Be Positive! {Thoughts on Gratitude and Grief}

I am drowning in a deep, dark sea. I am a captive to it's unpredictable waves. Prisoner to it's control
over me.

Grief has ripped my plans for productivity, joy, and peace and replaced them with a new person I don't recognize . Every time my wound starts to scab it once again gets ripped open by a new circumstance. 

"Be positive." they say.
"Write a gratitude journal," they tell me.

But I do NOT feel ungrateful.
Maybe if I think positively, then I will trick the universe into some cosmic twist of good things coming my way?

It feels false.
It feels unnatural.

Is this really the point? To be positive, despite your very world crushing below your feet?
Perhaps. I have met many who have met insurmountable odds and still ooze positivity. Some I think are sincerely in a good place and have worked through a lot of the natural anger and pain. I feel for others. I think so much pain must be just under the surface and they push it down with trite quips and and joy journals. Is this what Christ has asked of me? Am I ignoring him?

I look to Job, who suffered arguably more than any human being. He is angry. He is sad. He cries out to God. He ask God why.
I look to Christ. He is angry. He is sad. He cries out to God. He ask God why. Why?

I wish some would stop replacing my grief for perceived ingratitude. Look at what you DO have. Cup half full, Alyvia, cup half full. I am not ungrateful, I am sad. There is a difference, a big difference. Also, I wonder is this the Christian way of supporting one another?

On some level positivity is a great thing but is this how God wants us to help one another through suffering. At times is like telling a person to acknowledge how pretty the sea is as they are screaming for help during a tsunami?

We ignore that suffering and pain is part of the path paved to glory and our forever home.
Rather than encouraging other's to think of the cross during suffering we point their focus back themselves. "How can we get something positive from this?" we ask, when the focus should be how can God get glory through this?

I bask in my preacher's words:
When Jesus rose from the dead, it marked the beginning of the new heavens and new earth,
we have just yet to have them revealed them to us.
Suffering than glory.
We often try to make this all about me, myself and I, but the cross is the real focus.

This journey as lonely as it as and as sad and anger-inducing as it makes me at times, has made my
focus on just that. Through this suffering I am finding ways I would have never otherwise to glorify Him.

I am grateful, among so many things, to have wise people in my life who see that trite phrases and half-full quotes are about as helpful as an umbrella in a hurricane and instead allow me cry, to scream and to just feel what the honesty of the life that has been given to me. This ironically helps me be the most positive, because it redirects me to the hope and joy that surpasses any human suffering that can be throw my way.

So for my life, as hard as it is of late, I am grateful.