When We Mourn Together

Devotional

Grief makes you want to close the door.

Somebody asks how you're doing and you say fine, because the real answer would take forty minutes and you don't have it in you. You'd rather carry it alone than watch somebody else try to figure out what to say. So you get good at the short version.

Paul does the opposite, and I want you to notice how far he goes.

"We do not want you to be unaware, brothers, of the affliction we experienced in Asia. For we were so utterly burdened beyond our strength that we despaired of life itself. Indeed, we felt that we had received the sentence of death."

That's the apostle Paul. Writing to a church that already questioned his credibility. Telling them he didn't think he was going to make it. He could have left it out. He put it in.

And he can do that because of something he says at the top of the letter, before he mentions a single circumstance.

"Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort."

Look at what he calls God. Not the God of explanations. He doesn't say "the God who will tell you why." Father of mercies. God of all comfort. That's who meets you in this.

Then verse 4, and this is the engine of the whole passage. God "comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God."

Read that again slowly. It moves. Comfort comes from God, into you, and then through you into somebody else. It doesn't stop when it reaches you.

Which means your worst season is where you learn a language. There's a way of sitting with a grieving person that you can only learn by having been the grieving person. Nobody gets that from a book.

Now here's the part that stings, and Paul says it about himself.

"That was to make us rely not on ourselves but on God who raises the dead."

God let him get to the end of himself on purpose. Not to be cruel. To break the thing in Paul that still thought Paul could handle it. Because as long as your own strength has anything left in the tank, you'll keep drawing from it.

And notice the title he lands on. Not "God who prevents hard things." God who raises the dead. That's the name you need when you're past your own capacity. He isn't in the business of helping people who are managing. He's in the business of resurrection, and resurrection requires a body.

So when you're crushed past what you can hold, you are not falling away from God. You're falling onto him.

And this is exactly why grief was never meant to be private.

When you let another believer in, you're not being weak. You're standing in the design. That's what the meal on the porch is. That's what the friend who sits there and doesn't try to fix it is. They're not being nice. They're carrying comfort that God gave them in their own dark season, and handing it to you.

You need them now. Somebody's going to need you later, for the exact same reason.

And when it's too heavy to pray, hold onto this: "All the promises of God find their Yes in him."

Not in your feelings about them. Not in whether you can believe hard enough today. In him. The Yes doesn't wobble when you do.

Paul ends where he can actually stand. "He delivered us from such a deadly peril, and he will deliver us. On him we have set our hope that he will deliver us again."

Past tense, future tense, and hope in between. That's the whole Christian life.

Let somebody in this week.

You were never supposed to mourn by yourself.