Grief is the silent, knifelike terror and sadness that comes a hundred times a day, when you start to speak to someone who is no longer there. Grief is the emptiness that comes when you eat alone after eating with another for many years. Grief is teaching yourself to go to bed without saying good night to the one who has died. Grief is a whole cluster of adjustments, apprehensions, and uncertainties that strike life in its forward progress and make it difficult to redirect the energies of life. Grief is just one of many straitjackets we are squeezed into through no fault of our own.
Some people find themselves in financial straitjackets.
The monthly expenses total more than the take-home pay. Others find themselves in a straitjacket of poor health. Sometimes people feel tied in a career straitjacket. Relationships are a straitjacket that keep others bound. Whatever our straitjacket may be, in Psalm 4 King David tells us all we need to know to find release from that straitjacket.