Over the last two months, as I’ve been preparing this “simple little low-maintenance writing outlet” that has somehow taken on a life of it’s own thereby taking me three times as long to get ready as I hoped, I’ve paused to question, repeatedly, if this was worth it.  And each time I’ve done so, the Lord has been gracious to remind me that I’m on the right track.

Those reminders have come by way of conversations—numerous conversations—with women and men who are feeling and saying many of the same things as I.  Women and men who wrestle to live in acceptance—and not resignation—of the physiological cards they are currently being dealt.  Women and men who long for their life’s purpose to not be hindered by their diagnoses.  Women and men who know what it’s like to live in the tension between the now and not yet of our bodies.  Women and men who understand that there is both grief and joy in the giving and taking away happening within each of our lives.

I had one such conversation this past Sunday.  The woman who waited after church to chat with me shared about how a chronic health issue was impacting her life—causing her to have to leave her job, to worry about her future, to struggle with the feeling that the work she is doing now does not have meaning or purpose and longing, in her 50s, to be doing something that has meaning and purpose.  There’s no other word for it—she was just plain sad.  And I got it.

And I was reminded, as we were talking, of a friend who is single and the many conversations we’ve had over the years about acceptance and contentment and how difficult it is to walk in a place of acceptance at all times because the circumstances of our lives are always changing.  And the truth is there are simply things that come up that we don’t know we are going to have to grieve until we actually get there.  The woman I was talking with Sunday has had ongoing issues throughout her entire life, as have my daughter and I.  And it’s quite common for those not walking a similar path to observe a moment of struggle and think, “Good Lord.  Are they not over that by now?  Why can’t they learn to just accept that it is what it is?”

Acceptance.  Grief.  Can we walk in both?  If I’m I grieving a new loss, does that mean I’m not walking in acceptance?

I mentioned to this woman that thought—that even when we’e been walking this path for a while, accepting that this is our path, there are still things along the way that we discover to be losses that we must now grieve.  At the time of acceptance, you can’t grieve what you don’t even know yet you’ve lost.

This was true for my daughter.  When we pulled her out freshman year, there was certainly grief.  But then there was a foggy sort of half-acceptance/half-despair.  The issues had been around for years now—they were no longer new.  And she had already grieved leaving the school she loved with her lifelong friends.  But suddenly, two years later, there were new losses she was aware of.  Friends with leading roles in musicals, knowing that’s an opportunity she was unable to have.  Friends visiting colleges, knowing college is still a year or two away, knowing that it might not look for them like it looks for her.  Knowing that she would not graduate in 2017 with her original cohort.  Not driving yet.  Not posting senior pictures on Facebook because they won’t be taken for another year.

And she began to grieve those things.  And it was heavy and it was overwhelming.  For both of us.  But it was also necessary.  Because it is only once we grieve these things that we can release them and find our way forward.

Each loss grieved is an encounter with the Lord, if we allow it to be.  A time spent—as I do with my daughter—being held and stroked and comforted.  To grieve—if we are doing it right—is not the opposite of acceptance.  Grief, if anything, is the threshold of surrender.

For when we grieve each new loss in God’s presence, allowing ourselves to be held, we are in essence laying that thing on the altar—releasing it.  Offering it.  Surrendering it to be taken.  In the Old Testament, when this was done, there was an altar of remembrance built to commemorate this capitulation.  A pile of stones serving as an indestructible reminder.  A touch point.  A commemoration.

But as I envision these altars of sacrifice, I am reminded of hiking in Acadia.  Of rocky paths up difficult heights where the cold wind blew hard but the view was what really took our breath away.  And I see that those piles of stones in our lives—the rocks we pile in our moments of grief—also become cairns, trail markers, marking the way along our journey.  Indicating to us if we ever get lost how to get back on the path.  Indicating to others who come behind us the way to go.

It is in this way that grief and acceptance can walk hand in hand.  We do not set up camp at our altar—we allow it to be a cairn that points our way forward.  We allow it to determine our path, without protest or dissent.  We allow it to put a name to our pain.  We allow it to provide a purpose to our wandering.  And having pulled up our tent stakes, we set off, again climbing ever higher.

It is a steep, rocky path with a bitter cold wind—but I’ve heard tell the view will be worth it.

acceptance courage faith grief hope loss surrender