Grief or its expression, mourning, can make us feel separated from God…Yet in painful times our need for God is strongest. When times are good how easily we forget what really matters. When a loved one is lost the wound is deep the pain intense. That is the way of this life. Let us stop to remember this life is temporary transient and maybe a proving ground for Life itself…It is a mystery humans will never solve. We must live by Faith. Hoping that LOVE will reunite us with those we have lost…Remember: ‘Jesus Wept’ for his friend ,Lazarus, and his sisters.
Here is what George McDonald wrote about Mourning:
“Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted.’—Matthew v. 4.
Grief, then, sorrow, pain of heart, mourning, is no partition-wall between man and God. So far is it from opposing any obstacle to the passage of God’s light into man’s soul, that the Lord congratulates them that mourn. There is no evil in sorrow. True, it is not an essential good, a good in itself, like love; but it will mingle with any good thing, and is even so allied to good that it will open the door of the heart for any good. More of sorrowful than of joyful men are always standing about the everlasting doors that open into the presence of the Most High. It is true also that joy is in its nature more divine than sorrow; for, although man must sorrow, and God share in his sorrow, yet in himself God is not sorrowful, and the ‘glad creator’ never made man for sorrow: it is but a stormy strait through which he must pass to his ocean of peace. He ‘makes the joy the last in every song.’ Still, I repeat, a man in sorrow is in general far nearer God than a man in joy….there are two door-keepers to the house of prayer, and Sorrow is more on the alert to open than her grandson Joy…Men mourn because they love. Love is the life out of which are fashioned all the natural feelings, every emotion of man. Love modelled by faith, is hope…”
March 11 Additional thoughts…
As I read further this is also what McDonald had to offer concerning grief and accompanying mourning…
“The Lord would have us know that sorrow is not a part of life; that it is but a wind blowing throughout it, to winnow and cleanse…
There is one phase of our mourning for the dead which I must not leave unconsidered, seeing it is the pain within pain of all our mourning—the sorrow, namely, with its keen recurrent pangs because of things we have said or done, or omitted to say or do, while we companied with the departed. The very life that would give itself to the other, aches with the sense of having, this time and that, not given what it might. We cast ourselves at their feet, crying, Forgive me, my heart’s own! but they are pale with distance, and do not seem to hear. It may be that they are longing in like agony of love after us, but know better, or perhaps only are more assured than we, that we shall be comforted together by and by….
The Lord has come to wipe away our tears. He is doing it; he will have it done as soon as he can; and until he can, he would have them flow without bitterness; to which end he tells us it is a blessed thing to mourn, because of the comfort on its way. Accept his comfort now, and so prepare for the comfort at hand. He is getting you ready for it, but you must be a fellow worker with him, or he will never have done. He must have you pure in heart, eager after righteousness, a very child of his father in heaven.”
From Hope of the Gospel by George MacDonald
I will continue to draw strength from George McDonald’s writing!