Life’s Little Deaths Provide Opportunities for Resurrection & Ascension to New Heights!

There are many lessons to be learned from the death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ; lessons that we can apply to daily life. We experience little deaths when life doesn’t work out the way we wanted, or the way we planned. We all face serious illness, economic woes, love gone sour and many other small deaths throughout our lifetimes. The question is do we process them all carefully while we’re in our little tombs, allow ourselves to heal, to be resurrected by our Higher Power, and thus rise above these little deaths? Many of us don’t. We wallow in our emotional graves feeling sorry for ourselves and refusing to take back our personal power. In doing so, we prevent ourselves from being resurrected and ascending to new heights in our lives. We stay stuck.

When bad things happen we need to accept and grieve them as they are, and give them to our Higher Power. Then we need to talk with someone we trust about what we have experienced. Once we begin grieving our little death, we need to open up so we can break free from the blame game and our own denial. For example, let’s say our spouse of 40 years has up and left us for someone else. We may initially be in a state of shock and we can stay in that state if our denial about the relationship has been in high gear for a long time. After all, no one up and leaves a truly happy relationship. It can’t possibly come as a totally unexpected loss to us. If my spouse up and leaves me, then deep down I’ve known for a long time that things weren’t right between us. To act otherwise is to be sealed in denial. This is why it’s so important to talk with someone who can help us to see past our denial.

As we begin to tell our story to a trusted person, we’ll begin to reveal the history of our marital relationship. In doing so, the denial may very well begin to fall away. We may find ourselves admitting that we were married for the wrong reasons, and that we had caught our spouse cheating on us at various times over our 40 years together. We may also come to realize— and admit to ourselves for the first time-- that we were only staying with him or her because we wanted security. Once we start acknowledging all of the red flags that we previously ignored, we can admit to ourselves that this relationship was doomed to fail sooner or later because it was not based in mutual love.

As our denial subsides, we can stop blaming ourselves for the failure of the relationship; something that’s easy to do when we’ve been left behind by the other. We can then realize and understand that when someone leaves us behind, it’s not about us, it’s about them. It’s about the fact that they changed, that they weren’t happy and that they needed something else. It’s not so much about their rejecting us, or our not being good enough for them, but about the fact that they changed in ways we were afraid to change.

Now that we are free, we have the chance to lick our wounds and realize that we, too, need to grow and change. After all, we’ve been living a lie for a long time, just because we wanted things to stay the same, even if sameness wasn’t life-giving to us. We need to let go of our “if only(s)” and our regrets about ignoring the red flags. We can do this by mourning the time we’ve lost and surrendering it to our Higher Power. In doing so we can ask our Higher Power for the graces to move forward with the life we still have before us. Once we stop blaming our ex and ourselves for the failure of the relationship, we can begin the process of resurrection.

Our Higher Power and our friends can help us to see that we have much to offer the world. And our newfound freedom allows us the opportunity to grow in ways that we didn’t have when we were saddled to a bad relationship with our former spouse. We can start taking care of ourselves, go back to school, learn to play again and have a good time doing things we love to do. We can have our own supreme makeover from inside out. We’ll make new friends and maybe, just maybe, we’ll meet a person who really values us; someone who has been waiting a long time for us to be resurrected from our little death.

In these ways, we are not only resurrected, but we rise above the tragedy that initially seemed so insurmountable. We discover that life was never “over,” and now that we are ascending to new heights, we know that life is truly just beginning. From this point forward, we understand that little deaths are necessary when life stagnates and we need to be resurrected by God. Allow yourself to be resurrected, to rise above the past and glow as your soul begins to shine!