The Gift of Grief By Joey Dlamini
"Jesus wept."
It's one of my favourite verses in the Bible. Short. Powerful. Human.
As Christians, we often struggle with grief, not because we don't believe in God's power but because we do. We pray, we trust, we believe… so when things don't turn out the way we hoped, we feel a strange kind of guilt for our sadness. As if grief means we lacked faith.
I'm the glass-half-full girl, the eternal optimist. I can find the silver lining in just about anything. I even call myself an encourager to prove the point. Anyone else like that? So what happens when life doesn't go according to plan? When you lose someone you love or even the life you hoped for? If you're like me, you try to spin it positively.
You say things like, "It's not as bad as what others have gone through" or "It could've been worse." You lean into what I now recognise as toxic positivity. Sound familiar?
There's nothing wrong with trying to see the good in situations, but there's a difference between perspective and outright denial. The danger comes when we use positivity to bypass pain instead of processing it.
The truth is that grieving is a gift. This is really not easy to accept. We don't often refer to it as such, but it is. Whether it's the loss of a person, a dream, a season, a job, a friendship or a version of yourself you once knew… grief will visit us all, and if you're anything like me, you've probably pushed grief aside. Told yourself you don't have time to "wallow." That you've got responsibilities. Deadlines. People to take care of. Goals to chase. But here's the reality: you can't afford not to grieve.
Unacknowledged grief has a way of showing up elsewhere in our anxiety, our fatigue, our short tempers, our distracted minds. Sometimes, the tension in your shoulders isn't stress; it's sorrow that has never been acknowledged.
Here's the key:
Your grief doesn't have to be obvious, dramatic or "big" to be valid.
It doesn't have to make sense to anyone else.
It doesn't even have to be recent.
It just has to be real to you.
Journal prompts to sit with:
Look back over the last five years. What was your life like before the pandemic?
Are there dreams, people, or parts of yourself that were lost in the years that followed?
Have you actually grieved those losses? (Be honest).
Take this moment to acknowledge them.
Remember: grief doesn't give you back what you lost, but it creates space for healing. That space matters. It also makes you more compassionate, enabling you to comfort others with the same comfort you have received yourself.
So, if no one has given you permission yet, let this be it.
It's okay to grieve.
It's necessary to grieve.
We grieve with faith, not in place of it, and we trust that even in our loss, God will bring healing and restoration.
With love,
Joey