what punishments of god are not gifts

 I'm not religious, but I think about that line often. 

What punishments of God are not gifts?

"It's a gift to exist, and with existence comes suffering. There's no escaping that.” -SC.

I ask it when I’m angry, when the world feels unfair, and nothing makes sense.

I ask it when I’m crushed under the weight of grief.

I ask it when the pain seems endless, and every step forward feels like I’m dragging myself and my friends through the mud.

 

In those moments, I can catch a glimpse of how the hurt made room for something else. It will never be joy, nor relief, but understanding, and I'm okay with that. A deeper kind of understanding of myself, of the world, of how fragile and precious our moments of connection truly are. I started to see that the pain wasn’t pointless, even though it felt like it at the time. It’s as if the wound left behind a space for something new to grow in its place. Something that wasn’t there before. And as much as I want to go back to before, I accept that I can't rewind the clock. 

Though subjective, some say that God's punishments are meant to make us better; our suffering is fruitful and works to our benefit.

Hardship is what creates strength. It's what creates mercy. It's what creates love. The beauty of life is in the ability to see purpose in everything, even throughout pointless and inevitable suffering. To be unwavering in the face of what is uncontrollable is to attain acceptance.

Understanding.

The gift is not that we get back what we lost, not that the hurt is erased or fixed, but that we learn to love differently. Through all of this, I realized we love more deeply, more intentionally now. We find a new kind of strength in our vulnerability. And we create bonds that could never be forged before.

Grief is unexpressed love. 

It’s all the words we didn’t get to say, all the moments we thought we’d have, and all the love we still carry but have nowhere to place. That’s why it lingers. That’s why it never really goes away.

Grief stays with us because love stays with us.

Matter can neither be destroyed nor created. Our souls will remain, not just in celestial energy, but in the emotions we once held when we were alive, passed onto others, to the ones who carry us now. When we become a part of someone else, that human connection prevails.

Grief will remain with us until we pass because you can never have enough time with the ones you love.

Time is not a kind of change but something dependent on change.

When someone we love is gone, time never feels like it was enough. No matter how long we had, it’s never long enough to say everything, to do everything, to hold them close just one more time. So we grieve, not because we’re weak, but because we loved deeply.

There is nothing that will ever alleviate the pain of loss, but there is a redemption that can help us to appreciate it. We don’t have to like something in order to love it; love is about seeing the value. There is a time for everything.

Grief reminds us that the human condition is real, when these days we are so far removed from ourselves, we can never slow down and fully asses the real situation until something slams the breaks for us. And then, if it allows us to realize that we are capable, we love so hard it breaks us. 

If we’re lucky, in that stillness, we remember:
we are capable of great love.
The kind of love that leaves us aching.
The kind of love that changes us.

So when you go through life numb, it makes sense that grief stings all the more. We as humans have become so desensitised due to media, we walk around half-asleep, because we have to be.
We scroll past tragedy like it's nothing, mass shootings, war zones, missing faces all jammed between a meme and an ad for sneakers, shoved into your face constantly. Death is everywhere, but it never really lands when you look at it from that perspective.

But still, it's a slap in the face when it happens to us because we’ve been so conditioned to feel nothing that when something finally pierces the surface, it floods. There are no basins in life large enough to hold the tears grief sends us; it'll always leak through the cracks or spill over.

After a lifetime of being numb, presence hurts.
That pain is the only proof we have that we ever truly loved at all.

Though this isn't the type of post that critiques the world, I will mention.

The world isn’t built for this kind of sorrow. We don’t have time to fall apart. We have jobs, bills, and deadlines. The clock keeps ticking even when your heart has stopped in its own way.

A child once said it best:

"Why do you think you're sad?"

"I guess 'cause I used to be a brother,
and now I'm not a brother anymore"

"Oh well, we'll be your brothers, Dad"

The thing about death is, it doesn’t just take someone you love, it rearranges who you are. Because love makes a home for itself inside your identity. Humanity has created that connection that gives you titles; it gives you purpose. You’re a sister. A son. A best friend. A mother. A brother. 

And when that person is gone, we feel lost in our own identity.

We call our pain punishment, but without pain, who are we?

That person who loved you doesn't die. They just become something else. They will always find a way to poke their head in and remind you of the gift of life, manifesting in a different kind of presence each time, a different face but always the same love.  I've experienced it; for me, that love became a memory, or sometimes a moment of instinctive protection over someone else. It became how I showed up for others, even when my heart was heavy. So maybe he is still a brother. Just to someone new now, because the people who loved him taught him how to pass that love on.

It's a simple lesson, but one I found I was constantly searching for, learning how to carry that love forward into who I'm becoming.

I hope grief stays with me until I pass because it's all the unexpressed love I didn't get to show her; it means I’m still holding on to the parts of her I never got to give.  And if I let it stay, I’ll always carry her with me.

Because to mourn deeply is to have loved deeply.

And that, in itself, is holy.

I'm learning to carry the love differently.

She didn’t disappear.
She just became part of everything.

I do love you.

-Zee