Our Grief Unraveled Our God Redeems

Have you ever unraveled a skein of yarn in order to knit a project? First you must dig down in to the skein to find the end piece. When you reach in, you discover a tangled mass of threads, bound together and wrapped around one another. As you pull out the mass, you notice that the strands run across one another, up and down, back and forth, without any order.

After searching and teasing out the strands, you eventually find the end of the yarn, however, your work has just begun. Now the mass of strands must be untangled before you can start creating what you set out to create, like a sweater or a scarf.

This is how it can be when we begin to discover and get to the bottom of our grief and its complexities and mysteries. We may discover that the myriad of emotions entangled in our grief are great. Disappointment and regret and fear and rage and dread and loneliness and inadequacy and helplessness, and a great amount more, are all wound together.

As we desire to live the life that God has for us and try and work out the mess of our grief, we realize that in order to do so we may have to dig down deep and find the end of our grief (which may be the beginning) and untangle the emotions and the memories. There may be a lot of work that needs to be done in order to make sense of the mess and begin to straighten it all out.
Without God, of course, it is impossible to understand any of it. We need Him to help guide us through the process. He holds our hand to help us untangle the mess, and then takes the mess and shows us how to make something of great beauty.

In the end, we may realize that the emotions that we experience in grief are the same emotions that we can experience in living a full life. Now, however, they are laid down differently, not tangles, but side by side in a pattern that is vibrant, useful and honoring to God.

Seek the Lord our God, dear reader, with your grief and your sadness and ask Him to make something beautiful with it. Entrust the tangled mess to the Master's Hand and perfect plan. Psalm 34:22 says that "The Lord redeems His servants." God can and will redeem the lives of those He loves. He takes our messes and makes them lovely. Trust Him to unravel your grief and give you life, today.