Heavy Heart
The past few weeks have been hard. So much sadness and tragedy has effected people we are close to. My dear friend lost her 2nd baby girl again at 20 weeks. She had to bury another daughter. There are no words for losing a child. Wes' mom is close to a little girl who is battling cancer. This week she was given months to live and asked her counselors how she should prepare to die. No words. Why does this child have to ask this question? A few families in our church are close with a mom, her husband and 3 kids. The mom suffered a massive heart attack this week and died in the hospital after being declared brain dead. Three children and a husband left behind, confused, shocked, and mourning. Ive been reading about the slums in Uganda where the moms have to work the sex slave industry at night to provide for their kids. It is not uncommon for them to come home to find that their kids have drowned in the flood/sewage that plagues the slums maybe because they fell out of the hammock. Hopelessness.
It literally tears me apart. I can't even. I don't know what to say except Im sorry. I don't know how to respond to questions. I try to go there with everyone. I mentally put myself in the above situations but it is not the same. I am crying and breaking for a period of time but I don't fully understand the pain. Suffering is real. Suffering is guaranteed.
I shared this with my friend who birthed her babies into heaven. I like how John Piper used his words….
God’s crucial word on grieving well is 1 Thessalonians 4:13: “We do not want you to be uninformed, brothers, about those who are asleep, that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope.” Yours is a grieving with hope. Theirs is a grieving without hope. That is the key difference. There is no talk of not grieving. That would be like suggesting to a woman who just lost her arm that she not cry, because it would be put back on in the resurrection. It hurts! That's why we cry. It hurts.
And amputation is a good analogy. Because unlike a bullet wound, when the amputation heals, the arm is still gone. So the hurt of grief is different from the hurt of other wounds. There is the pain of the severing, and then the relentless pain of the gone-ness. The countless might-have-beens. Those too hurt. Each new remembered one is a new blow on the tender place where the arm was. So grieving is like and unlike other pain.
There is a paradox in the way God is honored through hope-filled grief. One might think that the only way he could be honored would be to cry less or get over the ache more quickly. That might show that your confidence is in the good that God is and the good that he does. Yes. It might. And some people are wired emotionally to experience God that way. I would not join those who say, “O they are just in denial.”
But there is another way God is honored in our grieving. When we taste the loss so deeply because we loved so deeply and treasured God’s gift — and God in his gift — so passionately that the loss cuts the deeper and the longer, and yet in and through the depths and the lengths of sorrow we never let go of God, and feel him never letting go of us — in that longer sorrow he is also greatly honored, because the length of it reveals the magnitude of our sense of loss for which we do not forsake God. At every moment of the lengthening grief, we turn to him not away from him. And therefore the length of it is a way of showing him to be ever-present, enduringly sufficient.
So trust him deeply and let your heart be your guide whether you honor him one way or the other.
May God make your grieving a bittersweet experience of communion with Jesus. Matthew tells us that when Jesus heard that John the Baptist had been beheaded, “he withdrew from there in a boat to a desolate place by himself” (Matthew 14:13). So he knows what it is to go with you there.
We do not have a High Priest who is unable to sympathize. He was tested in every way as we are — including loss.
Praying for each of the above. Thanking God for the day at hand. It is all the more reason to grab ahold of The Game Changer. Thankful to have hope in a world not seen. Thankful to realize that this fallen world is temporary. It does spur urgency to share the gospel as no one is guaranteed their next breath. And I feel the conviction to make His Glory known during the short years I live here on Earth. Do not waste your life.
And for counting a gifts each day when I wake up, come home from work, and go to bed… here's to the two hearts that walk around outside my body. Thankful for your imagination in a cardboard box.
Thankful for jelly stained faces that look like lipstick. Thankful for the homemade jam from a co-worker too.
Thankful for spontaneous one-on-one dates with Leighton to Hot Cakes.
Thankful for sleeping babies and sneaking in to get glimpses of them every night as if I hadn't seen them 1 hour prior.
Thankful for Sadie's funny personality and Leightons ability to sit back and let her sister shine.
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