Good Grief...

There's not a lot that is good about grieving, but I find that it does give one a fresh perspective from which deeply held beliefs can be examined and that's a good thing. With that in mind, this post is entirely about religion and may be exceptionally uncomfortable for some. You've been warned. 

Having grown up in a Christian household, the tenants of my faith were passed on to me as irrefutable truth.  Belief in God was the default setting and further examination or consideration, for the most part, wasn't necessary. I knew what was what.

Over the years, a lot of random ideas got mixed in with my Sunday school education. Pop culture, modern mythology, personal opinion and even ego were built into my assumptions about the nature of God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit.

Some Examples:

• Suffering will be evenly distributed with joy.
• Good deeds will be rewarded with good fortune.
• Pain serves the purposes of either punishment or assessment. 
• You get points for being good, for staying faithful through adversity, for spending time and money on church-y stuff and for talking people into Christianity. 
• God is important and I as an individual am not on his radar. 

Things being what they are, I find that I have a new curiosity about the mechanics of faith and hope. I  have questions about God's role in the details of my life and the space I occupy. Before Brian's death, God was far away with a lot to do and while I would send him a voicemail style prayer from time to time, I never really expected or listened for an answer. Faith and hope were abstract concepts. They were poetic words used to evoke emotion and bypass logic or reason.

In the same way that shadows are used to create texture and definition in an artistic composition, this dark season that started when Brian was diagnosed and everything I've been through in mourning his passing has added significant depth to my relationship with God and my experience of the human condition.

In my entire life, I've never been more certain of my faith... or more confused by it.  As I sort through the contradictions, every answer seems to come with a new question. But I'm persistent and resourceful and I feel like I'm on a good path to getting all of this chaos straightened out and put away in my mind. That's not to say that I don't have doubts or that the pain of this loss is even a little bit lighter. It's not.

But I have hope.

Our engagement photos taken in 1994
 at K-Mart in Alliance, Ohio.