Growing through grief...

I don't know about you, but I've had a lot on my heart and mind lately.  The cares of this world are starting to weigh me down.  How do you respond when the cares of this life get too much?  Sometimes we respond by shutting down, perhaps we take it out on someone else or we throw a pity party for ourselves.  Have you ever tried to take that grief, anger, panic or whatever it is that is trying to bring you down and using that to help you grow? I was having my devotions and found this observation of the struggle of trees by Marilyn Abraham interesting:

"We signed up for a hike with a ranger, who told us a remarkable thing: when a tree's life is threatened, stressed by the elements of fire, drought, or other calamity, it twists beneath its bark to reinforce and make itself stronger. On the surface, this new inner strength may not be visible, for the bark often continues to give the same vertical appearance. Only when the exterior is stripped away, or when the tree is felled, are its inner struggles revealed."

We cannot make ourselves stronger, but if we look to God to use us at our weakest moment, we become a stronger Christian.  When we allow God to use what we are going through to teach us a lesson so that we will be able to help someone else later on, we will grow spritually.  But if we shut down and refuse to take another step, we cannot be used and we cannot learn the lesson we were meant to learn.

Remember that our children see how we respond to the pain, cares and grief of this world and through our response, they learn to respond the same way.  Do we want our children responding to pain and grief the way we do?  Will they become a stronger person by responding the way we do?

Let's determine today to respond to the cares of this world the way that God would want us to respond.  Determine to let God use our grief to help someone else and make us a stronger Christian.  Let's determine that we are going to be an example to our children in our grief so they learn the correct way to respond to heart-ache, grief and loss.  We can't keep them from going through pain and loss, but we can help them get through it.

Grow stronger today!