You Are Allowed to Grieve

When the Silence Sits Heavy and the Heart Needs Room to Breathe

🕯️ There’s a particular kind of silence that follows loss. Not the peaceful kind — the kind that settles on your chest at ten o’clock at night, long after everyone else has gone to bed. The house is quiet. Your thoughts are anything but.

I know that silence.

I’ve been living in it for six months.

✍️ Someone told me last year, after my spiritual mother died — with the best of intentions, with love shining in their eyes — “She’s in heaven now. She’s in a better place.” I knew they were right. I know they were right. Theologically, completely, absolutely right. She is. She’s not suffering anymore. She’s home.

So why did those words make me want to press everything down and pretend I was fine?🤔

🪨 Here’s what I’ve come to understand: well-meaning words, spoken too quickly over someone’s pain, can accidentally become a lid. They press down on the grief before it’s had a chance to breathe. Being told I was strong quietly created an expectation — even though inside I felt bruised, and somehow responsible for being strong for everyone else too. Those words whisper, without meaning to — you shouldn’t still be feeling this. If you’re anything like me, you hear that whisper and you comply. You tuck it all away. You smile. You say, “I’m all right, thank you.”

Even when you’re not.

🕯️ Then — as if one wave wasn’t enough — six weeks ago, my brother messaged me. Our father had lost his will to live.

I want you to understand what those words did to me. He could just as well have told me that dad had died. That’s how it landed. That’s how it registered in my body, in my heart. I know that sounds dramatic. Perhaps it is dramatic, but know that space — I have lived there, in that hopelessness, no longer wanting to live. Grief doesn’t always arrive in neat, proportionate packages, though. Sometimes it hits you sideways, at five-thirty in the morning, in a message you weren’t expecting.

🕯️ Two weeks ago, we heard that Clive’s mom’s heart stopped on the operating table during what was meant to be a routine procedure. She was resuscitated, yet later stopped breathing in ICU and was placed on a ventilator, where she remained over the weekend.

On Monday morning, the ventilator was removed, and she seemed to improve slightly, yet then she plateaued. On Friday evening she was smiling, and then, during the night, she had a heart attack in her sleep and passed peacefully. Again we told ourselves she’s in a better place now. No more pain and suffering.

✍️ I want to tell you something that happened to me last weekend — something I’m still sitting with, still slowly unwrapping.

I was at a Freedom Weekend, a prayer ministry intensive, and in that sacred space, after more than two decades of carrying it, I finally arrived at a place of real forgiveness. Not the performed kind. The kind that costs you something. The kind where wounding, resentment and decades-old suppressed anger finally — finally — loosen their grip, and you breathe out, and something shifts deep in your chest.

Thirty minutes later, I received the message that she was gone.

Thirty minutes.

🕊️ I’ve thought about that timing many times since. I don’t believe it was coincidence. I believe it was mercy. God, in His extraordinary kindness, knew what was coming. He knew I needed to put down the weight before I could carry the grief. He knew I needed clean hands and an open heart before the news arrived. He orchestrated it — down to the very minute.

📖 “I will go before you and make the crooked places straight.” — Isaiah 45:2 (NKJV)

🪨 That’s the kind of God we serve. Not One who is caught off guard by our pain, but One who prepares us for it. One who goes before us into the very thing we don’t even know is coming.

🕯️ I’ve been learning something in this season — something that feels simple on the surface, yet has cost me something to receive. I’m still receiving it, honestly, one quiet morning at a time.

I am allowed to grieve.

Not in spite of my faith. Not as a contradiction to what I believe. As a fully human, fully valid, God-given response to love and loss.

📖 “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.” — Matthew 5:4 (NKJV)

Not: blessed are those who push through quickly. Not: blessed are those who keep it together for everyone else’s sake.

Not: blessed are those who keep it together for everyone else’s sake.
Blessed are those who mourn.

There is a blessing tucked inside the mourning.

There is comfort promised in the grieving — only you can’t receive what you’re not willing to feel.

🕊️ Jesus wept at the tomb of Lazarus. He knew, more than anyone in that moment, that the story wasn’t over. He wept anyway. He wept with those who were weeping before He did anything else. He didn’t hand them a theological explanation. He stood in the grief with them first. That’s who He is. That’s the kind of God we serve.

🕯️ I’ve been calling this season “limbo land” — that place where you don’t know what’s coming next, where your focus scatters and the tears sit just behind your eyes all day. Where you start things and don’t finish them. Where you go to bed tired and wake up tired still.

Limbo land is real. It’s a real place. It’s not weakness. It’s not a lack of faith. It’s simply the terrain of grief.

🪨 The temptation in limbo land is to run. To fill every hour. To make yourself busy enough that you never have to sit with what’s inside. I know that temptation well — I’ve lived by it more than I’d like to admit. Yet here’s the thing I keep returning to: you can’t heal what you won’t feel. You can’t outrun something that lives inside you. At some point, the only way out is through.

