Thursday, September 29, 2016
The thought
of my suffering and homelessness is bitter beyond words. I will never forget this awful time, as I
grieve over my loss. Yet I
still dare to hope when I remember this: The
faithful love of the Lord never ends! His mercies never cease. Great is his faithfulness; his mercies
begin afresh each morning. I say to
myself, “The Lord is my inheritance; therefore, I will hope in him!” The Lord is good to those who
depend on him, to those who search for him. So it is good to wait quietly for
salvation from the Lord. Lamentations
3:19-26(NLT)
Perhaps the
hardest of thoughts is to have hope in the midst of grief.
Battling
grief is a common experience; if you live long enough grief will be more than
once your uninvited companion on this journey through life. Often a first touch with grief is as a child
when grandparents die. That was my lot
as a pre-teen. It was then I learned
Jeremiah was right; you never forget the time of loss. In seminary a wise professor shared with us would-be
preachers that one of the last, arguably best gifts people give to
their grandchildren is their own death; it is a valuable and needed preparation
for learning to grieve while parents are still around to comfort and guide.
It has been a
little more than a year since my Dad became part of the church triumphant in
heaven. From our family’s perspective he
was the last of his generation. With him
passed away any first-hand memories of our family history. And with our family’s sketchy knowledge of our
ancestry, there is a haze of unknowing rather than links to the past. For my remaining brother and cousins, we don’t
know where we come from, and that speaks much about the emptiness and finality
of loss.
So what about
hope
in the middle of loss and grief?
Jeremiah said
he dared
to hope because his track record with the LORD is that there is
mercy forthcoming every morning, like the dew on the ground. And hope, itself, is much like faith; it is (as
the writer of Hebrews proclaimed) the evidence of things we long to see.
There is no
standard, one-size-fits-all way to move through grief. There is certainly no way to escape it altogether,
at least not in a healthy way. It must
be embraced as necessary to the process of accepting God’s new mercies in a rotten
time. It must be endured as the inescapable
price of loving.
The question
isn’t will I grieve; the question is always, how
shall I grieve; how do I start?
Let me borrow
some military advice from Jean-Luc Picard.
He is the fictional captain of the Starship Enterprise.
Patrick Stewart played the captain for the
1980’s TV series, and every time the Enterprise was about to begin a new
adventure traversing the next galaxy, or getting ready to do battle with the
evil enemies of The Federation, Captain Picard would look wistfully out the
front windows from the command center and issue the order to the helmsman, Warp
speed….ENGAGE!
This is how
we begin – without fear, without hesitation, but not without God.
For You Today
If your pathway is remembering with hard
thoughts today, engage…God is faithfully in the middle of it with
you with all the new mercies you need.
Go to VIDEO
NOTES
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