Lessons in Sorrow

It happened again and my heart is breaking.  Why can’t we seem to get this right?  Maybe it’s fear or our own un-comfortableness that drives our reactions.  It could just be our lack of knowledge and understanding.  I certainly don’t claim to have the best answer, but experience has been a good teacher.

I have friends and family that are going through various trials right now.  Most of these trials are brutal, hard, and very difficult to see beyond.  Other loved ones have been there in the past and suffered through.  One thing they all have in common is very real, very intense times of mourning.  Another thing they have in common it the responses and reactions given them by people who are supposed to (and I believe they do) care about them.  Responses like; “just trust the LORD”; “you should have more faith”; “remember, we are to rejoice always”; or even worse the person just walks away in judgment.  The sad thing is, it is mostly Christian people who seem to not understand that to mourn is a reasonable and appropriate response to most trials and is common to all humans.

I know that it is uncomfortable when you read posts from someone you care about, someone who says they are a Christian, and the posts are very dark and depressing, with seemingly no hope.  You do want to ask where their faith is and tell them to trust in God.  But sometimes we need to just sit in the ashes with them and keep silent.  Where is our trust that the only true and living God will get them through this?

I know a Christian lady, whose husband died, and she thought it was wrong and not God honoring to cry and be sad. To her is seemed more proper to put on a happy face and tell everyone she was doing fine.   Unfortunately she judged others by that same standard and couldn’t seem to see her own mourning that manifested itself in great fear.

Isn’t the guy who has just been diagnosed with cancer allowed to be sorrowful?  How about the couple who wants to have a baby but just found out it didn’t happen AGAIN, or the word miscarriage is too common in their vocabulary.  Can they not mourn that loss openly and still be trusting God? Someone had to put their precious pet to sleep and it hurts like the dickens.  What kind of people would they be if they didn’t cry.  The parents of a chronically ill child ride a rollercoaster of emotions and one that is predominate is mourning, mourning that doesn’t seem to end.  Trust me when I tell you they have no choice at times but to be sorrowful.  That makes all of them human, not weak in their faith.  Please try and understand them instead of judging them.

There are legitimate sorrows.   They are reasonable and even appropriate and don’t threaten God one bit.  To express these sorrows and cry over them somehow opens a sort of escape hatch that keeps our feeling from festering and poisoning our emotions for the rest of our lives.  It provides a way of healing kind of like washing a wound to keep it from getting infected.

There is an Arab proverb that says “All sunshine makes a desert”.  If your life has no troubles it is probably a pretty shallow life.  We learn far more from times of trouble and sorrow than when things are going well.  This is not my opinion it is truth.  James 1:2-4 “Count it all joy, my brothers, when you meet trials of various kinds, (3) for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness.  (4) And let steadfastness have its full effect, that you may be perfect and complete, lacking in nothing.”  Isn’t it possible to count it all joy and still be sad?  I know it is.  Joy comes deep from within, it is not superficial.

Robert Browning Hamilton expressed this truth in a poem:

I walked a mile with Pleasure,

  She chattered all the way

But left me none the wiser

  For all she had to say.

I walked a mile with Sorrow,

  And ne’er a word said she,

But, oh, the things I learned from her

  When Sorrow walked with me

What happened again, as I stated at the beginning, another friend who has been struggling with a trial has had people around her misunderstanding the importance, the need, the appropriateness, of sorrow and mourning.  No, we should not stay there, but that doesn’t mean we won’t end up there from time to time.  The worst thing we can do if our loved ones are there, is to judge them lacking, or sinful, or wrong.  Instead love them, encourage them with the truth, pray for them to leave the darkness for the light, and sit with them as they work through the lesson.