grieving

the art of grieving is a very personal thing.  i am in a book club at church that meets once a month in one of the readers' home.  on occasion we meet in our sunday school classroom.  this was the occasion this month.  events over the last month for our church family have been hard.  lots of loss going on.  our dear children's pastor, randy, went to be with the Lord and his sweet wife, kim, is grieving.  a very close friend of some of us lost her baby this week to a disease that developed in utero and she was 31 weeks along.  her baby boy died and she went through 30 hours of hard labor to deliver him.  she wept and smiled as she held her little boy.  then they took him to the morgue. she was such a testimony to the doctors and nurses because she told them she know her baby, Jeremiah, was in the arms of Jesus.  does she hurt???  yes.  does kim still ache from the loss of randy???   yes.  this will go on for a long, long time.  others shared losses that had happened to them and to others they knew in recent weeks.  a local orthodontist son passed away at college this week.  we have had many other things happen to families that are just hard too.  when we closed in prayer i got to lead out the prayer circle.  i prayed for kim and i prayed for the woman who lost her son.  i said that one day mayra would be reunited with her baby and she would see what color his eyes were and she would here his laugh.  this earthly life is a blip.  a vapor.  heaven is eternal.  the next day i got the sweetest text from one of the ladies who told me she had tucked away a miscarriage she had over 20 years ago.  during the prayer she said she just started sobbing.  she had never grieved that baby.  she thought that since she had three children already why should she even say anything.  so she tucked that pain away.  on tuesday night it erupted afresh.  searing her heart like a hot poker.  did she tell me this??  no.  i already know that pain.  i have two children in heaven that one day i will meet and hug and kiss and see.  i had two miscarriages before i had my two daughters.  each and every july and february i grieve those babies.  i know their ages.  after all these years i still grieve.  grieving is a long process that can involve lots of different things.  i have grieved over the loss of pets.  the loss of family members.  i grieved terribly over the death of my marriage.  i still miss being married.  while listening to kim talk about how the pain of losing randy was just so deep it made me just cry.  at one point she said that she had a very good marriage to her very best friend.  she knew so many women who had lousy marriages and could not help but wonder ..."why?"  why did hers end.  my marriage was not a good one for many years but the idea of marriage is something i grieve.  i grieve an intimacy that a wife shares with her husband.  not just the physical but the emotional bond and the nuances that married folk share.  i grieve the loss of that.  i ache for kim because she is just raw.  her heart has just been ground up but somehow it still continues to beat.  while we all grieve in our own ways the one security for the believer is that we never grieve alone.  Jesus catches each tear and i know that He intercedes for me.  for kim.  for mayra.  for you.