🕊️ This too shall pass. I know it will. I’ve been in seasons before, and I’ve come out the other side. There is another side. The invitation in this season, though, isn’t to sprint through it — I can already hear Elias say “it’s a marathon not a sprint” — it’s to let yourself be held within it. To receive the prayer ministry. To let people show up. To answer the door when a friend arrives with dinner. To let yourself cry when you need to cry.

🕯️ I want to say something about showing up — about the people who show up.

In loss, the ones who come not with advice, not with theological explanations, not with casseroles delivered from a safe distance, but who come and stay — who sit on the sofa and simply are there — those are the ones through whom you feel the love of Christ most profoundly.

That’s not sentimentality. That’s theology. God Himself is Emmanuel — God with us. Not God watching from a distance. Not God sending explanations. God here. Present. In the room. In the hard moments. In the silences that have nothing left to say.

🌱 When you show up for someone in their grief, you are enacting the character of God. You are being His hands, His presence, His Emmanuel. Don’t underestimate the weight of that. Don’t underestimate what it means to someone sitting in the dark to simply know that you came.

🌱 Then on Wednesday morning, at 5h30 my brother sent me a photograph of dad. He said our father is back to normal. Complaining about everything and anything — gloriously, typically, stubbornly himself.

In a season where I’ve been sitting with so much loss, that small restoration felt like a thread of light coming through a crack in the curtains. Not a flood. Just a ray. Just enough.

God is still in the business of restoration. He doesn’t abandon the stories He’s writing.

✍️ So I’m learning — slowly, imperfectly, with a great deal of grace required along the way — to stay in the season without running from it. To receive the prayer ministry I didn’t know I needed until a cancellation appeared out of nowhere on a Monday morning. To let the people who love me be there. To tell the truth when someone asks how I am, even when “I’m all right” is easier.

To mourn. To grieve. To feel what needs to be felt.

🕊️ To trust — really trust — that the God who prepared me thirty minutes before the news arrived is the same God who is holding me now. The same God who restores. The same God who weeps with those who weep, and then calls the dead by name.

He is Emmanuel. He is here.

In Him, even limbo land has a name, a purpose, and an end.

📖 “He heals the broken-hearted and binds up their wounds.” — Psalm 147:3 (NKJV)

You are allowed to grieve. Let yourself be held. 🤍

💡 Reflection

Take these questions somewhere quiet. A cup of tea, a journal, an honest conversation with God.

• Is there a grief you’ve been pressing down because someone else’s words — however kind — told you it was time to move on? What would it feel like to give that grief room to breathe? 🤔
• Can you look back and see a moment where God went ahead of you into something you didn’t know was coming? What does that tell you about how He sees you? 🤔
• Where are you tempted to fill the silence with busyness rather than stillness? What are you afraid you might feel if you stopped? 🤔
• Who in your life has been Emmanuel to you — present, steady, simply there? Have you told them what that meant? 🤔
• What is one small act of receiving — not giving, not coping, not managing — that you could allow yourself this week? 🤔

🎺 Affirmation

You are not too much. Your grief is not too heavy for God to hold. You are not falling behind — you are being held in a season that has a name, a purpose, and an end written by the One who loves you. You are seen. You are not forgotten. You are allowed to feel it all, and you are never feeling it alone. Emmanuel is with you — in the silence, in the limbo land, in the mourning that holds within it a blessing you are only beginning to receive. You are His, and His hands are gentle.

🙌 Prayer

Father,

I come to You honestly today — not with tidy words or a composed heart, but with the grief I’ve been trying to manage on my own.

You already know it. You knew it before I did. You went before me — thirty minutes ahead, a Monday morning cancellation, a photograph of a father who came back — and You have shown me, again and again, that You are never caught off guard by my pain.

So today, I lay it down. I lay down the pressure to be fine. I lay down the well-meaning lids I’ve allowed to sit on top of feelings that needed air. I lay down the running and the busyness and the brave face, and I come to You as I am — tired, tender, and learning, slowly, to receive.

Hold me, Lord. Be Emmanuel here, in the quiet, in the limbo land. Let me feel what needs to be felt, and let me feel it with You beside me. Heal what only You can heal. Bind up what only You can bind.

Thank You that You wept. Thank You that You didn’t hand us theology first — You gave us Your presence. Thank You that You are the same yesterday, today, and for ever, and that You are here.

In Jesus’ Name, Amen.

🕯️ If you’ve read this far, I want you to know — this was written for you as much as it was written for me. You are not alone in the season you’re carrying. The God who prepares, restores, and remains is the same God who sees you today. Sit with Him a little longer. Let the silence be the kind that heals. He’s not going anywhere.