My Grandma Rose passed away a little over two weeks ago, and several people have commented to me that I'm holding up well, etc. I've been watching old home movies of her and the rest of our huge family. I've been telling the kids stories about her. I think about her all the time. Those are things that bring me comfort. Those are things that help me get through the pain of the loss. We all grieve differently, and we even mourn each individual loss differently. The way I mourn the loss of my grandma may not be the same way I will mourn the loss of a parent in the future, or the loss of one of my children or my spouse. And that's okay. The relationships we form with others are all different, therefore, the way we mourn their loss will be different. Know what I mean? Anyway....
I'll let you in on a little secret that I learned a long time ago. And that secret is that Rafiki was right. He knew what was up.
In the clip above from the Lion King, Simba has finally come to the realization that he needs to go back home, deal with his past, and take his rightful place as king to save his kingdom from his evil Uncle Scar. Simba is afraid to go back home because of the circumstances surrounding his departure, and he also knows that his past is painful. Rafiki tells him the most important lesson of the movie, in my opinion: "Oh yes, the past can hurt. But the way I see it, you can either run from it, or learn from it."
It's the same with any loss, I think. Whether that is the loss of a spouse through divorce, the loss of a loved one through death, or maybe even the loss of a home to a fire. We all have a choice to make. We can either run from the situation, or we can face it head on, embrace the pain and grief, and learn from it.
It has been 11 years since my ex-husband asked me for a divorce. I learned very quickly during that next 6 months that I could work 14 hours a day, come home and drink a few bottles of hard liquor each week, and live life by my own rules, but in the end that wasn't going to get me any closer to moving on from the pain and getting to the other side. In the end it took moving 500 miles away, learning to live without medicating myself with booze, and learning to hand it all over to God to help me get through it.
I live in Iowa, so we see a lot of corn fields around here. If the pain of my divorce were a huge corn field in front of me at that time, you would have seen me spending a lot of that first year trying to walk around the perimeter of that field, trying to get AROUND the pain and not think about it. When I finally learned to hand it over to God, he took my hand and helped me walk THROUGH the corn field to get to the other side. And let me tell you, it was much quicker to get to the other side by walking through the pain than by trying to dance around it.
I think the same thing applies to dealing with grief. We can try to push it to the back of our minds, we can try to avoid it, we can try to not think about the person we have lost....or we can embrace the memories, we can acknowledge the pain and the loss, we can recognize that it is going to take time to heal from it, and be okay with that. Life is best walked through one step at a time. Let's not try to rush through the hard stuff. God works through our pain and our difficult situations. It is during these times that we are strengthened and changed like iron in a fire. Let God take your hand and lead you THROUGH that corn field. He has the map. He has promised He will never leave us or forsake us. He is a God who keeps his word. Some of the best prizes are on the other side of that corn field. You just have to make the choice to keep putting one foot in front of the other. It will get better. I promise.
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