When familiar places that once brought you comfort close.......

8 Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever. 9 Do not be led away by diverse and strange teachings, for it is good for the heart to be strengthened by grace, not by foods, which have not benefited those devoted to them.Hebrews 13:8-9

I may have mentioned in past blogs how important  rituals are in surviving the loss of a loved one.Rituals for us, and I think for most people, bring comfort. When we continue to attend the same worship service week after week, sitting in the same section  gives us the security at the moment our lives have been jolted and our security threatened.

It is when tragedy happens that our brains  take a major assault and why major life decisions  must wait several months before we act on them. I read, for example, that the parents of murdered  Jon Benet Ramsey, fell into major financial problems in the months and years after the loss of their daughter.

For our family, it was the familiarity and the warm memories of eating at those same restaurants after our loss that gave us a sense of comfort and security. I knew that we could not run away from our grief, avoid those places we enjoyed before our loss, and  the greatest thing we could do would be to create new memories with those places we enjoyed as a family of four. 

I knew that  grief wasn't something to run from, nor avoided and if we were ever to be successful with navigating this grief we must travel through the pain associated with our loss rather than avoiding it by tossing all of our emotions into a steel vault and tossing it in the sea.

It was in reading the Star Tribune online edition that my emotional heart strings were jerked when one of our families favorite eating places was closed because of what the paper described as changing pattern of dining out.

I was hoping, as I read the article, to find they had kept the Champlin location open, but that wasn't the case. As I saw that location listed I immediately, I saw a rapid succession of images of my family at each age eating at this  Rudy Tuesdays with the reality that a place that has brought so much comfort was no longer there for us. The loss of this particular Rudy Tuesdays location brought back an even earlier memory--the place my wife ate at before returning home from our honeymoon.

The loss of this familiar place taught me another lesson. That lesson is how important my faith in Jesus Christ continues to play in our families life and in this grief journey. While we can hope that familiar places are still there for us to give us that security, our greater security is knowing that Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today and tomorrow. He will never leave us, no matter how disoriented our lives become with the disappearance of those once familiar places!

He is the same yesterday, today and tomorrow!