A Grief Experienced

I don’t like being sad. It puts me in a bad mood and feels like a deep gray purple. Tonight on my walk home from work, the sun was setting and the breeze was just the right wind speed. Despite the beautiful night, I grieved. I grieved for the innocence lost this past week at "schoolies" (the post-graduation bingeing insanity that happens because the drinking age is 18). One of the kids at work said his friend spent hundreds at the strippers place in one night. I wanted to throw up.

I grieved for the children who will never feel the comfort of their mother's arms or the taste of ice cream or the feeling of being breathless after a game of backyard tag because their lives were ended as soon as they began. Last week in the news, a mother with twins was counseled to abort one of them after the doctors found serious handicaps. She chose to, only for the doctors to make a mistake and kill the healthy twin. Two lives lost because killing babies is legal.

I grieved for our host family, who lost their daughter two years ago to a rare disease and liver transplant failure. She was a wonderful, lively, adventurous wife, mother and daughter. What can assuage a parent's grief and the hardest pain they can endure? The life that they loved, they have lost. What remains is a hole filled with memories.

In this walk home, while I was almost overwhelmed with the brokenness of the world we live in, a whisper came. It said that our hearts can never be grieved more deeply than the heart of God. As sad, hurt and angry as we can feel, he feels more because he understands what should have been. He was there when he pronounced things "very good". He created the good and beautiful. He mourns the loss of innocence because he understands best of all what innocence is. He mourns the loss of life and relationship because he is the creator of life and relationships.

It is good to grieve these things. They are a reminder that the world is in desperate need of the Jesus born in a manger and killed on a cross.

LMS