Oh my dear friends. Especially you, Josh. I know you are suffering and aching for loved ones who have left this world. I am so sorry for your loss. I have wept with you this morning.

How do we handle it? How can we possibly keep going with this massive hole in our heart where our mom, our spouse or our friend once lived?

Death has touched me and my life too but I deeply fear the day that it reaches deeper and affects me again, and more.

Is that what hurts so much? Is it fear? I believe fear is actually the absence of love. And nowhere does this feel more true than when the ever-present love of someone dear to us dies. They and their love are physically absent and we fear so many things. We fear forgetting them. We fear replacing them. We fear no longer making memories with them at the center. And so much else.

God is love. When we take up permanent residence in a life of love, we live in God and God lives in us. This way, love has the run of the house, becomes at home and mature in us, so that we’re free of worry on Judgment Day—our standing in the world is identical with Christ’s. There is no room in love for fear. Well-formed love banishes fear. Since fear is crippling, a fearful life—fear of death, fear of judgment—is one not yet fully formed in love. (The Message translation, 1 John 4:18)

“We live in God and God lives in us.” Life and death are all one. Death is not separation from life, though that’s where the deep pain seems to take us. But life, and death, are undeniably and inextricably linked. Just like the life of a baby in a womb ends and transforms into a birth into this world, so does our time in this world end with a birth into the next world. And the next world, Jesus promises…

But there’s far more to life for us. We’re citizens of high heaven! We’re waiting the arrival of the Savior, the Master, Jesus Christ, who will transform our earthy bodies into glorious bodies like his own. He’ll make us beautiful and whole with the same powerful skill by which he is putting everything as it should be, under and around him. (The Message, Phillipians 3:20-21)

“We are citizens of high heaven!” Citizens. Our second birth, the movement from this world to the next, brings us to the place where nothing dies again in the place we will call our permanent home.

Oh so much easier to be read and said than it is to be done. And, likely, it will be a thought in our heads much sooner than it actually takes root in our heart and becomes true for us in our grief.

But let it be true in your life, now that your loved one has gone. Let it be true. Let it first be a thought. And hold this thought constantly.

“Mom has been born into heaven.”

“Grandpa has been born into heaven.”

You will weep and it will hurt to say this. You will struggle deep and long with the possibility. You will question its truth. I promise you will.

But the weeping and the struggle and the questions are transforming. And your only role is to weep and struggle and question. But just at the butterfly doesn’t know the day the cocoon will give way, so it is with the transformation of our grief.

Weep. Struggle. Question.

And let me do the same with you in the coming days.

I love you. If I can do anything, please let me know.

Doug