Grief & Loss

Joseph stood just outside the frame so his son could stand at the centre. For the parent estranged from a child out of reach, his shadowed fatherhood becomes a language for love that stays faithful across distance. The child is still held.

The ache of a birthday spent estranged from your own children, alive but out of reach. No call, no voices in the next room. Where worth holds when reconciliation is not promised, and why this day still belongs to a life that counts. You are still here.

You brought the bank statements, and your parent got furious. The anger is not really aimed at you, and not really at protecting the scammer. It is the last wall they have to keep the shame from getting in. You cannot heal shame by exposing it.

Most of us did not realise how much of who we were was the role we were doing. Then the role ended. The children grew up. The position was restructured. And in the silence afterwards, you discovered something most of us discover too late — you had not just lost a role. You had lost a self.

You probably will not say it out loud. You may not have said it to yourself yet. You have only felt it. Anger. At God. And you were raised, somewhere along the way, to believe this is the one emotion Christians are not allowed to have.

There is a grief most of us are never given permission to name. It is the grief for the believer you used to be — the you who walked into church without scanning the room, who read certain verses without flinching, who trusted leaders by default. That you is gone. You are allowed to mourn her.

Some loneliness is a season. Other loneliness does not ease. It sits down with you in the morning, walks you to the kettle, wakes you at 3 a.m. If that is your loneliness, this is for you. Practical, not magical.

We have been taught, quietly and persistently, that tears are something to move through on the way to something better. What if they are not the waiting room? What if they are, sometimes, the sanctuary itself?

The father in the parable does not appear to be doing anything when the son returns. But the text suggests he has been watching the road for a long time. There is something to be said about what that watching costs — and what it means.