Tears filled a lot of my day.  They didn’t all spill out.  Some brimmed to the surface of my eyes to be blinked back.  Too many found the corners of my eyes and slipped down my face.  Nothing sad happened.  Just some more grieving.

We did a siege simulation this morning.  It was too much like my life a few years ago.  Thankfully, I’d read through the scenario yesterday and was a facilitator for the exercise and not a participant.  I’m not sure how I would’ve handled being locked down in a similar situation again.  Lunch talk was split between evacuation stories and recalling the rape of a friend’s 11 year old during an armed robbery.  All that was followed by an afternoon session that included some good stories, but some hard ones about the death of a friend’s baby, the departure of a student who wanted to embrace Truth but chose to put it off.

It has been a hard day, but it was a good day.  Grief is cyclical not linear.  In the last week I’ve realized how much I still grieve for the losses of the coup that caused “La Crise” in Cote d’Ivoire.  I’ve lost the proximity of friends, a close knit—though sometimes wacky—community, daily interaction with students, an easily definable role, lots of possessions, and quite a few intangibles.  Grieving is good.  It means what you lost meant something; the things lost were good and important.  Even though today was hard, it was a good reminder of the good that was and God’s graciousness in the good that is.

photo courtesy of vivekchugh