A Grief Observed

A Grief Observed, has been an amazing book to read . It is the first book that I have read that truly captures the essence of genuine love, but not because of a romantic life but because of the tragedy that C.S. Lewis went through. Something that caught my attention was the paragraph when C.S. Lewis refers to God as a surgeon.

"If he yielded to your entreaties, if he stopped before the operation was complete, all pain up to that point wold have been useless."

The power in this sentence alone could have been an entire chapter. It reminded me of when I had to get stitches for busting my chin open when I was a child. The pain of course hurt entirely, but I knew getting stitches would hurt all the more. I did not want to go through the healing process because I knew that the beginning would be tortuous. I would have rather sat there in my pain and agony instead of getting the proper treatment that I needed for a complete healing. Thankfully my dad is my doctor and he insisted on going straight to the office to get my stitches.

Okay, okay, so they were just stitches compared to open heart surgery, but still, if you knew my personality and my fear of hospitals, this is a BIG DEAL to me. When I read this line in the book I started thinking about what my dad would have done if I would have asked him to stop in the middle of my operation. The entire surgery would have been for nothing because it would have only been half completed, half healed, and worse, half of my chin still would have been open for infection. In infection that would have only gotten worse and, perhaps, an infection that could have spread throughout my body. I would first like to point out that even asking to stop in the middle of an operation would have been an absolutely ridiculous request, because no doctor in their right mind sets out to perform an operation even questioning the thought of stopping in the middle. A doctor's job is to heal, not partially heal.

With life, we, as humans, will go through sufferings, the key is to get through it completely and courageously. Stopping half way through, before reaching your ultimate victory of being free will not heal you, but only mask over the hurt. This is not smart, for if there are still things that need to be completely rooted out of your life and sewn back, one leaves room for even more hurt and anguish to seep through. So something that might have only taken a year to complete is now taking four to five years and, perhaps, even more. One must complete the entire operation on one's life if one wants to be healed and have the ability to walk in freedom. This, in more simpler terms, is what I believe C.S. Lewis was trying to get across within this section of his book.