Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted
No one chooses the path of mourning, do they? Life has its own way of thrusting each of us into the valley of tears. Who would deliberately seek it out?
When my father died, his departure shocked and shook me to the core. The current of mutual and life-sustaining adoration that ran between us abruptly severed, I spun in circles, disoriented and blinded, lost in a wilderness I hadn’t even known existed. There were times I simply curled up in a fetal position on my bed, immobilized, wracked by a grief that felt too sharp to survive.
But even apart from death, terror not of our own making, like a magnet, draws us into a blackhole. Sometimes it starts like an ember, a spark we try to control. Illness, broken relationships, loss. But it grows, develops a life of its own, swells into a raging fire from which we cannot escape.
In my own life, the fires of hell burned closer than I could bear during a season when a loved one descended into mental illness. Specialists applied their expertise, as if they were spitting at a raging blaze. Until residential care became the only option. I can still hear the clanking of the solid metal doors behind us, unable to mask the raw screams, as we left our loved one. I remember telling my feet to keep walking, just keep walking. Until we reached an empty foyer, facing the last door, unlocked. Then, with tear-pooled eyes, we clutched one another: tight, tighter still, as if through our physical closeness we could somehow squeeze out the unbearable pain.
Robert Warren says in his book, Living Well, on page 19, “(Mourning) is to experience the gap between what is and what should be.”
It’s one thing for “the gap between what is and what should be” to be forced upon us. It’s quite another to choose it.
And yet, that’s exactly what Jesus did. In Luke 19, it seems he is finally experiencing the worship and adoration due Him. He rides a colt toward Jerusalem as the people praise God, crying out “Hosannah!” and laying their cloaks on the ground before him. Of course, the ever-critical Pharisees order him to tell the people to stop. His reply: “I tell you, if these were silent, the stones would cry out.” Jesus knows He is the King of the World.
But then He pauses, looks out over the city. And He weeps. The God of the Universe, overcome by grief because they “did not realize the time of (their) visitation from God.” Jesus stops, feeling the unbridgeable gap between how his creation was intended to exist and what it has become. He could have turned away completely from the brokenness, or at the very least, chosen to march on into Jerusalem, resolute and numb, to complete his mission. But instead, He looks out over the creation He so desperately loves and allows the grief to trample his soul into weeping.
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I invite them: Come. Come, stand on the brink of devastation, human suffering as you have never seen before. Come and hear these words: “Give yourself to the hungry, satisfy the desire of the afflicted” (Isaiah 58:10). But don’t just listen. Look into their faces, meet their gaze, touch them, feel their pain. Fast the fast of God (Isaiah 58).
And they say “yes.” They come to Kenya. They walk the muddy paths of Nairobi’s second largest slum where half a million people live in six square miles. They slip in sewage-laced mud; duck under live, pirated-electricity wires; crowd into one-room, windowless homes and listen to the heart-breaking stories of the residents; gaze over a garbage clogged river.
They sit in stunned silence during our evening debrief, trying to verbalize layers of questions. Was that really a dead dog I saw in the river as children played on its banks? Was that man lying on a garbage heap dead or alive? Were the very young children following us on their own, or was someone watching them, unseen? Why was I born where I was? Why were they born there? How can I un-see what I saw? And what do I do now, now that I know?
I tell them that the one thing I think I’ve done right in all my years of wrestling with these mysteries, is to allow my heart to break. To choose to feel what God feels. To choose to mourn.
I think back to what I experienced as the Lord’s first crystal clear invitation to me to notice “the gap between what is and what should be.”
From the beginning of our marriage in 1993, my husband David and I were interested in adoption. God gave us two beautiful biological boys, born three years apart. Then, when our second son was only six weeks old, a friend shared her plans to adopt from an orphanage in Kenya. She forwarded an email about some of the babies available for adoption. I read about baby #4, close in age to my newborn and described with a similar temperament. But his story had one stark contrast – this baby had been abandoned.
I told my husband about the email. Not one to cry easily, I began to weep inconsolably. It was an unbearable breaking of my heart.
After that, I began to pray for a family to adopt the baby; and somewhere along the way, I began to pray that we could adopt him. God answered those prayers, and less than a year later, we welcomed our precious son into our family, launching a journey into places that have broken my heart, over and over. And in jagged edges that refuse to heal.
And yet I’d take the journey again and again. Why? Because the Lord has comforted me.
Let me share just one example. In 2023, a Hope’s Promise Connection Trip team answered the invitation to “Give yourself to the hungry, satisfy the desire of the afflicted.” All week they served at a day camp in Mathare Valley for children in Hope’s Promise Kenya’s relative based orphan care program known as Kuza (Swahili for “nurture”).
On the last day, as our team stood at the front to say good-bye, the children began to sing “The Blessing” to us. I, along with the other members of my team, could not stay away from this group of seventy children we’d grown to love any more than water can resist running in trenches. We surrounded them, touched their shoulders, gazed into their eyes, sang the ancient words of Numbers 6:24-26 directly to them.
As we sang, a rat a tat tat began to dance on the metal roof, faster and faster.
In Africa, rain means God’s blessing.
We sang louder:
“May His presence go before you
And behind you, and beside you
All around you, and within you
He is with you, He is with you.”
(The Blessing lyrics)
The rain kept falling harder and faster, until sheets of water tumbled over the edges of the corrugated metal roof. Until we could no longer even hear ourselves singing. So we shouted, “He is for YOU, He is for YOU!”
Even as my own tears overflowed, I noticed tears streaming down the faces of almost everyone in the room.
The Presence of the Lord pressed in, thick and sweet. He walked among us, proclaiming over those precious children, over us, even as He shouts over me and over you: I know who you are. You are mine. And you are my beloved.
Yes, I have experienced the comfort of the Lord.
During my most recent trip to Kenya with a team, after debriefing our first experience in Mathare Valley, we sang “Is He Worthy?” by Andrew Peterson. Amidst the pain of the broken world we’d witnessed , we needed to proclaim that “all the dark won’t stop the light from getting through.” We needed to express our longing for the day when all will be made new. And we needed to remind ourselves that He alone is able to redeem it all. He is worthy.
Lately, I’ve been pondering a question: is He worthy of deliberately letting my heart break for what breaks His?
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The Question, photo and poem by Janelle Briggs (member of Hope’s Promise Kenya Dec 2024 Connection Trip)
No matter how many times I drive this road, my soul stutters
In my comfortable car, what do they think of me?
An intrusion to their hardship?
An entitled tourist too far from home?
A rich hypocrite who glances at their suffering and moves on?
I cracked the window, closing the distance yet a hair
And that opening framed a question
How much will I let my heart break?
And when I pick up the shards, will I toss these people, these lessons, these experiences?
Or will I allow Him to mend these broken pieces with gold?
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Reflection questions:
What can happen when we need to mourn but choose not to?
What can happen when we need to mourn, and we do?
If you are willing, ask Jesus what is breaking His heart and mourn with Him.
If you are afraid to mourn, share honestly with Him about your fears and hesitations.
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