Putting it all together

Well, it's no secret that a big part of my life over the past year and a half has been reshaping my life after the death of my mother. God has helped me do a lot of grief work over the past four months. I feel now life I am coming out of a long, arduous journey, and I'm trying to figure out where I want to settle down in this new, unfamiliar country.
With some guidance, I have started working through a workbook on grief. One of the things that surprised me was that restructuring your beliefs and values is a major task in the later stages of grief work. Of course, anyone who has lost someone important recognizes that such a fundamental loss causes you to put everything in new perspective, but I didn't realize how over-arching that new perspective could be. I truly feel like a completely new person compared with who I was before my mother got sick, and of course before she died.
For Jason and me, the perspective that we are adopting is one of truly living as disciples of Christ. We have started examining almost everything big or small about our lives through that lens. The fact that our little family's revolution could be part of the work of grief was initially surprising, but it really makes so much sense the more I think about it. Jason and I are both navigating our way through life without our mothers. I know that my mother was instrumental in shaping my views on the world and my place in it. I am grateful for all of the influence and honest input she gave me to help steer me in the path that I have traveled so far.
At this point, I feel like I am looking to God for more and more of the answers to questions I always posed to my mom before. It's strange to think about it that way, but I think God is behind the shift I am seeing in my ideologies and beliefs. While my mom was alive, I felt safe and secure on my path, and I never questioned my direction. Now, as I listen for guidance, I find that I question more and more of the things I thought were safe. I am reading the Bible now as a means of figuring out how to live. Oddly enough, I haven't really done that before.