Perhaps of all the
human emotions, sorrow is one that has baffled me the most. I am not one to mourn/weep. Thankfully my life has not been one which
that would evoke much mourning. But
there are two events that stand out, that I think God has used to help bring me
a better understanding of mourning and who He is.
I remember when I was eleven, my nephew Andrew
who was nine months in the womb and due any day, suddenly died. The shock to the whole family was
devastating. To see that baby who had left
the world before he entered it. To see
my brother and sister-in-law mourn there child.
It was not mellow dramatic, it was not fake; it was real. The pain of that baby sized gap in their
lives. As I watched everyone cry, I
could not understand. I was sad, but the
tears did not come. I think I tried to
force them back. I was afraid to
cry. I know, silly. I did cry eventually. When I went to the visitation and looked down
at that little body that was so still, and heard the sounds of the house of
mourning, it crept up into my heart, then into my throat, and there it
was. Almost as soon as it came, it was
gone.
Last week while I was at work, my
brother saw me and came over and we just chatted for a bit about stuff. My two brothers and I work at the same
company. As my brother was about to
leave he mentioned that they had arranged the visitation for Friday and the
funeral for Saturday. My heart skipped,
funeral for who? Then the words came
out, “for who?”
My brother looked surprised,
“Little Ellianah.” My cousin Ellianah
had been struggling with a heart defect for the first three and half months of
her little life. My uncle’s posts on her
Caring Bridge webpage were followed closely by hundreds of family and
friends. Her little face would appear
almost daily on my Facebook newsfeed, with the latest news on her fight. The Saturday before Palm Sunday she had had a
close call that the Doctors said was miraculous she had lived through. She was baptized on Palm Sunday, and went to
heaven on Monday as they got her ready for an MRI. The reason I did not know until that day, at
work, was because of my disconnection with the Internet. It was hard, but I knew that the hardest was
ahead.
For the rest of the week the weight of the news sat there on
my heart, but I did not cry. Our family
headed down to the visitation on Good Friday.
And I finally got to see my cousin, and I wept.
In the bible it says that Jesus
wept. This is really amazing. God weeps.
Even with his big, “all things work together for good “ picture; he
still weeps. In C.S. Lewis’s book The
Magicians Nephew, Digory (the main character) is asking Aslan to help get
something to help his mother who is dying.
As he stands asking, he stares at the Lions feet, till in his despair he
looks up into his face, and of all surprises, sees tears. This is how we can feel about God, when we
experience sorrow, he does not stand by with the blueprint and casually observe
that if we just knew what was going on we wouldn’t need to bother soaking three
boxes of Kleenex in an hour. No, he
comes and cries with us.
Every Easter there is some new
thing that God does to reveal himself and his glory to me. This Easter was a hard but important lesson: “blessed
is the house that mourns.” God knows our
pain, and also mourns. To sing the
glories of the God who wept, who felt pain, and who died for us, was just that
more incredible on Sunday as we joined the heavenly chorus, Little Andrew and
Eliannah included.
