Glenn Lucke, Grieving with those who Grieve

I met a pastor the other day. We rode in a van to a dinner, and then at the dinner, amidst eight other people, we ended up sitting across from each other and talking. The next morning we were on the same hotel elevator and had a moment or two while I was waiting to check out of the conference hotel.

In those three conversations I got to know a man who struck me as humble, kind, very bright and well read, proud of his sons and one who enjoyed life with his sons. The one mention of his wife was the high level of excellence with which she had homeschooled their boys. 

Because he is a potential client for my business (some of what we had talked about) I decided to look him up online and find out more. I ended up at his blog where I read about the death of his wife. His story about cleaning out her clothes closet, over a year after her death, slew me. 

There is something about reading the words of a man grieving the loss of his beloved wife many, many years ‘before her time,’ that punctures the senseless busy-ness that engulfs my days.  I felt like I was reading something too intimate to be read by me, a new acquaintance. The detail, the specific aspects of his wife that her clothes called to mind, the loss—so vivid was the picture that I found myself grieving with him.

To miss the love of your life, to lose your partner in loving your children and loving God’s flock, to anticipate future weddings of your sons knowing that your wife and their mom would not be there to celebrate, to envision grandbabies born and not be known by their grandmother. Such great sorrow.

None of us knows why the Lord does what He does. We can know and trust His character and big theological principles about Him and stories that tell of how He has interacted with His people, but none of those tells us why He takes home some old, some young and some very young.

Perhaps some believers can reflect upon the sorrow and stop short of the hope. Maybe some day I will. I sense a voice saying, “You cheat. You don’t sit in the grief. You run to the hope.”  Maybe so. I don’t know if it’s really cheating, but I do know that our Story is centered on Jesus, who carried a Cross and then hung on it, and then came back to life three days later. How do I divest or sequester Sunday from Friday? Friday hurts and I feel the sting and grief of Friday, but Sunday’s resurrection is bound up in Friday’s death.

This pastor’s grief caused me to grieve with him and at the sorrow our mortal lives inhabit. His grief reminded me to savor Jesus, and to savor Stephanie and all our loved ones, to forgive petty slights and big betrayals of friends and acquaintances, and to love and to love and to love.  

Comments

[Lois Westerlund]

Thank you, Glenn, for a moving glimpse into the life of a suffering fellow servant. Thank you for such a thoughtful response. The movement from sorrow to hope seems to me not exactly a progression, but rather, that we can only bear the unbearable because it is undergirded with joy. We are sorrowful, yet rejoicing, because, in our aching pain, we know we are held in the strong arms of One who suffers with us (more than we can know). He stills our fears and calls us to lean on Him, in trust, and yes, hope. I remember sitting by our fire years ago, murmuring over and over, my heart will break, and hearing God answer, yes, it will, but I will hold the pieces.
Lois

[David Wayne]

Thanks for making me tear up here bud! This one hit pretty close to home, in an appropriate way.

What you have written here is wisdom and dovetails with a passage I have had much occasion to think on lately - Ecclesiastes 7:2-4

2 It is better to go to a house of mourning
than to go to a house of feasting,
for death is the destiny of every man;
the living should take this to heart.

3 Sorrow is better than laughter,
because a sad face is good for the heart.

4 The heart of the wise is in the house of mourning,
but the heart of fools is in the house of pleasure.

[Lisa Hoffman]

I can relate to the above passage, Ecclesiates 7:2-4 .

It is indeed hard to lose a spouse, as I did in 2000. My best friend gone at 47. Cleaning the closet of his clothing, the smell of a person gone from this earth. The business to take care of, the family to care for. All the things usually done as a couple, those things are done alone. But strength in knowing that he no longer suffered.

Each day, showing God's love in my life through his passing.