A time to weep

the monthly letter

{My local community comprises a tiny percentage of my readers, but the place where I lay my head is also the place that keeps me up at night. The people who sit at my kitchen island or by our family room fireplace have my heart. And many friends in our local community experienced an emotional earthquake recently; thus grief is on my brain again.}

Years ago, a new acquaintance chatted with me about his time on the mission field. He told me about how his son had been traumatized by an experience in this impoverished nation, and how the terror that struck this young child’s heart was enough to send them back to the States.

It had been years since his family had returned to the States, and his children were grown now, and as he described the impact of this event on his son, this gentleman said to me, “But the great thing is, now, you’d never know. You’d look at him and you’d never know.” This dad was proud.

This statement hung in my mind. Our culture celebrates “you’d look at him and never know.” Our Christian culture often follows suit.

While the underlying truth of this statement (and likely what this man meant) is a beautiful goal — oh, to be a people who so radiate the life of Jesus that the light and momentary “deaths” to our bodies are overshadowed — so many of us live only on the surface of it, hoping to hide our scars. The scars that make us who we are.

And the scars tell the story that healing doesn’t happen overnight.

“For we who live are always being given over to death for Jesus’ sake, so that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our mortal flesh” (2 Cor. 4:11 ). There is a lot of death in a story that ever so slowly is eking out His life — often tiny deaths, along the way, that each one of us experience.

But to overcome before we pause to consider … to grieve where necessary … to heal — is not really overcoming; it’s circumventing. The ways that we respond to all sorts of things in our lives are informed by those parts of our past we didn’t grieve or consider or from which we didn’t heal.

We form a lifestyle around circumventing pain that comes with profound life disappointments, gaps in who we are, shattered dreams … and yet the psalmists had the words they did because of walking through, not around, their emotions.

We celebrate you’d look at him and never know when perhaps God intended His light to shine through the scars. And we live out the you’d look at him and never know in dozens, if not hundreds, of little ways.

You’d look at him and never know applies to the girl who worked tirelessly to win the Bible quizzes of her childhood — but really to win her mom’s affection. (Mom always hugged her when she won.)

You’d look at him and never know might be the corporate executive, earning awards for the company using skills she learned bouncing from foster home to foster home, reaching to be seen while never really receiving love.

You’d look at him and never know was perhaps the son of an abusive, alcoholic father whose attachment to him was spotty at best. He rose through the ranks of full-time ministry, preaching the gospel with fire but feeling dismissed when he wasn’t on the stage.

You’d look at him and never know might be what they’d say about you or me, and we might stand a little taller when they do, hopeful our past might become just as invisible to us as it is to them.

What we want to erase and move past, God often wants to walk through with us.

And the walking through requires … grief.

And grief is uncomfortable.

It’s messy. It has more questions than answers — less clean lines. Grief means things don’t run on time, and they’re unpredictable. Mascara stains across your white pillowcase are the least of your inconveniences while in grief. Grief can feel like stagnancy to the heart ever-oriented toward upward growth.

And allowing those around us to grieve requires a level of trust in God that is also uncomfortable (parents, can you relate?). Letting people go off the rails for a minute in order to find their way back reflects a heart willing to watch God play God. Letting our friends or our family stay in the places of grief longer than we’d like challenges all our human instincts to help them snap out of a place we’re afraid to go ourselves.

And what if it doesn’t end? What if we give permission to ourselves and others to grieve, and the grief just keeps coming?

We answer these questions with our actions before we even ask them.

Friends, we are (all of us in the Western world) master pain avoiders. We develop theologies of victory that ignore the place God has given us to grieve. We can’t be comforted in our affliction if we don’t stay long enough, afflicted, to receive it (2 Corinthians 1:4). We find answers to problems at the first whiff of them, just to avoid sitting in the repercussions of those problems.

And yet the grand mystery is that there is an argument to be made that God is nearest when we are most broken (Psalm 34:18).

Perhaps not the “near” we imagine, with our candles and Bible and profound aha moments while reading the Word. Maybe not the “near” our culture celebrates with our sermon soundbites and pithy Instagram posts. Perhaps not the “near” that makes an evangelist or a minister or a life changer out of you and me …

… but maybe it’s the simple near.

The near that when I’m sitting in it makes me want to stop being the someone who you’d look at her and never know. The near that allows me to rest right where I am, even if it’s in messy, seemingly-unproductive grief. The near that sees me for the heart of me and not what I put my hands to and try to show you.

Grief is like the first fresh snow of winter: bitter cold and icy to our systems, yet bringing with it a quiet to everything dormant underneath.

Grief is like a crashing wave that clears all out of its path, leaving only what matters. It’s the simplicity of an ocean-washed beach the day after a storm. Stark but effortless.

Grief makes life simple. Though the pain may be acute when we give grief its proper permission, the only way through is through. The things that complicate our days and nights often fade in the background during seasons of grief if we let them.

Jesus told us, “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted” (Matthew 5:4), and I’ve seen with my life and my grief that what comes out of seasons when I either give myself permission to grieve or the grief is so big I can no longer make a dance of life around it, that the blessing of the comfort God brings is many-sided.

God has much, much for us inside of our grief — but it won’t look like what we expect to see as the blessings of God.

It may look like scars that tell a story.

And those who allow grief to run its full course are those for whom it can be said, “oh, you look at her … and you know.”

I want to be one of those.

Until next month,

Sara