Grief & Loss
My husband died last year and the house is unbearably quiet. I do not know how to be a person on my own. Where do I even start?
“And she said unto them, Call me not Naomi, call me Mara: for the Almighty hath dealt very bitterly with me. I went out full, and the LORD hath brought me home again empty: why then call ye me Naomi, seeing the LORD hath testified against me, and the Almighty hath afflicted me?”
Naomi comes home widowed and childless and tells the women of Bethlehem to stop using her name and call her Bitter instead, because of what the years took from her. The book lets that stand without correction and without a rebuke from God. Her honesty is not the obstacle to what happens next in her story. It is where the story actually begins.
“Now she that is a widow indeed, and desolate, trusteth in God, and continueth in supplications and prayers night and day.”
Paul is writing to Timothy about how a church should organize care for widows, which tells you something before the theology does: the early church budgeted for them. He describes the widow left genuinely alone as a woman who continues in prayer night and day. That is not a picture of someone coping well. It is a picture of someone taking her loneliness straight to God.
A path forward
Change one thing about the silence: a radio at breakfast, a window open, a fixed time you leave the house. Small rearrangements of a room do real work.
Say your evening prayer out loud rather than in your head. In an empty house, praying aloud puts the sound of your own voice back into it.
Accept the next invitation you would normally turn down, even for one hour, and ask one friend to keep inviting you and not to stop when you say no.
Closing verse
“A father of the fatherless, and a judge of the widows, is God in his holy habitation.”
- Psalm 68:5
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