I’ve been crying. In silent and alone moments in my room, weeping when my children are gone and wailing in the darkness of a room that feels like a very warm blanket of sorrow, I cry.

I have found that it is better this way.

People don’t do well with discomfort. They flinch at expressive prolonged mourning. The platitudes and patting that come from those discomfited by my pain just put me at a pause that interrupts my need to say what is.

Now. Y’all know I don’t do Iyanla. Mostly cuz she don’t do Jesus, and I do not inherently believe that therapy or soul coaching works without the power of the cross of Christ to back it.

HOWSOINEVER: This rang true for me. How, when people are discomfited by your pain, they reach out to you. They touch you.

The conscious intention is to show sympathy and give comfort; what is often happening?

The interruption of the mourning process.

See, mourning done God’s way opens the heart to false beliefs that may have been hiding behind the teeth unspoken. In its truest form? Mourning leads to joy in its true form. Joy and peace come from the settling of the heart and mind into the will of God regardless of circumstance, situation, or story being told. In the process of mourning, you not only acknowledge the absence of a person or a thing; you also begin to acknowledge every hidden motive and emotion in your heart attached to them.

The fear.
The loneliness.
The condemnation.
The guilt.
The anger.
The abandonment.
The uncertainty.
The…whatever that has been lurking around in the dark parts of your heart.

During this process, I have been reckoning with feelings of guilt. Did I say “I love you” enough? Did I SHOW my love enough? What if I had woken up earlier? What if I hadn’t been frustrated during the times when he was at his lowest in sickness and grief? What if I had been more mindful of the changes he was experiencing? Did he feel like I had minimized his health, his pain at losing his mother and so many of his friends? Did he read my exhaustion as lack of care and concern or the fatigue that it really was? I should have been better. I should have done more. I could have…

I could have done absolutely nothing more than I had done.

Whatever I did do? I maxed out my capacity. And the Lord knew this. Knows this. And each time I have found myself in the throes of mourning, the Lord has, by His spirit and His word, cast down every single vain imagination. Every high thought has become a casualty to the knowledge of Christ.

But it only happened because there was no one there to interrupt the process for their own personal comfort.

Stop putting yourself between mourning and the person for whom God set down in that process. God knows every end from every beginning. He IS, and so HE KNOWS what we need to walk into the joy of the morning. Learn to sit in your own discomfort so that people can heal.

Still sitting in the process of the press,