When you think you've hit the bottom, and the bottom
gives way,
And you fall into a darkness no words can explain.
You don't know how you'll make it out alive.
Jesus will meet you there.
When the doctor says I'm sorry, we don't know what
else to do.
And you're looking at your family, wondering how
you'll make it through.
Whatever road this life takes you down,
Jesus will meet you there.
- “Jesus Will Meet you There” by Steven Curtis
Chapman
Chapman penned those words after his youngest child,
a precious girl, died at the age of 5. When grief doesn't creep as a rising
tide but floods as a tidal wave. When every emotion possible rushes through
with no rhyme, no reason, no method. Grief has no order.
"No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear." said C.S. Lewis. Well, no one ever told me that, either. He is a friend I have not
learned to love and a guest I have not learned to welcome. He is a participant
in my life who was not invited and yet will never leave. Because, honestly, if
we could plan our lives – if we had been allowed in on the decision-making process
of the human race – we would have left out the things that hurt us. We would
have left out grief.
Saturday afternoon, shortly before 1:00, we were sitting
in our church, listening to the strains of a wedding prelude and rising to see
the angelic bride float down the isle on the arm of her father. We got the call, shortly through the ceremony, that
the 16 month old grandson of some dear
friends was taken away. At a time
like this. Right in the middle of uniting two into a new life, a tiny life was
taken away.
And if we were the ones looking down from heaven and
jotting down life stories, we would have kindly omitted death, allowed the
treatments to work, the heart to keep beating, and the happy family would have
headed home at the end of the day. Deep in the heart of each of us is the voice
that promises that we will do everything in our power to not let grief into our
lives or other's.
But we are foolish.
We forget that it is not through the good times that
we are refined. Calm water does not refine gold, but fire. And we are golden
beings, on our way to a golden city.
If we try to remove grief from the human race then we
are trying to remove the hand of God, just as if we tried to remove joy. But,
heaven forbid. No one would try to remove joy! How ludicrous. But God works
through joy just as much as he words through grief. Can't you see that? They
are both his creations.
God created life. And God created death. He works
through both so that his purposes may be fulfilled. But he doesn't abandon us
there, when we are crying as if we will never cry again. When our hearts feel
like they are being ripped from our chest. He doesn't just deposit us on our
doorstep and say, “Well, buster, I created a life and I decided to take it away
and you're on your own now. Deal with it. I do what I want.”
No. That is not the Savior we serve. That is not the Lord
who drew us from darkness into marvelous light.
Jesus meets us. In the midst of our grief, he is
there. In the refining flames, he is there. In the moments when we are
sure that we will never live again, that this life is too hard – he is there.
He whispers to us that we still have a purpose. That every life has a
purpose. That every life is precious.
That if he sees every sparrow which falls to the
ground, then he is not remiss in seeing us, the beings created in his own
image, and he hears our cries.
There is a gravity in grief because it teaches us
that life is short. As I wrote in my journal this past week after finding out
that a friend of my brother's has leukemia - “Why is it that we suddenly realize the mortality of life when
immortality becomes impossible? We always know that we're mortal, - we always do, somewhere deep inside, know
that we're not actors in a movie who can face anything and come out in the end.
It's just when immortality is medically proven impossible in someone's life
that we begin to believe that it really is impossible."
Be in prayer for this dear family if it comes to your
mind. Grief may be an overwhelming flood, but we are children of the creator of
the waves, and He will not let us drown. There is a purpose in our sorrow, and
someday we will clearly see what it is.
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