10 Ways to Find Your Faith When Dealing With Grief

Dealing with the loss of a loved one can be the most trying time in all aspects of your life. The physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual toll it takes can seem impossible to overcome. Death has a way of rattling us to our cores, and naturally so. 

As humans, we love so quickly; and it doesn’t matter if you’ve spent a year or a decade with a person – if you love them, losing them is going to cause you untold pain and anguish. Sometimes during the process of grieving over a lost loved one, we can lose our faith. 

If you feel like this is happening to you, don’t feel like you are alone – you are not. There are, however, ten ways that you can go about reclaiming it. There is belief after grief.

Give Yourself Time

Time heals so much; it does. Most people will tell you this after you lose a loved one. In part, it is true – it won’t get easier over time though, it just hurts less. There will likely never come a time where you won’t feel some pain when you think of your person; the important part is what else you learn to feel over time.

Time will not heal you completely, but it will teach you gratitude and humility – and those are just as important when it comes to dealing with grief.

Accept Your Feelings

Grief has many different stages and everyone experiences grief differently. There are no hard and fast rules for dealing with grief. Be prepared – grief can be ugly. You have to learn to accept your feelings, whatever they may be.

Many people experience indescribable sadness, while others feel uncontrolled rage. These feelings and emotions are natural to the person experiencing them, even if they seem out of character.

Don’t Dwell On The Past

Don’t make the mistake of dwelling on the past when you work through your grief. There is nothing productive about questioning your actions or the actions of your loved one from long ago. Sure, there will always be things that you, or they, could have done better. The point is that there is nothing you can do to change the past, so there is no point in living there.

So much damage is done when your mind is stuck in a perpetual state of reliving your past. You must find a healthy way to move on from it. Accept the actions and find new ways to be a better person. The only use for our past is to learn from it, not dwell there.

Ask For Help

Grief can be a long and arduous process; at times, it can be incredibly overwhelming.

The grieving process is different for everyone and there’s no specific timeline for it either. It can take days, months, years, or even decades to work through the pain of losing someone important in your life.

There are many ways to help friend grieving. One way is by just being there for them. Another way is by trying different activities together – it may be difficult at first, but eventually these activities will become easier and more fun. You can also try to get them into hobbies that they enjoy or take part in activities that they used to enjoy before their loss.

You would be surprised at how much of a weight it will lift off of your shoulders. Grief is rarely a process that can be undertaken in a solitary manner, particularly with a difficult death. Too often, people drown in their grief when a lifeboat is just a phone call or text message away.

Talk To God

Talking to God may feel like the last thing that you want to do right now. That is understandable. You feel cheated and wronged by your loving Father. That is just a stage of your grief – those are your emotions talking and not your spirit. If you’re honest with yourself, you know that it’s not Him that you are angry with.

Be angry at the situation and circumstance. You’re just trying to lash out because you feel like there is no one to blame for your pain. Consult the Book of Mormon for assistance in your darkest times and open up that dialogue with God again.

Practice Understanding

This step is a difficult one, it is. That does not mean that it is impossible. By trying to practice understanding daily, it will eventually come naturally to you. In the beginning, it will be hard to understand that losing your loved one was not a personal attack on you.

There will be days that are harder than others, but once you learn to develop an understanding attitude towards your grief, things will get easier.

Be Patient

Grief is a journey and one with many twists and turns. You will eventually be able to go for weeks without having a breakdown, but those tend to sneak up on you seemingly out of the blue. Be patient with yourself and with those around you.

Remember that your journey through grief is not a solitary one. You and your family and friends will all be dealing with it in your way. Be patient and be kind, always.

Don’t Give Up

As challenging as this road is, there is no easy way to cope with grief. You have to keep your head on straight and push through the worst parts to get to the parts that aren’t so bad. Your memories of your loved one will be all you have to see yourself through the worst days.

Whatever you do, and no matter how hard it gets – do not give up.

Don’t Blame Yourself

As easy as it is to sink into the mindset of blaming yourself, that won’t help – it will only make your journey more difficult. The truth is that even in the most complicated of cases, you will never know if there was something you could have done differently to change the outcome of what led to your loved one passing away.

Overwhelming evidence suggests that this is rarely the case, so don’t be hard on yourself.

Don’t Blame God

This step is trickier. Being in a state of mourning is an intensely draining experience for a person to go through. You will probably find yourself wanting to blame God for taking away someone who you held so dear, and as hard as it is… don’t.

Death is a part of life; we all expect to live well into our old age and die peacefully in our sleep. Unfortunately, this isn’t going to be the case for all of us – that doesn’t mean that God was acting out of spite or malice. Try not to travel down this path as it is a difficult one to come back from.