Mama Grief Transitions to Grandma Joy

Earlier I shared this has been the "Year of the Grandma" for me. Becoming a grandmother is a glorious experience not without its share of emotion. Granted the wide range of emotions could in part have been age-related. Emotional variations are fairly common among women traveling through this season of life. Whatever the reason for the emotions, they were real and ran the gamut ranging from the lowest of lows to the highest of highs. 

Towards the end of 2019, as I prayed about what direction God wanted me to take in the coming year, I sensed Him leading me towards an unexpected focus on emotional health. Learning about the importance of emotional health actually began a little over three years ago when I was walking alongside someone else in their journey towards emotional healing and freedom. This wasn't originally about me at all. However, God in His omniscient omnipotence began the healing in more than one of His children during that season. Thankfully, the learning continues still. 

The gratefulness I have for God's faithful instruction and continued revelations of truth are literally indescribable. I confess it took more than one book on emotional health written by godly men and women along with  months of prayer to surrender any misguided ideas I had about whether or not it was okay for me to consider the possibility that seeking my own personal well-being. I discovered that a person can find themselves living life from out of man-given ideas about what being a Christian woman, wife, and mother looks and sounds like instead of God's desires and plans for His children. These well-intentioned but inaccurate beliefs had to be exposed and confronted with God's truth in order for me to walk in complete emotional health. As I walked alongside another taking this wholeness journey, one by one the lies were uprooted by truth.

Days flowed into weeks, weeks to months, and months have flowed into years. The lessons in emotional health have rescued and strengthened me more than once since their beginning. The season following the start of this journey has been filled with grief and sorrow. Every day seemed to contain  either sadness, conflict, confusion, or a combination of all three. Yet even in the midst of this sorrow and grief God caressed my family and I over and over with loving reminders of His presence and goodness. He hasn't ever left us; His presence has been our sure refuge and strength. The depths of darkness have been smattered with the most glorious moments. It has been a season of the miraculous and marvelous overcoming the awful and scattering the darkness over and over and over again day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year.

Nine people, six adults, three children, all living life together in the middle of grief and trial 24/7 365 provided more than one opportunity to put what I am learning into practice on a regular basis. Just like a baby learning to walk, my new efforts have seldom been smooth or beautiful. Awkward, wobbly, halting, unsure, unsteady, definitely describe this time. Not only was I trying to figure out what healthy look and sound like, but I was trying to live it in a hotbed of fear, anger, and grief surrounded by intensely passionate people trying to survive their own journeys through the same. It has been an experience. I won't say I have lived the season well. I'll just say this: my family and I survived. Somehow, someway, solely by the grace of God we have walked through death, hell, and high water and lived to tell about it. 

One year ago, right in a time when, for me personally, the grief was at its darkest, right when I was most tempted to doubt our family's survival, right when I was in the throes of having an inner it's been too hard for too long moment, an ecard arrived in my inbox for Grandparents Day. One year ago a baby's coming was announced; my first grandchild was on her way. I didn't know she was a girl yet. I only knew a grandchild would be born, and oh how I loved that unborn child! I can't understand it yet, the intensity of this grandma love that surges through my body as surely as my blood through my veins. There aren't words deep enough or wide enough to explain how the coming of a baby stirred me to my core, but stir me it did. 

A year ago I didn't yet realize, I couldn't yet see, the gift of healing and merciful wonder God has prepared for me. I was inwardly excited, yet the extended hardships had allowed fear to form a stronghold in my thinking. I was afraid of allowing myself to get as excited as I wanted to. An inner urge to protect myself  pressured me to proceed with emotional caution. Like an animal that has been wounded before, I was wary. I wanted to hope. I wanted to believe, but experience told me to exert caution. After all, my wounded thinking reasoned, anything could happen between now and when the baby comes. I was determined not to allow the joy over the coming grandbaby to be stolen by fear. Yet  fear was a menacing presence ever hovering on the edge of my happiness; it was threatening to squelch my joyous anticipation. The fight in my thoughts was on. Battles raged off and on in my mind. But God...

Even though I have been grieving so much for so long, joyous release has come. New life has come! The coming of a baby, the first grandbaby, continues to be a visible manifestation of God's promise of good. How fitting it is that, after several months of waiting to meet after her birth, Independence Day is the day this little bundle of promise was placed in my arms for the first time, and our first picture together is one with both of us full out laughing. What a visual testimony of God's faithful promises of good!  Not even a worldwide pandemic or a move further away can stop the healing flow of God's goodness as email pictures and phone calls continue to lovingly draw us together. As this grandma transitions from grieving to joy, I sing my praises loud for all to hear, 

"To God be the glory great things He has done!...Praise the Lord! Praise the Lord! Let the earth hear His voice. Praise the Lord! Praise the Lord! Let the people rejoice! Oh come to the Father through Jesus the Son and give Him the glory great things He hath done!"

*I am confessing that I didn't want to post this article as it currently reads because there are so many "errors" that have not been corrected yet. However, I am sensing a leading to post as is without correcting anything. To God be the glory.