“Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.”
—Matthew 5:4
Picture this:
A woman stands in the middle of a store’s Christmas display, suddenly frozen in place. The air is thick with cinnamon and pine, lights twinkle overhead, and cheerful holiday music hums in the background. But she doesn’t hear it. She doesn’t see any of it.
Her eyes are locked on one ornament.
“Baby’s First Christmas.”
It’s been years. Years since that loss. Years since she said goodbye. And yet, here she is, ambushed by grief in the middle of a department store, standing beneath artificial snowflakes while something inside her cracks open like it happened yesterday.
Time heals all wounds? I don’t think so.
We tell ourselves (or worse, others tell us) that grief has a timeline. That it should diminish in a straight line, shrinking neatly with each passing year. That eventually, we will “move on.”
But grief doesn’t work like that.
Megan Devine writes, “The reality of grief is far different from what others see from the outside. There is pain in this world that you can’t be cheered out of. You don’t need solutions. You don’t need to move on from your grief. You need someone to see your grief, to acknowledge it. You need someone to hold your hands while you stand there in blinking horror.”
We want grief to be something we conquer, something we eventually finish. But it isn’t.
Grief is something we carry.
The Spiral of Grief
We think of time as a cure, but time doesn’t heal wounds; time teaches us how to carry them.
Richard Rohr describes grief not as a circle, where we go round and round, but as a spiral—we revisit the same places, the same losses, but never in the same way. We are changed. Even when we feel like we are circling back to old pain, we are moving forward, whether we realize it or not.
Think of David, who poured out his grief in the Psalms year after year. Of Rachel, weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted (Jeremiah 31:15). Of Job, lamenting in the ashes. Their faith did not erase their grief. It gave them a foundation to bear it.
Even Jesus, standing outside of Lazarus’ tomb—knowing resurrection was coming—wept.
Why? Because love and grief are intertwined.
The size of our grief reflects the size of our love. And love doesn’t have an expiration date.
When the Waves Come
Grief is like the tide—it recedes for a time, only to return with force when you least expect it. A song. A smell. A holiday decoration. A date on the calendar.
This isn’t regression. It’s the rhythm of loss.
As I shared Sunday, the waves can knock you down, wash over you, or sometimes, just barely touch the top of your feet and you see the beauty of the water and what’s underneath. You just never know which wave might hit.
So when the grief waves come—whether it’s been three days or three decades—remember:
Your grief is valid.
Your timeline is your own.
Your love is eternal.
In the Beatitudes, Jesus doesn’t say, “Blessed are those who have finished mourning.” He says, “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.” There is no deadline on that blessing. The comfort doesn’t come when the grief stops. The comfort comes in the presence of the One who holds us in it.
As Megan Devine reminds us, “You don’t get over loss. You don’t need to get over loss. You need to learn to live alongside it.”
Prayer
“Holy One, when the waves of grief crash over us unexpectedly, help us remember that this too is holy ground. Thank you for meeting us here, in the spirals, in the questions, in the ordinary moments where grief ambushes us. Help us trust that You’re big enough to hold all of it. Amen.”