I Hope You

Grief is simply love that endures beyond death. Mourning can be unbearably painful, but it is also the gift of pain. We dread heartache and loss because the emotions are so devastating, but when it cannot be avoided, what do you do? Actually, there is no other way to measure the value of what you've lost apart from those emotions.

Once we realize this, a larger, more tender world opens up. Your pain can harden you, but it can also soften you, if you’ll let it. Our present life is a briefest of breaths, the narrowest of windows — yet the only one we have — to establish not just an eternal perspective, but a timeless value system. In other words, what is *worth* loving? You can speculate, but can't really know unless it is worth mourning, and you rarely mourn what you keep.

Thus, tears. When love is true, tears are the gift that tells you so. Sometimes we weep for lesser things, and that is a gift, too, because our tears betray our shallow values, and we learn to weep more appropriately when something truly precious passes from our grasp. Everything we mourn either calibrates or recalibrates our soul, numbing or sensitizing us to the true worthiness of whatever is lovely, whatever is love.

In either event, these few days of our sojourn on earth form our only opportunity to learn such lessons, whatever they may be. In the age to come, the valuation period is over. Believers will experience no loss, no tears, such that our present, troubled existence becomes a poignant gift — a school of sorrow, and the labor of grief a rare and temporary privilege. No, we do not yield to the enemy the right to destroy, oppress or cripple what God has saved and delivered, nor accuse God of malice when the loss is too great, when we don’t understand, and there are no answers. In those cases, we rightly look forward to the time when all is made right.

But if that is all we do, however long-suffering and noble we may seem to ourselves, we still miss the point. Instead, beloved...face and feel what you must; absorb the lessons of love lost; taste the salty nectar of grief, and let your soul’s roots grow deep in the nourishing golden gift of sorrow. Because one day Rev. 21:4 assures, "He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death’ or mourning or crying or pain.” Our window, mercifully and tragically, will close. Which is why Ecc. 7:2 confirms that in many ways, "it is better to go to a house of mourning than to go to a house of feasting, for death is the destiny of everyone and the living should take this to heart."