A Portal to Peace

I remember fighting to stay conscious as the room filled with doctors. One I had never seen walked over to my husband, shaking his head. I remember my husband pushing through the crowd to grab my hand as he told me our perfect baby boy was gone. I remember screaming but not being able to hear it. With Simon’s life gone, the focus became saving mine.

Several needles pierced both my arms, though the sensation was muted. Someone commanded another to run to get blood from the bank. The doctors and nurses were urgently yelling, but it all faded to a dull hum as my ears filled with a high-pitched ring instead. I didn’t look away from the lights above me, my body completely numb. A new heaviness settled into my gut. The triangle pattern of the bulbs blaring down imprinted in my memory. 

I remember closing my eyes and wishing I could fade away, but something always brought me back. I wasn’t allowed to leave. Still fixed on the lights on the ceiling, the only thought in my head, the only words in my mind were, “I will not leave you comfortless: I will come to you” (John 14:18).

I could not have recalled or quoted that scripture a day before. Those were not words I knew. They played over and over again in my mind. Each time I tried to drift away, those words would snap me back into my body. In those initial moments after Simon died, I felt more like an observer than a participant, like I was watching the saddest movie I could possibly imagine.

In the moment on that hospital bed, I took those words as a promise. I understood them as a vow that I would be carried through this hopeless situation. But the comfort never came, not then or later. There was no escaping the irreparable sorrow of my new reality. The hopelessness only sank deeper as the days passed. There was nothing to hold on to. I couldn’t breathe. Death is so final, so unfixable.

People said it was okay because I would see him again. People said I should hold on to my faith. But everything just sounded like different ways of saying, “Don’t worry, you will feel better when you’re dead.”

“Comfortless” was the only word to describe my state. There was no comfort. There was no peace. There was no relief. What about the promise gifted to me in the hospital? Why would those words be sent to me then only to go unfulfilled now?

Having the words of Christ come to me in my most hopeless moment might seem ordinary or even expected to believers, but as someone only recently returned to faith myself, it felt significant. Reaching for scriptures in times of need isn’t a reflex or habit, and recalling them is close to impossible. What’s expected or ordinary to some feels miraculous to others. I had spent nearly a decade denying faith and choosing doubt and disbelief, and even now I have no regrets about that season. I have been everywhere from atheist to angry to heartbroken to terrified to indifferent and all the points in between. But slowly over the last two years, I have been stepping back into faith. I decided to experiment with choosing faith, with choosing to believe. Because of this recent transition, when I found myself again at the crossroads of whether to believe in and trust God or not, I chose to try trust this time—maybe just for the sake of the experiment, or perhaps because I was all too familiar with the void of the alternative.

God told me I would not be left comfortless. Despite the evidence seemingly stacking up against him, I decided to trust the promise instead. If I believed him—which I was choosing to do—then I must be missing something. The peace and comfort must exist, no matter how impossible they seemed. My pursuit then shifted from demanding God to prove himself to learning to find what was maybe hidden in plain sight.

If the promised peace was already there, how could I receive it?

Grief has challenged every belief I hold. It has ripped everything out of the hypothetical and demanded immediate examination. Grief recodes every cell. Every part of me has transformed, for better or for worse. One of those transformations has been the way I understand and experience things like hope, joy, and peace.

What I can see now, that I couldn’t see in that moment in the hospital bed, is that in the darkest moment of my life, the only words in my head spoke peace—tangible evidence that I was not, in fact, being left comfortless. He was there. But it was also in that very moment when the peace I had known ceased that the new one began. Like many things transformed by grief, this new peace was unrecognizable in comparison to the one I knew.

Grief has shown me three different categories of peace: fixed, transitional, and expansive.

