Today I spent some time with my friend, and just listening to him and how he is working through a really rough patch in life. I won’t share about his problems for sure, but I will share about what I learnt when I went through my own times of grieving and sadness.
There is always something to learn about yourself as you suffer.
I think I’ve gone through a lot of sadness, and in different forms. I’ve experienced grief from the passing of a loved one, the heartache of breaking up, the loss of a pet, moving and the change of where home is, alienation and exclusion, and the list goes on. It’s not a bad of honour, but it’s just the amount of things I was forced to learn at each of those times. I hated every moment of it, but I learnt the softness of my heart. I learnt how I can’t handle separation very well. It hurts for me to go through disunity. And I can’t stand the feeling of losing a pet.
One of the key things I end up asking myself is how I could have avoided the situation. How could I not feel sad? Is there a way to avoid it? What do I need to do to make sure I can avoid this feeling? In this whole portion, I also found out how avoidant I am about sadness, and the length I would go to to make sure that I don’t feel too sad. But with things like death, I don’t have much of a choice. I have learnt to accept death, though extremely painful.
There is always something to learn about the world around you.
The world is not a great place, and as much as a lot of people like to say that everyone in the world is just trying to make the world a better place, they’re just trying to make the world better for them, and it’s always at someone’s expense one way or another. That itself is a sad situation.
But directly dealing with things like grief and loss, I have learnt that it is actually common in the world. We are all sad creatures that are dealing with loss in one way or another. In fact, we’re losing time as I type this and as you read it. It doesn’t mean that I’m going to cry about it, but at the same time, I’m not really happy that I’m losing time. But I will cry about losing a friend, about losing a friend to death, and about losing animals to death too.
The way the person dies is almost irrelevant, I will feel sad the same way. It is the absence of the person. The distance of eternity of living and dead, and I can never speak with the person this exact same way ever again. Death is the worst because I just cannot do anything to link back up with the person ever again. There is no more connection. It hurts the most.
There is something to place about God at a time of loss.
Perhaps God isn’t your term for this. But there’s this entity, after all your shouting and screaming, beyond the other sad people. There’s this person that you ask “Why did you take this away from me?”
This question to this entity, I call God, and I know as God. I ask Him often (I attribute male because I am male, but I assume gender as a human thing, not a divine thing), why do you allow humans to take away from each other? To murder, to steal, to take emotions away.
My answer from Him is usually because they can choose to give as well. As much as I am grieving from loss, I am also glad when receiving something. I am glad to to give sometimes, not all the time, because when I choose to give, I’m choosing to part with something.
This portion gets a bit more Christian, but bear with me, I’m just sharing what I learnt about God through my sadness.
This frames as well my idea of Jesus as a saviour, as God’s gift to mankind. It’s an imagery of God parting with Jesus. It is sad, it is hard. It is painful and difficult. But he gives Jesus to us for the sake of our futures. It is good to receive Jesus because I can later have a solving of a lot other brokenness because what having Jesus means.
It is painful, but God relates. It is separation. God relates.
Why, God? Because there’s something to learn from it.
It might never feel good, but I am learning from it.
I don’t know how to cheer people up very well, as you can tell. All I can ever say is, I know your pain, and I will cry with you. I am crying with you tonight my buddy. I hope it cheers you up a bit to know that.
Why, God? What do we have to learn today?