When I grieve
For a comforter is far from me,
One to revive my courage. Lamentations 1:16
Read 2 Samuel 12:19—23
I know that my grief is all my own. When I am in grief those of my world around me seem in another place. They live their lives by another clock. They respond to other impulses. They simply are living for other things. Their world to me is an unreal world. And my world is unreal to them. I must move through it at my own pace, according to its own timing, before I can return to them. Poor David! He emerged from his grief before anyone else was ready for him. There would be others who dismay their friends because they stay too long in grief. ‘Come back. Come back to us!’ they want to say. Sometime I will need this lesson.
God of all comfort, you have me in your hand. Because you love, you suffer. Because I love I will also suffer. Because I am made to live in love, suffering cannot be avoided. I thank you that when I grieve I participate in a deep experience that you have shared with me, for I am made to live with you, too. You are preparing me, then, adjusting me to a new situation, without one I loved, lost to what I cherished. I know heart-loss. I know if-only, and what-if, and couldn’t it have been? But in you I know a great mercy and a great faithfulness, a great suffering and a great promise that it shall be well with my soul.