Small Little Grief

November 2, 2022

By Jo Wiersema

Midweek Musings is a weekly Covenant blog with a variety of authors and a variety of topics.

Heck, we’re back after two weeks in Guatemala. I bet you’re ready for another Guatemala reflection, but alas, that’s not what’s on the heart today.

It’s my one-year anniversary of being offered the job at Covenant!

One year of officially being in ministry.

One year after walking away from an interview I thought I had absolutely tanked.

A year ago, on November 1st, I put in my notice at Epic. I made the unthinkable decision to walk away from the job security of corporate America, the relationships I had made over the years, and the very niche skillset of working in health information technology.

I loved my job. Yes, before you ask, Epic was hard. Yes, I travelled and sometimes had longer days, but I loved my job.

I loved the people: my coworkers, my customers, my baristas, I loved people so hard it hurt.

Quick note: I love deeply, I do everything in my life with a little too much heart, but the joys of loving hard is that these end up being some of the best relationships.

People who I could have just sat next to in meetings turned into parents of my godchildren, confidants, and friends that lasted much longer than I could have thought.

Grief isn’t always about death, but grief can be about change and loss.

The little grief we feel when things change is sometimes hard to put into words.

Leaving Epic was my choice, moving into ministry was exactly the right thing to do when listening to God’s call, but by golly it still hurts. It hurts to change sometimes.

Change is never easy, but some change, even a year later, is filled with a bit of melancholy you can’t shake.

Grief is messy like that, where time can move forward, but the acceptance of change and moving on isn’t always on the same schedule.

This All Saints' Sunday, grief might be on the mind.

It might be filled with saints who have died and there is much more tangible grief there.

It might be filled with saints who you only met in passing, or the friendship that fell apart, or someone you drifted away from.

These saints who we traditionally honor only in death, are all around us. We can grieve changes in our lives, towns we’ve left behind and even as we have the modern age of social media, we know it’s not the same.

We can see the shiny lives of people who we miss, the filtered photos of family fun and perfect Halloween costumes, but you miss the everyday.

You miss the honest hallway conversations and inside jokes.

This is all to say, I love my job now. I love my coworkers and the children and youth I get to work with day in and day out. But grief and joy can go hand in hand.

God made us in Their image to be complex and to feel these meaty emotions and to know that what we feel is import and valid.

This blog doesn’t have a nice happy bow on the end of it, but it’s all to say...

Time doesn’t always heal all wounds, but your experiences and emotions are valid. There is hope in small griefs, just as there is hope on Good Friday for Easter Sunday.

Blessed to be back y’all,

Jo