Moles of Grief

Jesus Christ taught in parables thousands of years ago. We still often try to explain truths with analogies, anecdotes and visual illustrations. Today, we have a chemistry analogy to talk about grief. Take a look at the visual of the ball in a jar, below. 

Captions: (top) People tend to believe that grief shrinks over time. (bottom) What really happens is that we grow around our grief. 

Eventually, you move away from the event of the death, but you don't move away from the person who died, and a lot of people equate the two of them. They're really not the same. That person still occupies a space in your heart and life. They don't add any more memories, so they stay the same in that regard. Those memories are special, although finite and limited. The growth that happens around them is what changes.

My daughter, Evelyn, took a look at this illustration and commented: "moles of grief stay constant while liters of you increases." What a beautiful (a trait from her mother) nerd (a trait from me)! 

In chemistry, the ideal gas law is written as an equation like this: PV=nRT. The formula tells us (among other things) that the pressure (P) and volume (V) are inversely proportional, so when one increases the other decreases.

If we apply that to grief, we might see our growth as increasing the volume, or capacity to hold the difficult things...and, at the same time decreasing the pressure we feel from the heaviness grief can bring.

This isn't a solution, by the way. Just some thoughts about how the natural world works and how we can learn about ourselves by looking at the rest of the created order. It shouldn't surprise us that the same God who created what we understand through science, designed the human spirit to operate with parallel laws to what we observe in the physical realm.

I find this completely fascinating.

James Gomez, Pastor at Prince of Peace Lutheran Church in Sturgeon Bay