Jan Groft - As We Grieve: Discoveries of Grace in Sorrow

If God be for us, who can be against us?

Romans 8:31

an unexpected embrace

I t was a scorcher of a Sunday in July, a day when the air barely budged and hung heavy around my shoulders. I hated the thought of leaving my best friend alone with her cancer, but Elaines brown eyes were starting to glaze, and she was too hospitable to sleep while I was visiting. We had first met when our daughters were one-year-olds splashing in baby pools back where our yards joined. Since then, wed shared secrets, trips to the beach, disco dance lessons, not to mention numerous discussions about Elaines hair color. Most recently, her hair had been dark brown and before that, blonde. Once it even turned purple, which had her scurrying back to the hairdresser only to be endowed with an interim shade of green. Now on this hot summer day, though I had no way of knowing it at the time, we would say our final good-bye.

Can I get you anything before I go? I asked.

My wig stand, she said.

Since the chemo had taken effect, and even since shed insisted on stopping it, Id never seen Elaine without the hairpiece, an effort, I believe, to ease her friends pain even more than her own. Her forehead glistened with sweat, and I figured as soon as I left, shed remove the wig. But when I returned to her family room with the stand, she was sitting with the ash brown locks in one hand, and with the other, she was scrubbing a napkin across her own sparse crop of hair, at last in its natural shade. I stopped and gazed at my friend.

Youre beautiful, I said, half-whispering. And she was, her fully exposed ears so delicate, her hair such a rich crimson-brown, that the sight of her left me breathless. All the things I knew about my friend of sixteen years rushed through me: her big heart, her flat-out truthfulness, her self-effacing humor, her unwavering friendship. A portrait so genuine and complete that it occurs to me now, looking back, that God was right there embracing me in my sorrow.

At the time, I dont believe my aching heart grasped the gift before me, but now I understand that is exactly what it was. Unexpected. Deeply touching. A memory that would return to me framed in magnanimous grace. The more I think about it, the more I see how often I have been blessed by these moments of light with which God imbues the darkness. The moments arrive quietly, not with a clap of thunder or a flurry of confetti. No, God displays class in gift-giving, subtly setting treasures out to be discovered.

This is a book about making that discovery. It is about finding Gods love tucked into the unlikely folds of loss and grief, a companion on the journey through sorrow that most of us, sooner or later, will be called upon to make. Nurturing a heart open to recognizing Gods presence instills hope. Like when a hospice patient opened her eyes from an afternoon nap, and before I could introduce myself as her volunteer visitor, she smiled and said, I had the most wonderful day yesterday.

Or the moment I knelt beside my mothers casket. After a lifetime of relentless efforts to please her, that one gaze at the content expression on her face overwhelmed me with the realization that her happiness was never mine to cultivate in the first place. It is moments like these that make it feel as if God and I are doing a jitterbugperfectly synchronizedjust as when Mr. Shoemaker, my elementary school principal, played Elvis Presley records at indoor recess for us to dance to, and at a crescendo, my partner lifted me high into the air.