Finding Hope in times of Grief

*The funeral is over....the people who temporarily turned aside to grieve with you, to honor your deceased love one...they are all gone.  The flowers have faded, and perhaps pots of dried up stems and leaves sit beside your trash can...

The meals that friends brought have stopped and now even the phone doesn't ring quite so much anymore.

The cards don't fill the mailbox the way they once did either-just the usual bills and junk mail, and maybe, painfully, a piece of mail now and then addressed to the one whose absence saps your strength virtually every moment of every day....and no matter how you feel about it, mornings still come and night still falls over and over and over again, with everyone and everything around you saying, "You'll just have to move on," While everything within you undeniably groans, "But nothing is the same."   What are you supposed to do with this massive load of experience and emotion that has landed on you an now weiths on every aspect of your being?

Are you just supposed to "get over  it"?
Are you just supposed to "move on"?
Are you just supposed to resign yourself to the idea, expressed in the words of the Bibles' book of Job:
Man is born for trouble, as sparks fly upward (Job 5:7)
Simply put, can you ever begin to feel better and to see this event that has befallen you assume a place of purpose and value in your life and in the lives of others?
The answer, according to God's Word, the Bible, is a resounding, Yes!!!! there is hope.
Hope is not wishful thinking, or whatever pleasant illusion we may conjure up.  It isn't some fantasy on which we fixate, in order to mystically influence events or, at least, to make ourselves feel better.
True hope is settled confidence based on objective fact and enduring truth. True hope does not give in to despair. It is based on expected and needed grace from God.  It patiently waits and confidently expects good from God-here and now, and for eternity-regarless of the severity of one's personal storm.
God based hope goes hand in hand with joy because it depends on the constancy of the One who holds us in his hand rather than on our own tired, tethered and fickled emotions. In God's word we have a promise we can embrace and draw strength from the promise that God Himself spoke to His people through the prophet Jeremiah: "For I know the plans that I have for you, declares the Lord, plans for welfare and not for calamity to give you a future and a hope'" (Jer 29:11)
God is telling us that if we turn to Him We can count on the risen, living Christ to make blessing and not grief the ultimate summation of our lives.
This article is taken from the book, FINDING HOPE IN TIMES OF GRIEF, by Preston and Glenda Parrish Authors,