If you’ve experienced grief, you know it’s different from sadness. Sadness is on the inside, like a bruise on the bone that sends a twinge up your spine when you brush against a painful memory. Grief, however, is outside, like being cast into the sea with no life preserver. Every moment is a fight to stay afloat, but the waves are merciless, and the deep beckons with every breath. Climbing out of bed feels like climbing a mountain. Making conversation feels like delivering a TED talk. When grief enters your life, every day is reduced to a series of endurances, and nothing comes easy.
I know this because when I was 24, I found myself lost in that sea. My wife and I had just moved to Kansas City. We lived in a little loft across the street from the Folgers factory, so every morning was Folgers in our living room, our hallway—pretty much anywhere but in our cups. (Go for Starbucks) We’d been there about a month, I was managing a Radio Shack, and Christmas was in full force. We had just celebrated our first anniversary a couple of days after we arrived, and life seemed like it was finally starting to come together. Our first year had been tough—we’d faced everything from layoffs to eviction—but in a new place, far from family and history, it felt like we’d finally found our path.
On Christmas Eve, the snow was so heavy the street signs were half their usual height, something I’d never seen being from Texas. But in Missouri, this was just a normal winter day, so at 7 p.m., I was still neck-deep in customers. This was the first Christmas I’d been away from my family, so when my dad called, it was a welcome interruption. I was trying to close the store, so I told him I’d call back in a couple of hours, a moment I wish I could have back to this day. An hour after I hung up, my brother called to tell me my parents and grandmother had hit an ice patch on the way home and slid into an oncoming car.
I remember thinking, “This doesn’t happen to people in real life; it’s something you hear about on the news or read about in a blog.” It’s like our brains can’t process the idea that it can happen to us until it’s our door that death decides to dawn. I must have been in shock because I asked my brother if I’d missed the punchline—I honestly thought he was telling a bad joke. But there was no punchline. Just a cold pitiless truth - my dad and grandmother didn’t survive, and my mom was closer to death than life.
As the news sunk in, it felt like a bomb went off. It was visceral. Standing there in my office surrounded by my pain, confusion, anger, and questions, I felt the fragments of my now shattered life closing in, and all that remained was the inevitable impact. But the impact never came. Instead, I stood there staring at the pieces of my life, hovering around me like broken glass, close enough to be a threat, yet restrained by some invisible force. That’s when I saw what could only be described as a vision. A dark path, like an abyss, and a light path opened up on either side of me. Not a literal portal—nothing so sci-fi—but it was more than a metaphor. It was as though God allowed me to see the spiritual reality of that moment.
In the abyss were all my questions, anger, accusations, and pain. It promised validation and a sort of dark comfort. It called to me, and I wanted to go to it. The light path, by contrast, was just a road lined with trees, like looking out a car window on a quiet Saturday afternoon. There was no draw or whisper, just a clarity that’s difficult to articulate. As I stood there, something welled up in my soul, and I blurted out, “God, this doesn’t change anything between you and me. No matter what happens next, we’re good.” A silly thing to say, but it was honest. As soon as the words left my mouth, the abyss closed in on itself, and the light path expanded until it faded into my office. And just like that the paths were gone, by the night's end, so was my mom.
Ten years later, I finally had the courage to ask God what I saw that night. He showed me that the dark path was a relationship with grief, and the light path, a relationship with Jesus. The dark path seemed comforting because grief tells you everything you feel is valid; your anger is valid, your sadness appropriate, and your demands of God just. But with that validation, it also tells you that your future is irreparably damaged, and to receive its comfort, you have to receive its lies. Grief will tell you how your father’s never going to see your son’s first steps, and your mother will never see you become the man she always knew you could be. It says every Christmas is ruined because you will have to relive this night through every decoration and holiday affair. Grief will literally steal your future by turning the moments you most looked forward to sharing with your loved ones into reasons to mourn their absence. It will project your entire future before you and turn every hope you had into an open grave until your life becomes nothing but a series of funerals. Then, after stealing your future, grief will make you resent your memories until even the happy times you have left become so bitter you wish you never had them at all.
You see, when you experience something like this, it doesn’t just bruise; it literally cracks the well of your soul, and what you fill the void with determines your future. That night I chose my relationship with Jesus, and I know that the peace I have today is a direct result of that decision. Not that it was an easy road. When I arrived home that night, I stood in my bedroom staring at the shrapnel of my life, still frozen around me. I had made my choice, and I knew what that meant. The Lord asked if I was ready. I said yes, stretched out my arms, closed my eyes, and let the wave land. In that moment, I broke in ways I didn’t fully realize until much later. For years, fear of letting my wife drive without me masked itself as vigilance. I held back from attaching to my children, afraid I wouldn’t survive if something happened to them, for far longer than I care to admit. But the difference between the path I chose and the one I avoided is that damage can be healed. And though I’ve walked through a lot of damage, I’ve only faced the challenge of healing, never hopelessness.
It was in this place I came to understand that nothing can replace your personal relationship with Jesus. No sermon, pastor, friend, or church. When that call came, no words encouraged, no hugs comforted. Only truth pulled me through the dark moments when everything I felt seemed to be the most honest, and all I wanted was to be told my anger was just, and the depth of my grief valid. When grief beckoned me to the depths, Jesus told me the truths that were hard to hear but kept me afloat. He told me that every Christmas isn’t ruined, just that one; that while my dad won’t see my children’s first steps on earth, he will see their first steps in heaven. Those truths, while difficult to hear in the moment, anchored my soul to eternity.
If you’ve been around for any period of time, you’ve probably heard someone say, “God allows these things to bring us closer to him.” As someone who has walked through it, I can assure you death and evil are not from God. He is just gracious enough to take what is meant for evil and make it so good, it feels like it was part of the plan all along.
If you are in a sea of grief right now, or worse, living with the bitterness it left behind, I want to encourage you that Jesus is near to the brokenhearted. His words are not always the most comforting, but they are always honest; and when you are drowning, you want the guy who’ll knock you out and drag you to shore, not the guy who tries to make you feel better about your situation. I still shed the occasional tear over a missed moment or experience I wish my parents were here to share. However, I know that every day I walk in peace and hopefulness, every first I enjoy with my boys and every Christmas I refuse to sacrifice at the altar of sadness, I am stealing glory from grief. So, from truth to truth, standing firmly on a foundation of unshakable peace, rooted in eternity and comforted by the creator, I defiantly say:
“Oh death, where is your victory? Oh death, where is your sting!”
~ In Loving Memory of Pat Wilbourn, Alan Wilbourn, & Kay Nelson
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