As Christians we seem to be better prepared for Heaven than we are for coping with the death of our spouse. We fast and pray for their healing but when they die we are cast upon the sea of grief totally unprepared for that tumultuous experience.
Almost every marriage that lasts for years will in time end with one spouse grieving the death of the other one. The question then becomes, what to do now? Why is never the right question. You are not God and only God knows the why of life. We need to figure out what now or what next.
The funny thing is that although this situation is coming and we know it will happen we are still so unprepared for this inevitability.
I survived the experience of grieving the death of my wife and I could not tell you how that happened. I moved here to alleviate the oppressive loneliness that was suffocating me. I did not plan to grieve but I did indeed go through all that grief entails. And now I spend my life trying to discover what is next for me and to discover what I need to do now that I am on the other side.
Our Fellowship is unprepared to help grieving spouses. This might be something that we need to take more seriously. We know how to evangelize and how to plant churches and how to disciple young men. What do we know about the grieving spouse who is left to process a life that they did not want and that they wish was not so?
I chose to be married in 1974. I did not choose to have that wife die in 2014. Both events changed my life. It took me years to learn how to be a husband. I do not have years left to learn how to live without her.
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