“What we have once enjoyed and deeply loved we can never lose. For all that we love deeply becomes a part of us”
Helen Keller
If you know any small part of my story you know it involves a great deal of loss. Loss is deeply personal. We all experience it. If you haven’t yet, just live a little longer- it’s coming. But when you do finally experience deep loss and grief you very quickly learn that loss is loss and grief is grief and that it is irrevocably foolish to compare losses and griefs or to make them a competition. There is no good way to lose the people or the things you love. There is only losing them.
Horses have been my greatest teachers in grief. They don’t rush through loss or grief. They don’t pretend it isn’t heavy. They just stand with you in it. Breathing, listening, staying. Through the tears, through the yelling and screaming and cursing, through the hard questions that make most people flinch or turn away. When my world shattered, time and again, they didn’t fix the ache. They stood with me in it and walked with me through it, and that is the holiest kind of comfort.
I love this Helen Keller quote because it reminds me that, although we will physically lose people and things that we love, those people and things stay with us as who we become because of their impact on our life. Because of their love for us and our love for them. Just like their presence changed us for the better, their loss does too.
But, as December 10 approaches and I look down the gun barrel at 3 years without my mom, and at the countless other losses over the past few years, there is an even greater comfort than that our loves and their losses change our lives for the better. And I was reminded of this truth at my grandpa’s funeral last week. Someday, we’ll be reunited. Just as he has been reunited with my grandma and my mom.
Today, your losses might feel permanent. They might feel so heavy that you can’t even get out of bed, much less take a step forward. They might leave you gasping for breath. They might leave you curled up in a ball on the floor. They might have you thinking that you are about to bleed out. I know.
But they aren’t permanent. God is restoring all things. And that holy comfort that horses give? God gives the exact same kind of comfort. He stands with us through the losses and in the grief. He doesn’t flinch through the yelling and screaming and cursing. He doesn’t turn away in the face of hard questions… in fact, He does a little better than a horse and actually offers the answers to those very same questions. Offering the holiest kind of comfort when people offer their platitudes or their comparisons or when they turn away altogether because the questions are too hard and the grief too messy.
“O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting? The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, who gives us victory through our Lord Jesus Christ.” 1 Corinthians 15:55-57
“He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.” Revelation 21:4
Centered Path Equine 