Years ago, I began a journey of awakening. The end of that journey exposed the beginning of my life. At long last, I saw the hard-to-face realities and easy-to-embrace fantasies in my childhood that led to everything else. I wrote about it in “The Dream.”

And then I mourned.

God has taught me a lot about grief during these years. Repeatedly, he reminds me:

There is a time to mourn.¹
And much fights against our doing it.

Enemies of grief include:

• The pull to minimize or deny loss, for fear of drowning in it.
• The call to keep busy, always, always, busy.
• The desperation to get past the pain.
• The expectations of those around us, that we quickly move on.
• The hushed voices, when our grief lingers, that whisper we’re “not doing well.”
• The beliefs, accepted as Christian, that disparage and shame grief.

Much fights against our believing and experiencing the truth of our Lord’s words:

Blessed are those who mourn,
for they will be comforted (Matt. 5:4).

A blessing unfolding

Jesus declares it good for us to own and express our grief. In fact, he declares it vital.

Often, we associate grief exclusively with death. We may not give ourselves permission to grieve someone’s death. We may not even realize, “This is grief,” when it comes upon us at other times.

This is grief

Grief enters with loss or betrayal. It arrives with sorrows experienced at any point in our lives, including our earliest years. Further, we can inherit grief via trauma in our family or ethnic history from which previous generations never healed.

Whether grief sneaks in, or bursts in, whether it comes early or late, it does not simply dissipate with time. At the onset, it may surge relentlessly. Later, it may return in waves.

Unacknowledged and unmourned, grief eats at us. Inside us, it becomes like the can of tomato sauce that sat for years in the back of my mother’s cabinet. Eventually, the ruined sauce ate a hole in the can and spewed black gunk on everything around.

This is mourning

We mourn as we open up to pain we may desperately want to keep stuffed in back closets of our lives. We open up to it and give expression to it. Pain expressed isn’t pretty. It’s raw and real.

And yet, mourning brings us, bit by bit, to the place of letting go of what has been taken from us, or what we thought we had, but did not.

Whenever we feel the pain of grief, it’s a time to mourn. As we learn to give voice to our grief, we avoid the ungrieved grief that spews black gunk all over our lives.

But sometimes it’s the black gunk that alerts us to years, and even decades, of grief we haven’t acknowledged. Then, as we gently but resolutely face the mess, the long-repressed feelings will begin to well up. That too is a time to mourn.

Grief that is grieved doesn’t fester, yet it can still return. For grief ebbs and flows. After anything from a moment to a season of calm, the pain of loss may suddenly flood over us again. And as often as grief is triggered, it’s a time to mourn. It’s time to embrace what is precious, but gone – facing into the pain, rather than running from it – until, once again, we can let it go.

Jesus affirms mourning – and he doesn’t put a stopwatch on it. He promises comfort – but does not specify when it will come.

Ah, but in our Western, white church cultures, we tend to hear mourning as a discordant note. We feel we must quickly resolve the chord.

Short-circuiting grief

Thus, we may convey to ourselves and others: “Good Christians stay positive even in the darkest times. So as soon as you start to feel sorrow, affirm God’s goodness. Focus on your future hope. If you express a negative, immediately follow it with a positive. Better yet, don’t say anything negative. Just praise God that he is working all things together for good.”

Eager not to dishonor God, distress others or embarrass ourselves, we have perfected the art of short-circuiting grief.

A short circuit is a low-resistance connection, often unintended, between two points in an electrical circuit. “The current tends to flow through the area of low resistance, bypassing the rest of the circuit.”²

A quicker way to a desired end sounds like a good thing, especially when the quicker way appears to avoid pain. But when an electric current finds a shorter path of very low resistance, the current becomes very strong.

Temporarily, the shortcut works. But ultimately, damage, overheating and fires result.

Similarly, short-circuiting grief may temporarily appear to resolve it. Yet when we deny and stuff grief – thus taking the path of least resistance – we set ourselves up to get burned. For ungrieved grief will smolder within us, damaging us. And ultimately, it will find other, explosive ways to get out.

