I’m no grief expert. Well, let’s be honest – I’m no expert at all, but I have experienced some grief in my life. As a child I lost grandparents, as a teenager I lost a good friend, and as a relatively new mother I lost my own mom. I’m thankful that that is the extent of my losses. I can’t comprehend losing a spouse or a child and I pray often that that never happens.

It’s been 7 years since that amazing October morning when my mom left us for her true home.  We watched God answer her last prayer (at least that we know of) - that she would not die at night in the dark. She died at the official sunrise time for October 13^th. Of course there were many tears, but there was also so much joy in that same moment. I don’t believe that anyone except believers in Jesus can experience those two seemingly opposite emotions at the same time.  

In my quiet time this morning I was reading in Psalm 66. Verse 10 says:

 “For you, O God, tested us; you refined us like silver.”

As you can see by my blog title that “the furnace” was the theme for that season of my life. It was a perfect description of what I was living through because even though it was painful I also knew that it was going to produce something wonderful. I just didn’t know how long that would take.

Psalm 66 goes on to say at the end of verse 12:

“We went through fire and water, but You brought us to a place of abundance.”

I have these verses marked in my Bible. I even have arrows that show the progression from verse 10 to verse 12, but somehow (because I’m blind so often) I never applied that to myself and my journey. So this morning it was kind of like a smack in the face. All of a sudden I thought, “well duh Brittany!!”

This grief process is so strange and so ridiculously slow. So slow in fact that you tend to not even realize you are on the other side of it. Now I’m not saying that you are never sad anymore. Or that you don’t miss that person immensely. Or that there aren’t going to be moments of acute grief. In fact, anyone who has lost someone knows that the simplest of things can trigger overwhelming sadness. But what I am saying is that there WILL come a time when you realize that God has led you from that place of chronic despair to a place of true abundance. Abundance that we know can only be found in Him. How long that takes will be different for each person so don’t let anyone dictate how long this process will take for you. This is a journey that the Lord has YOU on. Let Him guide you and I promise that there will eventually come a day where you will get a smack in the face like I did this morning. ;)

I don’t write about this much anymore and even when I was writing all the time it was because the Lord was obviously giving me thoughts that I just had to get out. That happened this morning. I hope and pray that this can give someone the energy to try to get through one more day in their grief journey.

As my mom kept saying that last week of her life, “He’s so good Brittany. He’s just so good.”