Amid all the smiles and laughter, if you’re grieving this Christmas, it’s OK. Your anguish has a role to play. If you let it, that pain can lead you to remembrance, which leads you to hope, which leads you into communion with God, which leads you back to the presence of the one you love. In other words, the grief we experience from death or absence calls us to a deeper knowledge of God’s love. And God’s love is what we need to reveal the presence of the other.

Think about it like this: When you grieve and allow God to grieve with you, the God in you (deep love) speaks to the God in the other. Psalm 42:7 calls this “deep speaking to deep.” Your Grief creates a mutuality in the heart of God, who embraces both of you.

Over the last year, I would say this has become one of the most profound thoughts I have wrestled with. It’s given me such fodder to consider and hold. It’s given me something to cling to when all else feels loose and out of sorts. To say it more plainly: Our deep inner self is spiritually connected with the ones we have lost. Our relationship with God is our “deep,” and it connects with our love’s “deep,” even beyond this life.

If you are grieving this Christmas, embrace your anguish. Let God into your pain. This may seem backwards at first, but it works. Rather than trying to cast your pain aside, enter into it. Don’t lock it away; open yourself to it. Walk through it; for when you do, you meet your true self who is constantly in communion with God . . . which connects you to the one you lost . . . which helps you never forget.

No matter how dark your pain feels, no matter how depressed you get this Christmas, if you travel through your pain, you will find God’s light. As John’s Gospel put it, “God’s light always outshines the darkness, and even the deepest darkness cannot overcome it.”

Pastor Barrett