Spring Is Coming

The day Sherrie died I walked out onto our deck and I asked God to carry me through my grief and to help me grieve in a healthy, healing way.  Looking back over the past 7 months I see many ways that God has been carrying me through my grief.  One way God has carried me is through the many remarkable people he has brought into my life to help me.  One of those who God brought into my life gave me a CD by Steven Curtis Chapman titled Beauty Will Rise.  The CD contains songs he wrote after the death of his daughter.  On the CD he sings a song called Spring Is Coming.  It is a song about the resurrection to the new life.  I also relate the song to my resurrection back into life from my grief.  So where am I after 7 months of my grief journey?  I am like the picture of the tree attached to this post.  Like the tree, I am showing signs of life.  And like the tree, these signs of life are in the beginning phase and there is a long way to go before life fully blooms in me again.  I still deal with the pain of my loss.  There are waves of sadness, loneliness, anger, and depression.  There are dark days and tears. I know I have a lot of very hard grief work left to do, but the grief work I have done has kept me moving forward towards healing.  For those of you who are grieving a loss I want to encourage you to lean on God, continue to do your grief work, and don't give up.  The important thing is to keep moving forward through the pain back into life one step at a time, one day at a time.  Remember Spring Is Coming.