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by Jonathan

Grief is a powerful thing, echoing on and on through the chambers of a heart.

Loss singes the soul, and death does indeed bite.

We are not the only ones who grieve, to be sure, but those who’ve lived abroad certainly know this to be true: it hurts to leave. It hurts to return. And when others leave, whether by death or call or transfer, that hurts too.

Our stories are the ones written with contrails, straddling continents and seas. And these stories, the good and the bad, the ones that heal and the ones that hurt, must be written, and remembered.

Some would say to get over it. Stop crying. Some might accuse: Too little faith. Too little thought of heaven. Too much focus on the past. As if holiness requires Novocaine. Numbness. But grief is an indelible part of our story now. Grief bleeds through the pages of our lives, marking the pages and stories that follow.

Failing to acknowledge these chapters is to censor, to edit out, to delete plot twists and main characters, to murder history.

So we leave the pages as they are, splotched and imperfect. Because on every single ink-stained page, he remains. Comforter. Rock. Shepherd. God. He remains the God who grieved, the God who understands, the God who comforts. He remains, and he is enough.

So we keep feeling, refusing to numb. We keep sketching out these life pages, confident that he knows our stories. He loves our stories. He redeems our stories. And we keep trusting that in the end, our stories are actually a part of his story.

And he’s really good with words.