Grief in Light of the Cross

We don’t always know when we’re grieving. Perhaps, sometimes grief can come gently as it brutally breaks your heart.
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If I’m being truthful, grief has been a daily battle this past year. It’s been a year of the kind of grief that doesn’t come as a shock, but is more like a dull throbbing–constant and weighty.
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Yet, when we grieve, will we believe the truth or falsehood? That God is good, or that God is not.
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We’re not promised earthly riches, comfort, or prosperity, as some people proclaim from behind glitzy charisma and high-end automobiles.
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No, the Children of God are instead promised earthly trials. There most certainly will be pain. There will be grief if you are marked with the Cross. For the way of the Cross is never easy, and it was never meant to be.
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The steps of Christ are, after all, the road to excruciating death. They are the way of sacrifice, of blood, of grief, and of deep pain.
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Crosses weren’t just made to be carried, but to be crucified upon.
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Yet, is any action done in mercy and obedience easy?
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Did Christ himself not experience grief time and time again? The God-Man knew grief as we will never know it, yet He had joy abundant.
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The Man who loved his children enough to be their perfect Lamb, knew intimately our grief so that we might have joy eternal!
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Yes, I grieve. Yes, the pain often presses, and breathing is sometime laborious.
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Yet, I am pressed, but not crushed. For I am held by a merciful Father who has not withheld himself from us. And what greater joy is there than to know Him?
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No, grief and sorrow are not a reason to doubt His goodness, or to shake out fists at the sky, but they are to conform us into the image of Christ.
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And there is an unexplainable joy in that.
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So, we walk our holy road daily unto death, and we sing for the life that is to come!
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Though grief has become a despised acquaintance of ours, and until the end, it will stay close, let us look forward to the day when our joy shall be made full in Glory and sorrow shall be no more!