My soul is full of silent words as it groans and moans and sludges along after “losing” my dad last month.

I’ve wanted to come here and write but I admit I’m afraid of depressing everyone with my current situation. But I also feel like I have much to share from what I have learned and am learning from these major challenges of life. A friend said I shouldn’t worry about it because if people want to read it they will and if they don’t, they won’t. Simple.

I’ve been thinking about why this grieving is so hard. Because it is. Losing someone, whether you had years to prepare or no time at all, is excruciatingly difficult.

I’ve heard that from others but I couldn’t have really known until now.

I think there are many reasons that make it so hard to get through. Some moments, I feel like I’m ok, I’ll get through this just one slow step at a time. In other moments, living with the pain of grief feels like I’m trying to continue swimming upstream with a 100 lb weight attached to my feet.

I’ve been trying to journal but it’s hard to get any words out. Words are empty in times like these, they swirl around in my soul but then they only come out like pieces of lint from the dryer. Mush.

However, the thought I’ve been pondering the most is about “God’s Will” and our extreme attachment to our own wills. In private, it’s easy to say I “trust God” and “I will do whatever He asks of me.” But in reality, we cling desperately to our own wills, our own plans and ideas for how things should go.

This is what makes losing someone so hard. It goes against what we want.

This isn’t to say that God wants us to suffer and die. Not at all. He mourns our suffering and our deaths along with us because this is not how He wants it to be.

But just as he created nature, even with all its profound beauty and it’s unpredictable destruction, so too death is now a fundamental part of this mysterious natural world we live in.

God invites us to become part of Him and His creation by loving others just as He does.

But he also calls us to surrender everything to Him. Everything. Even those whom we love the most.

But for many of us, our love for others becomes more of an attachment. And the more attached we are, the harder it is to detach.

Love is not attachment. Love is surrender. Love is Agape.

Love is desiring for another to have love. Love is desiring for another person’s total and complete happiness. If Love is God and God is Love – which I firmly believe is true – then Love is desiring for another to be in total and complete union with God. Forever.

And this is what God’s Will is, as I wrote about about a year ago, His Will is simply to Save All Souls: Bring them to Heaven and provide Eternal and Complete Happiness for All.

The how, when and where are the hard parts because we have very little, if any, control over those. And that’s the main reason grieving is difficult. We don’t want to let them go, we want them to stay with us forever and our lives to go on “as usual”. But they can’t.

We have to surrender ourselves completely to His Will and let go of our control – or at least accept that it was a farce to believe we had control to begin with. Talk about being humbled.

What I am learning, over and over, is that we need to ask God not to take our pains away but to help us accept and surrender to whatever He allows us to go through, no matter how difficult. Easier said than done but it’s really the key to getting through the hard stuff of life.

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