I’d like to tell you a story from the bible, as you read you may identify with the father or with the sick woman. Even though it’s a different story, it helped me identify the process of my grief.

 “A man named Jairus came and when he saw Jesus, he fell at his feet. He pleaded earnestly with him, “My daughter is dying. Please come and put your hands on her so she will be healed and live.” So, Jesus went with him. A large crowd followed and pressed around him. A woman was there who had been subject to bleeding for twelve years. She had suffered a great deal under the care of many doctors and had spent all she had, yet instead of getting better she grew worse. When she heard about Jesus, she came up behind him in the crowd and touched his cloak, she thought, “If I just touch his clothes, I will be healed”. Immediately her bleeding stopped, and she felt her bod was freed from suffering. At once Jesus realized that power had gone out of him. He turned and asked, “who touched my clothes?” “You see the people crowding against you,” his disciples answered, “and yet you can ask, ‘who touched me?” But Jesus kept looking to see who had done it. Then the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came and fell at his feet and trembling in fear, told him the whole truth. He said to her, “daughter, your faith has healed you. Go in peace and be freed from your suffering.” While Jesus was speaking, some people came from the house of Jairus, “Your daughter is dead,” they said. “Why bother the teacher anymore?” Jesus responded saying, “Don’t be afraid; just believe.” He took the child’s father and mother and the disciples who were with him and went in where the child was. Her took her by the hand and said, “Little girl, I say to you, get up!” Immediately the girl got up and began to walk around.

When I was 3, my mom took me and my brother in the middle of the night and left my abusive father. I was too young to understand and spent the next 25 years trying to earn his love and acceptance. For the last 5 years I shifted my pleas to Jesus, I prayed, at times more frequently than others, for reconciliation. For my dad to supernaturally change and decide he did in fact love me and want to be in my life and finally meet his grandchild. Fast-forward to April 2020, the world had just shut down for 2 weeks and I was on the phone with my mom when she informs me my dad had just died of a heart attack. I knew instantly that I did not have the tools to process this loss, so I signed up for online counseling over zoom, as it was my only option through the pandemic.

Through my time in grief counseling, I wrestled with my faith and personal beliefs – Ultimately, not only was I grieving the loss of my father’s life, but I was really grieving my unanswered prayer, my hope and dreams of having a relationship with a father who loved to be will never be. So, I wrestled with my believing that God was good. Grief has a way of bringing along with it a crisis of faith, and that’s exactly what I had. 

At the same time, I was going through a life coach certification program and my coach gave me the assignment to write ‘A day in the life’. It’s simply a creative writing assignment starting at the beginning of your ideal day, if you had all the resources to have your life look exactly how you’d want it to -your job, your family, your co-workers/clients – from the moment you wake up until you go to sleep at night. Well, I was telling my counselor about my assignment, and she challenged me to take it a step further, to use the assignment to process some of my feelings about losing my dad. I sat down at my computer and started writing, it came out so quickly and easily and honestly with a rush of endorphins. I felt better than I had in a long while. 

I’ve always been a creative, but I’ve never felt like anything I’ve ever produced was good enough. Always my own worst critic, but I sat there and read my ‘day in the life’ and thought – this is actually really good! I asked my husband to read it and give me honest feedback, I told him it felt like the first chapter of a book, and he agreed! I started to continue my story and wrote about my dream life, interlaced with my main character processing feelings of grief, having the same thought patterns as myself and seeing the outcomes that I hope for. It was such a rush, and I was so happy with how it was going that I made a goal for myself. I would finish this book by my birthday and then I would start submitting it to publishers.

To my absolute shock, the very first publisher I submitted my manuscript to said yes! It’s honestly been success beyond my belief. That brings me back to the story about Jesus and Jairus’ daughter. For me, it was that moment when something (or someone, or the dream) dies on the way to your miracle and Jesus says, I’m still coming. What this published book of mine represents is Jesus showing up anyway. Even when I had lost all faith in my broken dreams and unanswered prayers, life showed up through creativity and along with it brought breakthrough and healing. 

A miracle came anyway, not the one I had hoped and prayed for but something beyond my wildest dreams. Is grief gone? No, grief never goes away but as my counselor says, there is always a gift. I was able to channel my grief into creativity and the gift, the miracle is now I get to share it with the world, and I’ve discovered writing is something I really love and that I’m really good at. Even saying that I’m good at it is a mini miracle. So, I want to challenge you, encourage you – Life can come out of grief if you let it.  

I shared this with an amazing group of ladies and one of them had asked me how I dealt with the disappointment of having an unanswered pray or unfulfilled dream. I feel like this is such an important question I thought I would share my answer here as well. The short of it is I still am. It’s still a process, I’m more at peace with it than I was when my dad first died but I think it will always be unresolved. Until I reach the end of life and have full understanding I will never fully be without the disappointment of not having a present, loving dad here on earth. But I allow myself to feel it, I write, I talk to trusted friends and process my feelings, I sing, I cry and I feel a little bit better. But most of all I trust my unknown future to my known God. I like to think of the image you’ve seen floating around of a little girl clutching her teddy bear and Jesus holding his hand out asking for it and what the little girl doesn’t see is behind Jesus’ back, He has an even bigger teddy bear he’s waiting to give her in return. We never know what goodness God has for us just around the corner. So feel the disappointment, but don’t live there. The only things that come from that are bitterness, resentment and the inability to receive the good things that are meant for you.