When all you know is what you feel and all you feel is pain, life can be very challenging to say the least. You do everything you can to cope. You pray and focus on anything other than “the” thing. You fill your life with activity and work to the point of sheer exhaustion, but the pain is still there. Sleep becomes your only escape, albeit brief and then with the morning sunrise, it’s there again with its relentless reminder that nothing has changed. And before long, you notice that life is no longer something to enjoy or look forward to, but rather something to endure and, on your worst days, dread.
Sound pretty depressing and bleak? Well, that’s what it’s like to live with chronic despair and pain. That’s what it’s like for me on my worst days, when I’m alone and missing my old life and my late husband. I imagine it’s pretty darn similar for those who live with the loss of a child, too. There is the before when your loved one was with you and then there is the now, which will never end. The pain can be so overwhelming that it keeps you from putting one foot in front of the other. You may even want to die just to make the pain stop. Believe me, I get it.
I don’t have any simple answers or quick bible verses to make it easier, since this is a journey that can only be made by hanging on tight to Jesus and know and believe that He’s hanging on tightly to you. All the truth in the world cannot take this cup from me. My only hope to emerge from this deep, dark sorrow in my life is to hope in Christ as my Savior. He’s not saved me from “the valley of the shadow of death,” but he promises to save me in it, and He will save you, as well.
Pain