I believe I shall see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living. Psalm 27:13

This is a hard scripture for those of us who grieve.

Goodness, really?  This doesn’t feel so good right now.  Missing my child, the emptiness in my heart, the ache in my bones … these don’t feel like goodness.  I feel more like I am in the valley of the shadow of death than the land of the living.

And yet, it is in this place where we are most shattered, most broken open, that the Lord is able to most fully flood into our hearts. We are cracked open so completely in grief that there may be nothing left to hide.

This makes me think of Christ on the cross.  Laid bare for us. Painfully, graphically, brutally surrendered to the Father. Not for his healing, but for ours. For mine. For yours.

Our God is a God of healing and restoration.

Currently the daily mass readings are moving through the book of Exodus.  Our pastor reminded me the other day that Exodus is the story of freedom: from slavery to exile to the Promised Land. If we let him, the Lord is in the business of making us FREE. When we trust and surrender, even sorrow and death can be used fruitfully to heal and free our hearts from the bondage of sin and trauma.

Our God is a God of story.

You can be sure He is using the story of your life and the story of your child’s death to bring healing, freedom, and restoration to your soul. In fact, since your heart has been shattered to hold immense grief, as you heal you may find yourself able to hold even more joy and freedom. I love this quote from William Wordsworth after the death of his six-year-old son:

“I loved the Boy with the utmost love of which my soul is capable, and he is taken from me - yet in the agony of my spirit in surrendering such a treasure I feel a thousand times richer than if I had never possessed it.” - William Wordsworth

God gave me a very clear message after our son John Paul Raphael died:  let yourself be loved. I had been on a healing journey with the Lord already for several years. I am convinced that God revealed this particular mission to me through John Paul Raphael’s life and death to show me how close He was in my suffering. I could feel Him present in the depths of my broken heart saying: I am still here. I am still with you. Even this nightmare, I will use for your healing and my glory.

I know without a doubt that the proclamation to let myself be loved was spoken from the heart of Heaven to my heart. Whispered from my baby into my deepest soul. Mommy, please let yourself be loved. From the heart of Jesus and his own mother. Elizabeth, my daughter, let yourself be loved. THIS is what I have wanted for you from the beginning of time…

The freedom and joy and peace of eternity can be lived RIGHT NOW on Earth if you will just let me love you. And believe you are loved.

Part of my journey has included several years of Narrative Focused Trauma Training, or Story Work, with the Allender Center at the Seattle School of Theology and Psychology. Story Work involves writing and reading aloud a painful or traumatic story from your childhood and vulnerably allowing the kindness and care of others to speak truth and goodness into those stories.

At this point in my journey, I had already felt the Lord invite me to writing, grief work, and to share John Paul Raphael’s story in a book. I shared with my Story Group that the deceiver was using an old lie of unworthiness to try and silence the Lord’s invitation to share my story of grief and loss.

I could hear the enemy whispering: Who do you think you are? Your blog is a joke. You're writing a BOOK? There is nothing you can say that hasn’t been said before. Your story has been told 1,000 times already. What is even the point???

I was waging a battle with unworthiness and I struggled to fight back like a young David slinging his stones against Goliath. Our wise and gently leader affirmed me, “Yes, the plot of your story may have been told before. And that’s okay because --

We need ALL the stories in ALL the voices.

We need a chorus of truth.”

This is the freedom of letting ourselves be loved.  This is the freedom of finding the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living.

Your story matters. 

Your surrender matters. 

Your heartbreak matters. 

Your child’s life and death matter.

Your grief matters.

Your healing matters.

My story is beautiful because it is in my voice and from my heart and from my perspective. The same is true for you. No one else in the history of the world can tell the glorious story of how Love and Beauty came for you -- in the darkness of your grief, in the exile of your brokenness -- and found you, held you, healed you, and set you free.

I am free to accept and honor – even reverence—my extraordinary, ordinary, brilliant life and yours. I am free to let the glory of God radiate through me and through my pain. Together, we can be a chorus of hope to come out of hiding.

The world is in desperate need of our true selves, our authentic grief, our honest suffering.

Let us have the courage to speak the truth and let the Lord love us in our pain. To come out of hiding and share our broken hearts with Him. Let him love us and make our story shine, even in its most shattered places. We only get this one radiant life to let ourselves be loved. I pray together we will keep throwing off the shackles and learn to receive the goodness the Lord is still offering, even in sorrow, even in death.