Fixed peace: the most traditionally experienced and understood form of peace. Fixed peace is found circumstantially. In this state, we feel that everything actually is okay—not metaphorically okay or relatively okay, but really truly how we think things should be. Fixed peace is comfortable, safe, calm, and can often be taken for granted. Because it is the most basic and universal form of peace, it can sometimes be the default baseline. Yet this assumption can set up some tricky expectations about the peace we feel entitled to. Fixed peace is cozy but limited.

Transitional peace: Things start to get a little more complicated here. As we lose control of the outcomes, we also learn that everything being circumstantially well and good is impossible; the fixed peace we once relied on becomes elusive. Transitional peace marks the phase when we start learning how to be okay even when things aren’t okay. We start understanding that peace is an inside job requiring divine assistance. Here we see the atonement of Jesus Christ really entering the chat. Transitional peace can still feel like fixed peace, but is fueled by faith rather than circumstance. How we feel in this space requires intention, effort, and trust.

Expansive peace: So far, in my very limited experience, this brand of peace might not feel like peace at all. Expansive peace is when we learn that peace is not an absence of suffering—or at least, not an absence of sorrow. I can’t speak to it fully—I don’t think anyone can. I experience expansive peace as heavenly peace, divine peace. Expansive peace manifests only in glimpses. Expansive peace is eternal peace, and in certain moments we are given a sustaining taste of it.

And maybe grief is the only mortal portal to the preview.

I am still very new to grief, but being a rookie comes with certain advantages. I am a student to my grief, and every new stage comes with curiosity and a hunger to understand what’s happening. I can never anticipate how something will feel or what phase comes next. Grieving keeps me on my toes in the worst way. A few months after Simon’s passing, my husband and I went to see one of my favorite Broadway shows, Hamilton. I had bought the tickets as something fun we could look forward to together. I hoped it might be a brief reprieve from the weight of our grief. 

We were having a great time and then the second act opened—it hit me that the entire second half of this show included Alexander and Eliza losing their son (something that, as a Hamilton veteran, I should have calculated). The story is told beautifully and tragically, complete with a featured number that I have sung along to hundreds of times, though I really heard it for the first time that day. I sobbed as silently as I could in the theater and watched my husband wiping his own tears. Nothing, not even attending a musical, could feel the same as before we met grief. Our world was different now, in every single way. I have often wondered if anything will feel fun again, or even normal again. 

I can’t deny, however, the growth that accompanies this darkness. The amount of learning, growing, and evolving that grief demands is unmatched. Every day I feel chased by a tiger, and I can either find my way to safety or get killed. You might think that sounds dramatic, unless you get it.

How do I then make the claim that this relentless chase has led me to a higher peace? Peace is never the word I would use to describe the last year of my life, but I can’t deny the moments, the glimpses of expansive peace only made accessible through the desperation of a broken heart. When I was pregnant with Simon I would always talk to him out loud as if he were sitting right next to me. I never really did that with my other kids, but in this pregnancy my chatter became habit. I would chat with him all day every day about a million different things. This continued right up until the moment my sister took him from my arms and carried his perfect body out of my hospital room to the funeral home transport van. That’s the moment I felt him leave. That’s the moment that hurt the very most.

Months passed and though everyone loved to tell me that Simon was “always with me,” I had not felt his familiar presence once since parting with his body that day. One morning, about nine months after his funeral, I got in my car to go to a pitch meeting with a publisher. This was a big day for me. I write professionally for a lot of people, but never as myself. I was here to pitch my own book. I started my car, took a deep breath, and without conscious thought started talking to Simon about where I was headed and how I was feeling. For a single moment, I knew he was there too. His presence was familiar, and so desperately missed. A new, unfamiliar, almost mystical feeling flooded my body. We were doing this together, Simon and me. He existed. Somewhere, he existed. The sacredness and power of that fleeting moment are not things I expect to be constant or even frequent, but I do think they are meant to teach us, to show us. 

God has promised us a fulness of joy: “And for this cause ye shall have fulness of joy; and ye shall sit down in the kingdom of my Father; yea, your joy shall be full, even as the Father hath given me fulness of joy; and ye shall be even as I am, and I am even as the Father; and the Father and I are one” (3 Ne. 28:10).

