As It Should

On Halloween this year, I saw an unforgettable photograph of a young girl trick-or-treating on streets clogged with Michael's wreckage. She walked towards the sunset, her bag over her shoulder, with broken shingles and chunks of brick on either side of the street and a row of blue tarped houses in front of her. And part of me thought: that's so great that she gets to go do something totally normal right now when everything else is so not normal. And another part of me thought: how can we even think about something like trick-or-treating with everything that's going on?

But the truth is that life doesn't stop when we are grieving. The children still have to be fed. The dog still needs to be walked. The baby still has to have a nap at a relatively regular time. This is true whether we are walking through a wide spread community grief (like a hurricane) or an intimate personal grief (like a miscarriage). At least when it's the former, we are not the only ones walking around in a daze wondering how this normalcy can exist when the fabric of our lives has just been shredded.

Part of us wants life to stop, as if that would validate our pain. We ask ourselves how someone else can be laughing, when we feel that all the joy has been stripped from the world, how someone else can be falling in love, when we're pretty sure that love has been lost forever because of what we have been through. We are too numb to be cynical, but that is, of course, the next place we will land once our grief begins to fade.

Except that life goes on...as it should. We realize that while we may be in a season of loss, there is still hope that it is not forever. While we are in a season of grief, there are still joys worth celebrating. While our hearts are broken, they still function, at least in part. We make the next meal. We take the next walk. We prioritize the next nap time. And we wake up the next morning and do it over again, and maybe--just maybe--it's not quite as hard as it was the day before.

We find ourselves taking in the muted fire of sunrise, awestruck at the beauty. We remember how much comfort there is when given a hug that squeezes us just the right amount. We are served a meal that suddenly tastes like life instead of sawdust.

And we may not stay in that moment for very long, that moment where we felt fully whole again, but it happened and it may happened again. If we wait for it. If we grieve honestly but keep hope in our hearts. If we keep waking up day after day and putting one foot in front of the other.

We want life to stop in the face of our loss, but we don't get what we want. Thankfully. Instead, we get a chance to learn that his mercies are new every morning. And his faithfulness is great. Even when it doesn't look that way. Even when it doesn't feel that way. And sometimes especially when it doesn't look or feel that way.