What can Frozen’s Anna teach us about how to faithfully deal with grief?
Last Sunday, we remembered those we love who have died. Death is God’s enemy over which Jesus has claimed victory and yet in many instances when someone we love dies it doesn’t feel like a win. Death can feel like a punch in the gut, it can feel numb, it might not even feel at all, it feels like a loss. That is because it is a loss.
In that loss we can start to feel lost. Like we’ve come unmoored or struggling to find our way in the dark. Jesus on the cross was feeling this kind of grief when he prays and pleads Psalm 22, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from helping me, from the words of my groaning? O my God, I cry by day, but you do not answer; and by night, but find no rest.”
What do we do when the pain of grief closes in? I think Disney sum’s up one small thing we can do when grief surrounds us. In Disney’s Frozen 2, two sisters Queen Elsa and Princess Anna are on a journey to save their kingdom and to discover greater truth about their own identity, when Queen Elsa and their snowman friend Olaf, die and Anna is unable to save them. In the song, The Next Right Thing, Anna provides faithful advice. Watch and listen here.
We just take one day, minute, breath at a time and we do the next right thing. Because when grief surrounds us, sometimes it takes all we have to do just that one next right thing. I wonder if this is kind of what Paul meant when he wrote in 2 Corinthians 5:7 “for we walk by faith, not by sight.” When experiencing grief by just doing the next right thing, we trust that God is leading us because we can’t see where we are headed or what the future may hold, and so we walk in faith.
Today, whether your walk is marked by joy or grief, know you are not alone. We can walk together with Jesus leading us.
