This was what Jerry Sittser （A Grace Disguised, p. 49) said: "It is therefore not true that we become less through loss-- unless we allow the loss to make us less, grinding our soul down until there is nothing left but an external self entirely under the control of circumstances. Loss can also make us more. In the darkness we can still find the light. In death we can also find life. It depends on the choices we make.
Though these choices are difficult and rarely made in haste or with ease, we can nevertheless make them. Only when we choose to pay attention to our souls will we learn how much more there is to life than the external world around us, however wonderful or horrible that world is. We will discover the world within. Yet such attention to the soul does not have to engender self-absorption. If anything, it eventually turns us toward the world again and makes us more compassionate and just than we might otherwise have been.
Not that the choices we make will always have happy results. That is especially true if we choose to face our losses squarely. When we plunge into darkness, it is darkness we experience. We fell pain, anguish, sorrow and despair, and we experience the ugliness, meanness and absurdity of life. We brood as well as hope, rage as well as surrender, doubt as well as believe. We are apathetic os often as we are, hopeful and sorrowful before we are joyful. We both mourn deeply and live well. We experience the ambivalence of living simultaneously in the night and in the light."
So darkness is not something to be avoided but to be entered into trusting that our faithful God would eventually turn the mourning into joy and give us beauty for ashes.
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