Daily Devotion - Thursday, May 7

Natural?

A reading for today: John 11: 35

“If we include our ‘little griefs’
along with our ‘large griefs’
we can say that grief is as natural to every person as breathing.”
--Granger Westburg from Good Grief

A devotional thought on grief? You’ve got to be kidding. No.

Over the last four or five decades grief awareness has grown remarkably. Unfortunately much of the time we still associate the word grief with death. Westburg reminds us that death is a large grief, but that there are many other “little griefs” that come our way.

These days some have had to face “swine flu.” During economic downtimes, people face “job-loss grief.” With some illnesses like Alzheimer’s, families face the loss of a person before the death of a person. Moving or other types of change in family life brings grief to the forefront. A hospital or a county with “growing pains” can be a grief producer. The list, in fact, could be quite lengthy.

Often we sweep this “grief stuff” under the carpet or hide it away in a closet. The brief reading for today shows that grief stuff is OK in public. When we open ourselves to the challenge of “working through” our grief (whether little or large), we affirm our common ground with one another. When we pour out our grief, we open ourselves to the healing power that others have to give.

May each of us have the courage to identify and clarify our own “griefs” and, as we work through them, may they all become “Good Grief.”

--Ben Keckler
05.07.09