God Grieves

We are told quite rightly by our scriptures that God lives in unapproachable light in the heavens. There is no darkness in Him. Our God is so holy that He is utterly unlike us in His purity of heart and perfection of Being. But we would be wholly wrong if we thought that meant that He doesn't have feelings. Jesus said that the Father cares (feels it) when even a sparrow falls to the earth so entirely does He hate death. He is the Creator of life and the God of the living! He never created death. He didn't create us to ever experience death. Death didn't exist in the original Plan. That was the plan we broke. When sin entered in, so did death. Amid all the pain and confusion of our broken world, we hardly notice the greatest thing that was broken: Our Father's Heart.

I'm going at it this way because sometimes we act as if we believe that the Lord has no feelings. Do we think that His distance from us means He is emotionally detached? Or, that His silence means that He doesn't care? Just because He doesn't lash out when someone acts outrageously, doesn't mean He isn't offended. More to the point, just because He won't burden us with His own grief, doesn't mean He has none. God grieves over every sparrow and more. The Holy Spirit groans in anguished intercession. Jesus continues to be the Man of Sorrows. With Them, however, sorrow never has the last word. They grieve far more deeply than we could ever bear to feel, but They never grieve as those without hope (1 Thessalonians 4:13). We do, at times. They know better.

The Lord's advantage is that He can see the end from the beginning. We see and feel an end we never wanted to arrive at, and it feels like a dead-end to us. We don't see it as a beginning and we certainly don't see the rosy end that He says He sees way off in the distance. So, our lack of faith adds to our pain, especially when we lose hope for the future. Losing hope will tumble anyone into the morass of self-pity, a particularly loathsome pain.

How God Grieves

His grieving heart, however, is forever sustained by knowing with an absolute certainty what He once told Julian of Norwich, All shall be well. And all manner of things shall be exceeding well. That's not faith, coming from confidence in His power. That's knowledge, coming from His ability to foresee the future. What He is asking of us is to have faith in what He already knows He will be able to do.

Once we learn to trust Him better, we will be able to carry our own grief as He does His. Faith gives us spiritual sight to see Him and to know that He is not lying to us about anything that concerns us.  So, if He says (and He does) that the future looks full of hope, it is. By trusting His knowledge, we can practice His way of grieving, not as those without hope, but as New Creations who have learned to see our world through His eyes.

Let's take another look into the unapproachable light where God dwells. As we have seen, that didn't mean that God has no feelings, but that He is holy His feelings are pure, as are all His thoughts and actions. There is no darkness in Him at all. This tells us that there is nothing dark about grief. It is entirely good in its pure form which is certainly the way God experiences it. We can know by this that our grieving is not a dark thing born of the Shadow, but the righteous response of a good heart. Provided we keep the contaminants out, our sorrow is a God-given response to being rent by something evil.

We're torn by being unnaturally separated from our loved one, a disastrous state of affairs that our Lord will remedy by a future Resurrection and Restoration. All things really will be made not just well, but exceeding well. Sadly, that's still miles down the road. The grief that enters our heart now is a God-given remedy for mending us in the meantime. It's what He does with His own.

His grieving, however, is unlike ours in another way. It is not mingled with self-centeredness, the most difficult of all the contaminants to remove. He doesn't grieve because He is having a bad day. He grieves because someone He loves is having a bad day.  Eventually, we can also learn that thoroughly wonderful way that our God grieves.

Prayer

Dear Father, I am so moved when I consider how You grieve. Forgive me if I ever thought You weren't touched by our tragedies or shared in our sorrows. How it helps me to grieve, knowing by faith that You, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit also weep with those who weep we are never alone, not even then. Truly, You are the Loving Father that I can trust with all my heart is feeling. Help me bring my tears to You and place my loved one in Your capable Hands. I choose to give You all the pieces of my broken heart for You to mend.

Scripture

But we do not want you to be uninformed, brothers, about those who are asleep, that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope. 1 Thessalonians 4:13 ESV