Good Days
Day 18
Image courtesy of Rebecca Webb Wilson, Hawkeye Nature Photography
Those who go through the desolate valley will find it a place of springs,
for the early rains have covered it with pools of water. —Psalm 84:5
Sometimes you will have a good day. You may notice, as you are going about your normal routine, that something is different. You can’t put your finger on it at first, but then you realize, with a start, that the familiar ache is not there. In fact, you haven’t even thought about your loved one all day.
This comes as a surprise. You’ve been hurting for so long that you hardly know what to make of the pain’s absence. You may even feel guilty, as though you are somehow being disloyal. You are not.
These good days, these unpredictable, sporadic breaks from sadness, have nothing to do with the measure or quality of your devotion. Think of them as rest stops, intermissions in the drama of your grief journey. They are in fact—and this may be another surprise—the best evidence that you loved well. A good day is a mark of your capacity to be self-forgetting in your care for another, a sign that there are open spaces in your heart that require nothing in return for the love you give.
This sounds impossible. How can we lose someone of vital significance, someone we thought of as necessary to our well being, and still be alive, even happy? Isn’t that a contradiction? Well, yes. The juxtaposition of loss and happiness is indeed a paradox. But it means that the tangle of need we so often confuse with love is yielding, finally, to a mature kind of love. You are not just a loving person, you are becoming love. Which is, of course, the end point of every true pilgrim’s journey.
Your sadness will return, perhaps with an even greater intensity than before. So when an unexpected moment of light-heartedness arrives, be grateful for the gift that it is. Pause. Breathe. Dip your hands into the spring and drink deeply from its healing waters.
O God, my heart is glad for you are with me. Thank you. Thank you. Amen.