Business As Usual

When someone close to you passes away life doesn't stop altogether.  In fact, the voice of the living still cries out “business as usual”.  Demands business as usual, dictates business as usual.  Thankfully, there is often an “excused pause” graced by co-workers, friends, and extended family.  However spoken or unspoken the underlying current strains “Can we please get back to how things usually are?”  Death becomes an uncomfortable reality, disrupting pace, present relationships and future pursuits.  But to the person that is managing their everyday life after a loss, there is almost nothing that feels like “business as usual”.

It’s crazy because I don’t usually feel this irritable.  I don’t usually lack such patience.  I am usually much happier and can usually overlook much more.  I don’t usually cry this much and definitely not usually in front of strangers.  I can usually arm myself with the right words to deflect dumb ones just spoken to me with much more grace.  I don’t usually feel this vulnerable and am not usually this sensitive.  I don’t usually feel this measure of guilt or feel like I am going to buckle under the weight of regret.   I can usually think through things with clearer thought and reason.  Everything about present life feels quite unusual actually and there just doesn’t seem to be the opportunity to whole-heartedly embrace this notion of “business as usual” simply because everything keeps moving forward.

Unusual emotions, ponderings, responses appear to be the normal business of grieving the loss of someone we love.  It doesn’t mean that there won’t be moments that feel like things are as they were before, however with or without our permission life is carving a new path of what normal looks like, feels like, and will be like now.  And that is O.K.  If there is one thing every person is subject to and life on earth declares is that there is only one thing that never changes and that is that EVERYTHING CHANGES!  The job we have is to become comfortable with this reality.  The faster we do that, the more flexibility we will exercise to embrace every season, the good with the bad, the joyful with the sad because that is life’s business as usual. 

“There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens:

a time to be born and a time to die,

a time to plant and a time to uproot,

a time to kill and a time to heal,

a time to tear down and a time to build,

a time to weep and a time to laugh,

a time to mourn and a time to dance,

a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them,

a time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing,

a time to search and a time to give up,

a time to keep and a time to throw away,

a time to tear and a time to mend,

a time to be silent and a time to speak,

a time to love and a time to hate,

a time for war and a time for peace.

What do workers gain from their toil? I have seen the burden God has laid on the human race. He has made everything beautiful in its time.”

         Ecclesiastes 3:3-11