All our attempts to put grief into words seems to us…inadequate. At the very time when grief and our verbalizings of it bring us to tears, we find ourselves feeling that our grief is really too deep for tears and too agonizing for words. As we struggle with the ache of loss, the grip of our grief imposes a kind of relational paralysis. It hurts like hell, we say; perhaps it is a true reflection of hell, where the ache of losing God and all good, including the good of community, will be endless; be that as it may, a most painful part of the pain of grief is the sense that no one, however sympathetic and supportive in intention, can share what we are feeling, and it would be a betrayal of our love for the lost one to pretend otherwise. So we grieve alone, and the agony is unbelievable.
J.I. Packer
The Lord is near to the brokenhearted
and saves the crushed in spirit.
Ps. 34:18
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Grief is an unbidden guest, but it need not be an unwelcome one. In the Father’s hands, it is a means of healing those parts of ourselves that have long gone unseen and unheard.