Some Past Posts

For those of you who've been reading these posts it won't be a surprise that I've been on a journey of grief. A journey that instead of becoming easier to bear over time has strengthened it's hold on me.

I've felt punished, I've felt that I must have planted a bitter crop to be reaping the harvest I find myself reaping. I've felt depressed because it seems that God is hell bent on punishing me for something horrible I've done yet I have do idea what that was.

So I've been carrying this pain of constant loss, the pain of injustice, the pain of thinking that no one can or does understand what I feel, the pain when some well meaning people want to point out the reasons why it is "crazy" for me to feel the pain I feel and still be at this level of grief.

But where I believe that I've miss the mark the most is my need to focus on my pain, to allow it to burst forth a boiling cauldron of hot putrid acid. Spewing from my mind and hands in these blogged rants and raves. So, I've removed those past posts and today and perhaps only for today, I've decided to look forward with hope. To focus on good possibilities and to ask God to show me how He wants to use this situation, to mold me, to train me, to create or refine in me a specific character or pattern of behavior that He can use for His glory and for His Kingdom.

Judges 3:1-2 (NLT)
These are the nations that the Lord left in the land to test those Israelites who had not experienced the wars of Canaan. 2 He did this to teach warfare to generations of Israelites who had no experience in battle.

It’s not about punishment at all. For a more rounded focus, I have to read the entire Bible and stop taking the verses that have been misunderstood for generations out of contex and understand them in conjunction with His grace, His Word in it's entirety. To know that it's not God who brings bad things on me. But it is God who takes all situations and works them for my good and His Glory. That maybe it’s about discipline? One definition of discipline is; “Training expected to produce a specific character or pattern of behavior.”

Complicated Grief

I found a term today that may describe me - but I'm not exactly sure. It's called complicated grief. The definition goes something like this; Complicated grief is unresolved grief that is a term used to describe a prolonged sense of mourning.

That pretty much sums it up for me right now doesn't it? Unresolved grief. Here's the problem, everything I read talks about helping the person get past the death of a loved one - helping them move through bereavement, mourn it out as it were, to get to place of health. Strangest thing though, I couldn't find anything telling me how to get past the type of loss that I am experiencing.

Recently I was praying and thinking that I don't ever want Andrew's mother to go through, to feel the things, that I am feeling. That I don't want her to have to reap what she is sewing and then it hit me.... What did I plant that the crop I'm reaping is so very bitter?