Article October 16, 2017 Issue

From grief and sorrow to genuine joy

Andrea Ward

I was sitting in a business meeting recently when the topic of mentors came up. One of my colleagues looked to me and asked who my mentor had been. I quickly answered that it had been my dad, and in that moment, I surprisingly became overwhelmed with grief. My dad had passed on six months earlier, and I thought I had moved past any feelings of sorrow or grief. My colleagues did their best to be supportive and told me that it would “just take time.”

My parents had raised me in the Protestant faith, and I had learned about Christian Science through my husband. But when my dad passed on, instead of deepening my understanding of Christian Science, I turned to easy platitudes as a form of comfort.

It became clear after the incident with my colleagues that what I had been relying on was my own self-will to keep grief at bay. I simply refused to seem weak in front of my family and friends. This reliance on myself had not come from God; therefore, it had not lasted. What I really needed was to understand man’s relation to God. I could no longer just believe in eternal life; I needed to understand what it means to have eternal life.

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