Dear friend,
Jesus wept.
I have been thinking about how grief keeps returning at hours that make no sense, how it can be the middle of folding laundry and suddenly the loss is standing in the room again as if it just happened.
I want to name that plainly this morning rather than move past it. You are grieving something, and I am not going to spend this letter trying to talk you out of the weight of it or arrange it into something more bearable than it is.
In John 11:35, the whole verse is two words. He wept. Not at the tomb of a stranger, and not before He had already told His friends what He intended to do. He wept anyway, in the middle of knowing. I notice that the text does not treat His grief and His power as contradictions that needed sorting out. They simply sat in Him together.
I do not think you are required to make sense of your loss before you are allowed to feel it. Grief that waits for permission tends to wait a long time.
What has today asked of you that you were not ready to give?
A prayer
God, You know exactly what has been taken and what it costs to keep living around that absence. Stay close to her in the plain hours today, and let her feel that closeness even when nothing has been resolved. Amen.