By Omar King—3 min. read—client resource
Grief’s ana. . . what? I didn’t make this word up. I promise. Don’t let its multisyllabic
arrangement scare you. It doesn’t roll off the tongue easily, now does it. And I am not trying to be
pretentious. What you will discover with a bit of patience and explication is that this is one of the most
beautiful words ever created. Not because of its lexical complexity but because of its profound meaning
and implication. Though you may never actually use it in conversation, I’m convinced that you’ll never
forget it. So, promise me you won’t look it up before it’s defined here. No spoilers. Now, with that
preamble out of the way, let’s talk a bit about grief. That word you know very well, and probably regret
you are as acquainted with.
I heard it said that grief is what we experience when love doesn’t have a home or has no place to go.
I can’t think of a better way to capture grief’s orphan status. Grief is what we experience when love’s
labor is lost. Grief is what we experience as an unintended consequence of the fall. We were never meant
to grieve because love—loving and being loved—was never meant to expire. God intended for us to live
forever so we could love forever. Our love was supposed to imitate God’s steadfast, enduring, and fierce
love. The same kind of love experienced within the Godhead between Father, Son and Spirit. Sin compromised love by severing its lasting thread. We ultimately experience the consequence of severed
love through death.
Grief is what happens when love is interrupted. Grief is therefore painful, very painful because the
greatest and central aspect to human existence is love. We were created by God from love, in love, and
for love. All of creation and specifically God’s act of creating human beings as image bearers is and
enterprise in love. Love’s greatest threat to its continuity is death or, broadly speaking, loss. A loss of any
kind is a miniscule form of death. It foreshadows and forebodes greater and impending losses. However,
grief or how we grieve can tell us something about our love.
In one sense, you can tell how much a person loves someone by how they grieve them. Its intensity,
duration, and impact on their life. Grief is proof of love. It attests to love. When Lazarus, Jesus’s good
friend, died, Jesus wept. Witnesses around him responded in amazement, “look how much he loved
him.” Those who do not grieve do not love. Or their love is stunted or impaired.
Grief also longs for love to be restored. Grief pines to be reunited with the object of love.
Anacampserote is defined as a thing that can restore a love thought lost. Stories agogo have been
written and told, shown in cinema and depicted in sci-fi which revolves around the lengths, sometimes
bordering on the insane, that a person would undergo to postpone grief by saving their loved one from
dying, or attempting to revive their loved one after days, months, or years of mortem. The human quest to
acquire an anacampserote is as old as the original sin. Death separates us from God and love, because
God is love. (1 John 4:7-8) An inbuilt desire for eternal life is quintessentially as desire for eternal love.
In Christ love is restored. Jesus Christ is grief’s anacampserote. He is our anacampserote. This is
why Christians do not grieve as those who have no hope when faced with death (1 Thess. 4:13). Our
hope is in Christ who restores loves we thought were lost. And our hope does not produce shame,
because God’s love is poured into our heart by the Holy Spirit (Rom. 5:5) His love is retained,
inseparable, and reassuring. God promised that not even death can separate us from His love because of
Christ. (Rom. 8:38) Praise God, whose love sets both a precedent and a promise that through His Son, all
our loves we believed were extinguished are in fact recovered and restored.
Like I said, I bet you’ll never forget this word now!