Processing grief

Mourning that brings healing doesn’t bypass any part of the process. It calls forth anger and sorrow. It prompts hard questions and gut-level honesty. It takes us into and through each wave of grief.

All of which appears for a time to take us the opposite direction from “comfort.”

And yet, we’re blessed when we do not ignore the emotions that accompany loss, but rather pay attention to them, identify them, feel and express them, take them to God.

Jesus does not hold us responsible to conjure up our own comfort. Rather, he gives it – and invites us to receive.

Our Lord promised, “Those who mourn … will be comforted.”

Centuries earlier, Isaiah wrote:

The Spirit of the Sovereign Lord is on me … He has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, … to comfort all who mourn, and provide for those who grieve in Zion – to bestow on them a crown of beauty instead of ashes, the oil of joy instead of mourning, and a garment of praise instead of a spirit of despair” (Isa. 61:1-3).

Who receives this amazing comfort? Not those who try to ignore and skip over grief, but rather “the brokenhearted,” “all who mourn,” “those who grieve.” They will be clothed with beauty, joy, praise.

Giving comfort

And who does the comforting? Not the mourners themselves, but rather one who, by the Spirit of the Lord, comes alongside to help. Early in his ministry, Jesus identified himself as that one.³

Just prior to his crucifixion, he promised:

I will ask the Father, and he will give you another comforting Counselor like me, the Spirit of Truth, to be with you forever (John 14:16 CJB).

And Paul wrote:

Praise be to the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God (2 Cor. 1:3-4).

Father, Son, Holy Spirit – our Lord is the God of all comfort. People can be comforters too – but only to the extent that they have mourned their own griefs and received true comfort in its time.

“Mourn with those who mourn,” says Romans 12:15. For “mourning with” is the beginning of true comfort, not goading to instant cheer.

Receiving comfort

We’re blessed when we take our grief to the Comforter, or simply wait for him to come.

He mourns with us, he offers grace to us: As we sit in darkness, hearing only silence. As we cry out in anger, in confusion, in pain. As we question whether he is with us and for us. As we choose to trust him, if only with a mustard-seed of faith. As, at last, we sense his presence, hear his voice. And, then, as something stirs, the first breath of hope, the first movement of life, the first hint of joy.

We’re blessed when we share our grief with other people who have learned what it means to mourn and be comforted. They too can help us find the way through.

Song of solace

Mourning is like playing a concerto’s second movement.

A concerto is a musical piece in three movements, performed by a solo instrument with orchestra. The first and third movements are often lively; the middle movement, slow and written in a minor key.

Grief is a somber solo none of us wants, but all of us get.

You can reject it: You can jump from the first movement to the third, trying desperately to resolve grief without experiencing it.

Others can discourage it: When you start that second movement, the “orchestra” around you may skip to the finale – and then stare at you like you’re the one who messed up.

Yet remember: Grief will express itself one way or another, but you open yourself to the blessing as you press in to play the whole song.

As you cry out in your pain, the Comforter will not withdraw or rebuke. Oh no. He himself will fill the deep places that grief has carved out. He will welcome your raw emotion and distill it into a song of solace. At just the right moment, he will give you grace to change keys and move on.

Dear one, beloved by God, may you know the blessing of mourning. And may the God of all comfort connect you with others who have refused to short-circuit grief. May he bring you genuine comforters who recognize a time to mourn.

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“The Blessing of Mourning” is a lightly edited update of a post published March 26, 2019. It is based on the Key Truths e-column, “Good Grief,” published December 2008.

Image by Hans Braxmeier from Pixabay.

See also

• Spiritual sundowner’s: When darkness overwhelms you
• Dear traumatized one, I pray you float
• Truth, desperation, spirit, life
• When waiting is writhing
• God who has wronged me
• Defender of the forsaken
• I will fear no evil: Resting in God’s very present help

Footnotes

1. See Ecclesiastes 3:1, 4. ↩︎
2. Short circuit. The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition. Houghton Mifflin Company, 2004. ↩︎
3. See Luke 4:17-21 with Isaiah 61:1-3. ↩︎