Lori, you said it so well, that He not only comforts us but also carries us through our suffering. He is the one that gives peace in the midst of the suffering and loss.

You don’t forget a loved one, but you do have to find a way to live with their loss. A friend of mine who lost her father at a young age said that it’s a bit like losing your leg. You never get over it, you don’t stop missing your leg, you just learn how to hop. You have to find a different way to live because something that was supposed to be there is gone.

I think it’s a balance, and as I said to Amber, it’s a learning process. You can’t walk forward while only looking at what is behind you (tend to lead to crashing into things), but you can’t, you wouldn’t want to, lose the memory of this person you loved. The work is in the balance of it, focussing on the good memories, remembering them and trying not to stay stuck in those days when the pain is so raw it takes your breath away.

Does that make sense? If not, please feel free to write back and I’ll try to explain it better.

I am sorry to hear that you found today’s devotional hurtful. That is never our intention, but you came here and were hurt by something that you read, and for that I truly am sorry. I don’t think that Marilyn was saying that you should just pretend that this awful thing did not happen, rather she was saying that if something in our past becomes our point of reference it makes it very difficult to move on, to begin to heal.

I can hear a lot of pain in your comment. I have to disagree about what you said about a false hope. Hope in God is not false. God clearly promises that He has plans for each of us – plans to give us hope and a future. (Jer 29:11). That hope includes you. I cannot imagine what it is that you have suffered, but I do believe that God has good things planned for you. Isaiah 40:31 promises that, “but those who hope in the LORD will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint.”
Hope in God is not misplaced hope.

I would never want to minimize what has happened to you, but I do believe that if any of us are going to begin to heal from pain then we have to work through the process of letting go of it. That doesn’t mean that we pretend it never happened or that we weren’t hurt to begin with. But it means that we begin to do the hard work of learning how to trust again (not the person who hurt us, but people in general and God in specific). We have to learn how to go back out into the world, how to let people get close to us again and part of that process is letting go of some of that pain, thinking about it a little less so that there is room in our minds to think about something good.

It’s not a quick process nor is it an easy one, but it is necessary. You may find that you need some extra help to walk that road, especially if what you experienced was particularly hard. I hope that you are able to walk that road and that there will come a day when what happened to you is only a part of your story and not your entire story.
I hope there comes a day when it is easier to live with, when the pain gets smaller.

I’m struggling to understand the term ‘forget’ and the way you explain it makes it complicated to me. In the case of losing a loved one, how do you “forget” in a quest on “not dwelling in the past”?