We all mourn… differently, and that’s ok. I once heard a mom tell me that shortly after her child was born, and that baby was diagnosed with a lifelong ailment that, “she had to mourn the idea of her perfect baby”. It wasn’t that there arose in the mom a desire to neglect the child for, not being “the ideal”, it was mourning the ideal. I mourned the death of my family, as I knew it, when I got divorced. I’ve mourned the death of my grandparents, in a more traditional sense, when they passed away. What I’m getting at, is that it is ok to mourn… but not get stuck there.
I say this to just state the obvious, we all have these ideas… where we’re going to end up living, what we want to be when we grow up, what our kids will be like, what our family is, what our houses are going to look like, what our socio-economic status will be, etc… and sometimes life happens and our ideas either never come to fruition or, in some painful circumstances, we come to grips with the fact that our “idea” is just that… a fantasy, and therefore, it ain’t gonna happen. I’m not diminishing these moments because they can be significant. I’m saying… we’ve all been there. I get bummed out because what I really, really wanted… didn’t work out, and I’ve been rocked to my core, because what I believed was solid was actually a vapor.
So I’ve mourned both physical losses and ideals that never manifested… and that’s ok.
Why is it ok? Because God. HE has a way of weaving those lost ideals into new opportunities, HE has a way of making beauty out of ugliness, HE has a knack for bringing light into dark situations, and most importantly HE has a way of using us when we’re at our weakest, when HE’s pruned us, we can bloom. Jesus wept… we WILL weep. But then… we got to get up and glorify HIM, regardless of what we are, where we are, what we aren’t, and who we’ve lost.
God is good all the time.