And by pain I mean grief, and by grief I mean the loss of someone who is so essential to your well-being that breathing hurts,that everything turns dark.

Sometimes that someone can be you.

The heartlessness of grief lies on the endless horizon.  One day of loss is hard, a wasteland.  But when we grieve we know (or part of us knows) that the endless sea of brutal days without the beloved is part of the weight of sorrow.  We desperately want a reprieve, and when there is none there is a madness in sorrow.

This is Jesus on the Cross.  He is the focal point of endless loss–Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?  We know our grief feels endless and unbearable.  We know His was.

I once looked up the valley of the shadow of death.  I wondered if it was an actual geographical location.  It is not.  And this is why–the shadow of death is the place we walk through when the loss of our loves leaves us there–feeling alone and abandoned.

But it is only the shadow.  The pain of grief ripping through the core of our souls is merely–merely, the shadow of death.  Real death we see only from a distance as a Man agonizes on the cross of history.  He walks through the valley of death…so we never have to…