"I used to feel like I would like to go asleep the day before Thanksgiving and wake up January 2," admits Lois Rabey. She expresses the grief most widows and widowers feel during the holidays. Thanksgiving and Christmas usually are times when most families get together and facing the reality that your loved one is not going to be there is almost more than a grieving wife, mother, husband, child, or father can bear.
I was with my dad when he went to heaven two weeks before Thanksgiving. That Thanksgiving was one of intense pain and sorrow for our whole family as we dealt with the reality of him no longer being with us. Even though that was 15 years ago, I still cry thinking about that night and how much we miss him, especially on Thanksgiving and Christmas.
My good friend, Clayton King, lost his sweet mother yesterday and he will preach her memorial celebration, the day before Thanksgiving. Pray for him, his dad and that family.
Even though this was the year in our rotation system that we were going to be with my family, Tebra and I are going to spend Thanksgiving with her sister and family. Her husband, my friend, Redmond, went to heaven February 3, and this will be their first Thanksgiving without him. Pray for Freda and her four children. There is nothing I can say that will help them. There is nothing I can do to help them. But I do know the One who can help them and I want to be there as I call on Him to send His ambulance of grace.
You probably know someone who has a loved one in heaven and their heart is heavy this Thanksgiving. Write, email, text, or tweet them. Call and leave a message saying how much you love them. Remind them that He promised to always be there and to cry out to Him. Don't give them some little trite saying like, "Time will heal your heart." That is a lie. Only Jesus can heal a heart.
Don't tell them to pray and go on with their life. The word "on" implies we leave something and go to something else. If you have to say something, say, "Jesus will help you go forward with your life."
Most of all, pray God's grace: strengthening grace, sympathising grace, sustaining grace. It is God's grace that brings a person through their grief and causes them to survive the holidays. If you are that grieving person, look to Him. He sees. He cares. He is really the only One who knows exactly what you are going through, and He is there, ready to help you.
He was despised and forsaken of men,
A man of sorrows and acquainted with grief; Isaiah 53:3
