The gift of grief

It occurs to me that heartrending grief is a gift by which God provides us the slightest glimpse of his love for each of his beloved sons and daughters. This should be the context in which we understand Jesus' entire human life and all of salvation history.

The fact is that God will never have the sort of need for us that we often have for our loved ones, which drives so much of our grief. God is complete without us. Yet God's love for us is somehow simultaneously infinitely more even in the absence of need than ours is as motivated by need. God's ache for us for our sake is somehow greater for us than our ache for our lost loved ones, which is so often for our own sake, and naturally and understandably so.

But our loss is compounded by not knowing - at best daring to believe - what our eternal destiny in relation to our loved ones might be. It seems to me that God's grief on our behalf must be even greater when he has seen that one of his beloved ones will choose to separate him- or herself from him for all eternity.