Matthew 6:10

“Your kingdom come. Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”

Grief in the Garden 

As care-givers, most of us relish in the fact that we are given opportunities to gain spoken or unspoken wisdom from those in our care. Moments spent in laughter, candor, wit, strength and gentle grace expressed in the midst of their suffering have informed and transformed my personal suffering. If we are honest with ourselves, there are times when we gain lessons and there are other times we grieve the loss of the ‘good old days.’ Contrary to popular opinion, we do not only grieve deaths, we can grieve all losses. Grief can be defined as the normal but bewildering cluster of ordinary human emotions arousing in response to a significant loss, intensified and complicated by the relationship to the person or the object loss (All our Loses, All our Grief). Indeed it is possible to grieve the loss of our loved ones independence and our dependence upon them for our unmet needs or desires.

When we pray, “…Your kingdom come. Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven,” we are asking God to give us the strength, agape love and discernment to care for our loved ones, according to God’s will, despite our personal struggles with insecurities, fear and grief. We are praying the prayer Jesus prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane: “Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me; yet not my will but yours be done.”(Luke 22:42 NRSV) It behooves us to carry our grief to the garden, for in the garden there are possibilities to gain serenity and center ourselves in God’s will in order to do God’s will for our lives and in the lives of our loved ones.

Prayer 

God in heaven, we ask that you ‘have your way’ in our lives. Give us a glimmer of hope as we go to our gardens to gain help to continue our journeys. Our beloved ancestors sang the hymn “We’ll Understand it Better By and By,” help us, for “Trials dark on every hand and we cannot understand, all the ways that God would lead us to that blessed Promised Land. But he guides us with His eye and we’ll follow till we die. For we’ll understand it better by and by.”

Thought for the day 

God give us strength during the good and bad times in our lives!