Separation

Who is that one person in your life that is the most special to you?  Who brings you the most happiness?  Who, if you had to be separated for a long time (maybe even the rest of your life), would you grieve the most over?

Whether separation is from divorce, death, deployment or happenstance it is horrible.  The grief of being parted from the one that you love with all of your heart is inconsolable.  Depression, loneliness, feelings of abandonment and not feeling loved coupled with the inevitable day-to-day changes to your life from the missing person make separation seem like a living hell.

There is a reason separation from your loved ones seems like hell - it is because it mirrors on a very small scale what hell is really like.  So many people think of hell as only a burning fire and eternal torment and I do not want to discount those aspects but by far the worst characteristic would be separation from God.

God is the source of everything that is good in your life and in this world - so imagine a place utterly devoid of everything good.  That would be hell.

At church on Sunday, a man who had been on the unwanted end of divorce brought up how horrible separation from that person you love is - that it is a living hell.  It really helped me to think in terms of a comparison I could understand.  I have been separated from my husband by military deployment (as has my little sister, Esther!) and it is horrible - how much more to be separated from God?

I would never want any of my friends or family to go through a painful separation from anyone they loved.  What am I doing to make sure they don't go through a much worse separation upon their death?