Jerem.

This weekend, I had the opportunity to join together with my peers for a young adult retreat. While I was there I meditated on the loss I've experienced over the past year and was able to focus on healing and ask for prayer. When I left yesterday afternoon I felt like I had just woken from a very long sleep. I felt the cloud of grief lifting for the first time. 

When I was off the mountain, literally, I got the news that someone I have loved dearly for a long time was gone. 

I have been crying and sleeping and aching as I grieve this, try to understand it, and feel the hurts that had started healing this weekend become fresher and reopen. 

My mind knows this: Grief is the price you pay for allowing love to dwell in you and join you with others on this journey. I would never trade my grief and do this life over with out the people I've lost to save myself from a minute of anguish. 

My heart is broken, though, it aches, it hurts. I am grieving for myself, for my best friends, and for his family. His siblings who lost him so suddenly, like i lost my sister. 

I know that God is close to the broken hearted, and that is my strength as I find myself spread out from my friends who I urgently want to be close to, right now.  Among my group of friends, I stand alone in that sentiment, that faith I have that I am not breaking all by myself, so I say a silent prayer, and I cry with my friends, because that we can share, and we will be good to ourselves, the way we wish he had been good to himself.

I will never not miss him. I'm thankful for that.