - desperately reaching out and intimately speaking to the very essence of who He is.
He is IN our tears...slipping out of our eyes, rolling down our faces, dripping onto our chests, soaking into our tissues.
He is IN our wail...rumbling up from our deepest place, flowing into our throat and shrieking out of our mouths, filling the air with a mournfulness to end up being absorbed into the normal sounds of the world around us.
He is IN our minds - that are futilely seeking to understand and make sense of our existence and make a way different than HIs, all the while quietly and knowingly protecting us with the very denial that we would use to punish or lash out.
He is IN our heart - that feels so broken that it'll never be whole again, blood powerfully coursing from this place to that, cells replicating and dying with quiet purpose.
He is IN our sorrowful solitude and silence - sitting lovingly by our side, sometimes holding our hand or gazing at our face letting us just "be" and allowing us to feel all that "being" entails, but never abandoning us to our well of emotions and our incomplete understanding.
I sometimes wonder if we can really get much closer to Him, than when we grieve....for grieving attests to great love that has been given and received and from our perception lost.
I sometimes think that that may be when He is as close as our breath, as close as our heartbeat and He, Himself remembers why He created us to begin with, for He IS love and created us from the very deepest of longings to love and be loved and share all the mysteries and revelations in a lovingly and creatively drawn out way for both our benefit and His.
The great love and utter loneliness He must've felt to fathom such a grand plan of creation and existence.
Love is what goes on and on and on and although we have no touchable type of knowing... we know.
We know He is in every tiny part of us, how could He not be?
We are made in His image and He took deliberate pains to ensure that we experienced all that He knows to be most precious and to reveal to us that He is here with us and He was willing to place a part of Himself as His Son into a human form so that we can be assured that He thought it all so worth it that even to endure the pains of His crucifixion was not too much.
He waits to welcome us back to Him in that glorious place of light and love and allows us a lifetime to become and experience all that was our assignment from before our earthly birth.
And when we cry and wail for the loss of those we loved, He knows that the very sorrow we feel is confirmation that the part of Himself that He deposited into the person that we loved and lost touched us and He is overjoyed that they've returned to Him completing their assignment in a beautiful way, making a difference, leaving their mark, sending out ripples of His love in a lasting way that carries on from them to us to those that will one day lose us...and so it shall be until all have completed their journeys and His mission has been completed and we are ultimately reunited.

© Cassandra McElyea – Author of God is With Us When We Grieve 2016
All Rights Reserved
P.O. Box 401 Van Alstyne, TX 75495