Grief & Loss
She was fine on Tuesday and gone on Thursday. There was no warning at all and my head will not accept it. How do people live with something that sudden?
“Then Job arose, and rent his mantle, and shaved his head, and fell down upon the ground, and worshipped, And said, Naked came I out of my mother's womb, and naked shall I return thither: the LORD gave, and the LORD hath taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD.”
Job's losses arrive inside a single afternoon, one messenger interrupting the next before the last has finished. His response is to tear his robe, shave his head and fall to the ground, which is the ancient vocabulary of shock, and only then to speak. The book offers no comfortable reason for the timing and never supplies one later. What it gives is a man permitted to be levelled and still counted faithful.
“Let not your heart be troubled: ye believe in God, believe also in me.”
Jesus tells his friends not to let their hearts be troubled on the night before his execution, speaking to men whose world is about to be removed without warning. He is not instructing them to feel calm. He is giving them somewhere to put their weight, describing his Father's house as a place with room in it. The words were spoken into the exact kind of night you are having.
A path forward
Tell the story of that week to someone, in order and out loud, more than once. Shock loosens as the mind is walked slowly through what it could not take in live.
Keep prayer short and repetitive for now. One line, said often, is enough. A mind in shock cannot hold long thoughts and does not have to.
See your doctor if sleep has gone. Sudden bereavement wrecks sleep, and going without it will make every other part of this harder than it needs to be.
Closing verse
“The LORD is good, a strong hold in the day of trouble; and he knoweth them that trust in him.”
- Nahum 1:7
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