October 30: Of Grief and Comfort

Lamentations 3:1-66

Hebrews 1:1-14

Psalm 102:1-28

Proverbs 26:21-22

Somewhere, there are three young siblings whose world has just gone dark, having lost their father quickly to cancer, some ten years after they lost their mother.  Orphans, the youngest barely in his teens.  

Similarly tragic, a friend's six year old grandson is waking up probably each day with the expectation of a mother's voice, only to excruciatingly realize she is gone - where, he is unsure - her voice no longer to be heard.  That little boy's confusion is rivaled only by his grandmother's cacophony of emotion and emptiness at the loss of her daughter.  

I read today's OT reading and thought, this must be what each of these people is feeling.  To be walled in by inexplicable tragedy, unable escape, weighed down by grief and frustration and anger; to cry out for help yet feel as though God had shut out their prayer, the one they loved still gone.  I read Lamentations today, and I think I can begin - barely! - to get some sense of their suffering, how the streams of tears flow from their eyes.  

Yet their experience is by no means unique, not in this time of pandemic, both medical and economic, for there are many who have been taken, whether  by disease or by despair, their loved ones left with the loss, the anger and the emptiness.  What can we say to them that might ease their pain?

The truth is, I have no idea.  I don't think there is anything I could possibly say to ease a pain so terrible.  So rather than speak to them to try and offer comfort I am incapable of providing, perhaps better to turn to the One who IS able.  To beg the Lord, as the psalmist did, to hear my prayer, my cry for help, to turn to me when I call.  To declare His eternal and sovereign nature, and to trust that He will look down from His sanctuary, hear the groans of my suffering friends, and release them from their grief.  

Father, You have given us the capacity to love, and empathize with, others; but You have withheld the ability for us to alleviate their pain.  Thank You, then, that we can lift our grieving friends into Your care, knowing You love them.  In Your time - but if You are willing, please make haste! - comfort them with Your love, and the knowledge of Your love for the ones they have lost.  And in Your time, turn their sadness to joy.