Will I Find Joy Again after Loss and Grief?
Will I find joy again after loss and grief? Will I ever smile again or feel that warm rush of happiness bubble up like warm sunshine?
These questions haunted me in fresh grief after Dan suddenly died. I was convinced that I’d never be truly happy again. I would try to make the best of it for my children, I thought. They had already lost one parent and they couldn’t lose another because I quietly quit. I’d show up as best as I could for them but everything good, it seemed, was behind me.
Loss had created a before and after. A hard line that divided life into two halves. The days before the fulcrum when I was married to my high school sweetheart and my children had their father brimmed with joy and light and laughter. The days I was now walking out on this side of the fulcrum, when life imploded in ways I’d never seen coming, were heavy and bleak and shrouded in sorrow.
I had not only buried the love of my life but our dreams and plans, our shared history and understanding, the movie lines and memories and inside jokes that could make us erupt in belly laughs with a single word. All that was gone and would never be again.
How could I ever feel real joy again when it was all I could do to get my feet to the floor each morning, slog through an overwhelming to-do list until my head hit the pillow, and fall asleep to exhausted tears only to get up again the next day to do it all over again?
And yet, I desperately wanted to know smiling again was possible.
When life shatters, all we can feel are the sharp edges of life. We carry around a constant missing, a persistent and sometimes physical ache, an acute longing for what was and what we dearly wanted life to be.
In those first few weeks after Dan died, someone shared her own grief experience with me. She said after loss, she never again felt the lowest lows but she also never felt the highest highs. Loss had left her coasting on neutral, guarding her heart from ever feeling such heartache again.
But even as she spoke those words, I silently challenged them. Yes, life looked different on this side of the loss fulcrum, but I refused to settle for a life washed out of vibrant color. I wanted to laugh again, find new inside jokes, and experience moments of heady delight. I wanted to walk through this wilderness of pain to flourish again.
I didn’t know whether exuberant joy was possible again, but I determined to fight for it.
I began praying for joy. I pressed through gnawing loneliness and grim despair clinging to the hope that God restores. That God delights in giving us abundant, heart-splitting, explosive joy. And that no circumstance, hard as it may be, can invalidate his promises.
In John 10:10, Jesus says, “The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.”
While the enemy would love for grief to steal our joy, kill our hope, and destroy the deep purpose God still has for us, Jesus died to give us abundant life. That word abundant in the Greek is perissos and it means “beyond what is anticipated, exceeding expectation, going past the expected limit.”
Christ’s promised abundance is not only for heaven but also for life this side of heaven. Scripture tells us that in God’s presence “there is fullness of joy.” (Psalm 16:11, ESV)
Neither our feelings nor our circumstances change the truth of God’s promised joy.
But smiling again wouldn’t just happen. I needed to fight for defiant joy in grief.
We fight for defiant joy when we look for tiny joys in the midst of sorrow.
We fight for defiant joy when we refuse to miss all the good that is because we miss the good that was.
We fight for defiant joy when we believe the enemy will not get the last word.
Defiant joy doesn’t deny the very real pain of loss. Instead it holds both/and—sorrow and joy. Grief and gratitude. Sadness for all that was lost while embracing all that is.
Defiant joy is trusting that when we do the hard work of processing our loss, we’ll see that life can be good again.
God delights in bringing us lavish joy—abundant life that is beyond measure and will exceed our expectations.
That promise doesn’t start and stop. It’s as sure this side of the fulcrum as it was that side of the fulcrum.
Will you find joy again after loss and grief? Yes. If no one else in your life has assured you, let me affirm that you will smile again.
In fact, God’s joy may surprise you sooner than you think and in ways you didn’t expect. Processing your grief and loss will take enormous work and it may take longer than you thought it would.
Keep fighting for defiant joy. Don’t settle for the bland resignation of neutral. And you will again experience the kind of beautiful joy that bubbles up like warm sunshine.
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