Maybe this promise is what painted the picture of godliness as happy, light, and even easy. Everything will be okay! Everything is good! Joy! Peace! We endure hard things with the hope that all will be well in the end. And maybe it will.

But also, “Jesus wept” (John 11:35).

If I believe Divinity mourns with me, then I believe Divinity mourns. If I believe God weeps with me, then I believe God weeps. If I believe Divinity has been sitting next to me in the most impossibly dark moments, if I believe Divinity never leaves me, then I believe Divinity grieves.

Joy is not an absence of sorrow. Peace is not an absence of sorrow. Godliness is not an absence of sorrow. Grief is not something we are exalted out of. We are meant to learn to hold grief, because I believe we will be holding it in one form or another for eternity, for ourselves and for others.

The mother of God knew grief. “[She] kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart” (Luke 2:19). She kept them. She held them. She knew pain. She knew loss. She knew grief. She knew the weight of an impossible load, and she carried it with her throughout her life. 

Maybe then, grief is not a punishment, but an invitation to learn God’s highest form of peace, a chance to expand our capacity to a place where joy and pain coexist, a place where they have a symbiotic relationship—a place where we can hold it without breaking. Christ was not spared from suffering, sorrow, pain, and grief. He needed it, and so do we. A fullness of joy requires it. An expansive peace independent from circumstance demands it. Can we trust him? Can we trust the plan? Even at this cost?

Knowing is overrated. We claim we want to know things, but we really only want to know when it’s good. When life gets bad, it’s much better to hang in the space of hope and faith and possibility. We don’t want to know for the sake of knowing, we want surety that things will be okay—we want peace of mind. We want fixed peace. 

To be okay even when nothing is okay transcends our natural human capabilities. We crave the comfort of fixed peace, but we were never meant to stay there. Comfort comes in new ways now. It comes through fleeting moments of expansive peace, when—for even just one second—we are able to trust the truth that all is well. All is as it should be. The deficit between our perspective and the eternal one is torture, and relief is so hard to hold on to—but it is there.

Grief invites us to expansive, divine, heavenly peace, but it is only through faith we can really receive it. Feeling that peace is up to us. Expansive peace is there waiting for our faith to grow into grasping it. Grief transforming us is nonnegotiable, but how it transforms us is in our hands. 

I want to believe that God is there. I want to believe that comfort is coming. I want to believe that my joy will someday reach as high as my pain was low. I want to believe that my Heavenly Parents grieve with me, and that grief contributes to their fullness of joy. I want to believe that mine will too. I want my faith to grow to be able to hold on to and trust those slippery moments of heavenly peace I have witnessed. I don’t expect to be delivered from grief, but I do hope to be delivered from doubt. Because when I am able to choose to believe I am able to access peace. Belief is the only way. And so that has to become the primary goal: To keep believing. To keep trying. To keep trusting. To build faith.

Like so much of mortality, expansive peace might not look like what we want, and it certainly doesn’t come the way we want it. It is easy to say we want the achievement of running a marathon without considering the sacrifice of the training, or desiring to play the piano beautifully, without wishing to invest the years of rigorous training. To be human often means falling to the temptation to prioritize comfort and indulgence, but it is also our humanity that invites us to learn resilience, perseverance, and the true gifts of service and sacrifice. Our lives are full of invitations to come and taste heavenly peace, but the path is often laced with despair. Expansive peace is still there, waiting for us to bravely claim it. The learning curve is steep, and the trail is rigorous, but the destination is promised. It is secure. Peace is promised. Joy is promised. Faith is the way.

Julie Taylor is a writer, speaker, and host of the Get Ready with God podcast, where she shows up daily hoping God is real and usually overthinking everything. She lives in Provo, UT, with her husband and kids.

Art by Fujishima Takeji (1867–1943)