There’s Help in the Face of Loss

Don’t be afraid, for I am with you. Don’t be discouraged, for I am your God. I will strengthen you and help you.   I will hold you up with my victorious right hand. Isaiah 41:10

There’s a kind of grief you may be experiencing without even knowing it.

It’s called ambiguous loss. It’s the grief you may feel when your partner is in the room with you, yet completely distant. Or when a parent is living, but their memory of you has been taken by Alzheimer’s Disease. This bewildering grief leaves you stuck between hope and despair as you mourn something that isn’t entirely gone. Will today be a good day or a bad one? Will the one we love move toward us or away from us?

Ambiguous loss is especially hard to process because it comes with so much uncertainty. Without knowing God personally, uncertainty can be terrifying! Maybe you think everything in the universe is random or assume God doesn’t know or care about you specifically.

If so, here’s good news for your uncertain, loss-filled situation: God knows and cares! In the Bible book of Isaiah, He says, “Don’t be afraid, for I am with you. Don’t be discouraged, for I am your God. I will strengthen you and help you. I will hold you up with my victorious right hand” (Isaiah 41:10). He says that He knows the plans He has for you and that they are plans for good and not for disaster, to give you a future and a hope” (Jeremiah 29:11).

In the grief of what feels like a relationship slipping away, in war, famine, economic collapse, breakups, illness and just regular bad days, God says that He knows your situation and cares. Scripture records this invitation to you in the Bible book of Jeremiah: “If you look for me wholeheartedly, you will find me” (Jeremiah 29:13). If you are His, there is no loss you’ll ever experience without His right hand underneath you.