A holy trinity of Grief, Pain & Love
Jul 10, 2021
"Grief, I've learned, is really just love. It's all the love you want to give but cannot. All of that unspent love gathers up in the corners of your eyes, the lump in your throat, and in that hollow part of your chest.
Grief is just love with no place to go." Anonymous
I know for many, grief & pain are things we try to avoid. Maybe they're not really necessary to experience healing, we bargain & hope.
I think grief is the PAIN of not getting to love.
We were created to, created by, and created for LOVE. We exist IN love. To not be any of those things is to literally have a break down in being human.
(which we see in psychology/pathology/personality disorders)
We think it's the Emotion of Pain that will kill us. But I think it's the Pain of NOT BEING IN A RELATIONSHIP W LOVE towards something/one that threatens to kill us.
The tendency is to avoid the pain - whether through numbing, ignoring, minimizing, denying, fighting, bargaining, redefining, etc. But ironically, that actually keeps us further from love and perpetuates the pain.
It takes courage & faith to choose to have a different relationship with pain. But when we embrace it, we discover our fear: that pain is void of love - is a false fear.
When we embrace our pain, we discover there is indeed Love literally within the pain.
The gospel isn't narrowingly a story about how the Divine took our place in the Line for Judgment & Punishment.
It's a story about how the Divine had to penetrate every possible space that we would encounter because Love never abandons nor destroys. We broke from our connection with Him in the garden & pain entered. And He willingly chose to enter into & inhabit Pain, so we would not actually die within it.
Love invites you to surrender to the pain. Our fear is that the pain will engulf & consume us, but it's actually Love that waits to engulf & consume you.
