When Obedience Feels Like Loss

There is a specific kind of grief that no one prepares you for because it does not fit neatly into any of the categories that grief is supposed to occupy. It is not the grief of the thing taken from you without your consent, not the grief of the loss that arrived uninvited and unwelcome and that you would have prevented if the prevention had been within your power. It is a stranger and more disorienting grief than that, because it is the grief of the thing you laid down yourself, the thing you released not because it was taken but because something in you, something that you identified as the voice of God or the movement of the Spirit or the honest demands of the faith you are trying to live, asked you to release it. And you did. You were obedient. You did the thing that the obedience required. And then you discovered that the obedience produced a grief that the disobedience would not have produced, and that the grief was real and significant and ongoing and not adequately addressed by any of the theological frameworks that were available to you in the moment of the releasing.