Many years ago a wise, older woman told me, “everyone will experience grief in this world, and it  won’t leave you the same person- you will get better or you will get bitter”. The experience of the pain of grief is associated with some sort of loss in our lives. Personal grief can be divided into two categories: godly grief and worldly grief.  With godly grief, our pain manifest as anger or hurt that compels us to turn toward God for help and relief. When we choose to go to the Lord and work out our emotions , slowly but surely we will encounter relief in place of heaviness. We will move toward being able to live without regret and will understand that God uses all our experiences, both positive and negative, for good. Godly grief will produce recovery and acceptance in our hearts and lives. On the contrary, worldly grief produces physical, emotional, and spiritual death. Worldly grief manifest as self-pity, codependency, failure to take responsibility for our feelings, blame, manipulation, false guilt, condemnation, sickness, hopelessness, and bitterness. Within this dark grief we easily get stuck, never processing through and finding release into the light. It is God’s will for us to turn to Him as we encounter and endure grief. Only He has the power to use grief as a tool to move us toward physical, emotional, and spiritual health and wholeness.

“For godly grief and the pain God is permitted to direct, produce a repentance that leads and contributes to salvation and deliverance from evil, and it never brings regret; but worldly grief [the hopeless sorrow that is characteristic of the world] is deadly [breeding and ending in death]” (2Corinthians 7:10).