Grief & Joy (by Molly)

(intro by Lora) There’s nothing more difficult for me as a parent than watching my children struggle with something I cannot fix for them. There’s nothing more affirming than seeing my children build resilience by growing stronger in their faith in God’s goodness. My heart was eased, reading this essay Molly wrote for her Old Testament class at school. She’s finding the best path through the hard places. Here are her words…

Proverbs talks a lot about grief as well as joyfulness. Reading through these verses hit pretty hard in my life actually. They talk much about how people like to hide their grief and seem as if they're joyful even when God knows they aren’t ok. The following questions and answers are how I interpreted the verses that I read.

These verses taught me a lot about how joy and grief go together. You can’t really have joy without grief. If we didn’t have grief we wouldn’t know what joy feels like. But if we didn’t have joy, we would just be sorrowful all of the time. But, if we go to the Lord in our times of grief, he can help us through it and help us regain our happiness.

Our world is kind of a mess. There is so much grief all of the time between wars, sickness, and environmental issues. People try to show they’re happy and that it’s all ok when in reality, it’s kind of a mess. Many people also don’t realize how much God can help them through these situations which makes the grief able to take over more.

In Proverbs 17:22 it says, “A cheerful heart is good medicine, but a crushed spirit dries up the bones.” In the past few years of my life grief has been kind of strong. Although there were no deaths, my parents had gotten divorced spring of my 8th grade year. And all before that, it was a stressful situation. My mom did everything she could to be happy and strong for me and my brothers but I knew she wasn’t ok. As well as I knew I wasn’t doing well either. All of my friends at school and people outside of my family saw the happier quiet version of me that didn’t show any signs of sadness, grief, or sorrow, but when I was alone it was not really ok. During this time my cat had passed and he was the thing I was comforted by the most so it was not a wonderful situation. In this time I noticed myself getting closer to God and leaning on him for help more. This summer I’m getting baptized as well. As I got closer to The Lord it helped learn that I could trust some of my friends and that they could help me as well. So although in a bad situation of grief,it led me to get closer to the Lord. So the verse shows that getting closer to God gave me a cheerful heart and helped me to become happier even when the grief beforehand was making me sad and made me feel lonely.

These verses show that even though you can’t have joy without grief, in the end it will end up ok. If you are happy at one point but it ends in sadness, the Lord will always help you through that situation. An example could be that a close grandparent dies. You had much happiness with them and loved them so much but they were older and passed and you had much grief over them. Knowing that they are in a better place and being taken care of even better than they were before will help you get through the stage of grief and help you to be happy yet again.

Proverbs is a great book to help you learn that joy and grief go together. Although grief doesn’t seem like a wonderful thing, it’s a part of life. It helps you learn things as life goes on. Always remember that when you aren’t doing well, God is always there to help.

- Molly