How God's Love Changes Us: Part 3 - Overcoming Grief, Achieving ReconciliationSample

To move toward joy, we must have the courage to grieve what has been broken in our lives. This requires a willingness to grieve our stories of loss, to mourn with courage at what treasure has been taken or what dream has not come to fruition. Was your childhood innocence lost as a result of sexual abuse? Was your heart broken by your father’s violence? What did your mother’s passivity and manipulation create in you as an adult?

To let pain matter is to honor your story; to honor your story is to honor yourself. The capacity for joy that transcends death is proportional to the depth at which we are willing to grieve. If we have grieved our losses only superficially, we may miss the fullness of joy when the time for gladness comes.

It’s important to note that we need not go searching for grief in an effort to experience joy; that’s not how authentic grief works. When we live with open hearts, tragedy and heartache will find us whether we like it or not. The question is not whether grief will arrive but whether we will have the courage to become intimate with it when it does.

Where are you on the continuum between grief and joy? What wounds do you still need to face within your own life in order to increase your capacity for joy?

This is Day 1 of Overcoming Grief, Achieving Reconciliation which is Part 3 of How God's Love Changes Us: three reading plans based on The Prodigal Son Parable. All three plans are based on Andrew Bauman's book Stumbling Toward Wholeness. Learn more about the book here.