My Experience as Youth Pastor

Honestly I don't know that I would choose to write on grief. I try to have fun and keep things light unless I need to vent, but I struggle with depression and feelings of self-doubt. That is one of the reasons I avoid writing on subjects like grief. I did write a post about my deepest grief once. It is also my greatest testimony that I call being taken from the black hole.

This year had brought quite a bit of grief to myself and dear friends and family. My grandmother died on my mother's birthday this year. I don't know if I would survive that. I was asked to speak at the funeral and that was the hardest speaking experience I have ever had.

Grief speaks of loss, but sometimes it is hard to figure out what the loss really is. I grieved my grandma, but I never really knew her. I think I grieved no knowing her and never getting that opportunity more than losing her. I was raised in the military so I might have seen her an average of one week a year. My dad's mother died when he was a boy and my mom's dad died when I was a boy. I met my dad's dad like 3 times in my life for a total of a few hours. He died 3 years ago. When my grandma died I also lost my history. I have friends with great grandparents they knew and spent time with regularly. I felt like my anchor had been pulled up leaving me adrift.

When I think of grief my head spins, because you can't really feel grief unless you are attached. The problem is we tend to be attached by many threads so when those threads are cut the grief is amplified because it comes from too many directions.

I don't like to write about grief because it reminds me of all those severed threads, but it also serves to remind me that when the world is spinning out of control that there is a rock that doesn't move.

Labels: Blog Carnival, Grief