Comfort

Through a difficult week for many friends over the loss of a dear mother, friend and Warrior. She's blazed a trail for many mothers many years ago, having a career as a nurse, then getting married later, only to really enjoy having seven kids and raising them well. Her daughter blogs about her in a tribute. 

In the same week, there was a terrible accident at the high school I attended, where a teen girl was killed and another girl seriously injured.

The loss of those two beautiful women is striking and severe. We all must face loss in our life. We might not lose our mother or our friend or our daughter, but every day we must confront our own mortality and limitations.  

Grief isn't just over great loss, it can be experienced every single day.  We might see them as frustrations or disappointments. But they are losses. The kids break the radio. The meat you took out for dinner is bad. School is delayed two hours again. Our friend let us down. The struggles we face might seem simple in light of a greater loss, but we still have to ask   How do we move through grief?

Every person has their own way through; and if you are currently experiences, I pray you will find your way through the comforts of Christ. But you will have your own time, methods, pace, momentum and stalling. That is why I love poetry; because it is always a reflection of someone else's process. It reassures me that I am not alone in my experience, nor am I supposed to make it look a certain way.

Speak low to me, my Saviour, low and sweet

From out the hallelujahs, sweet and low

Lest I should fear and fall, and miss Thee so

Who art not missed by any that entreat.

Speak to me as to Mary at thy feet!

And if no precious gems my hands bestow,

Let my tears drop like amber while I go

In reach of thy divinest voice complete

In humanest affection -- thus, in sooth,

To lose the sense of losing. As a child,

Whose song-bird seeks the wood for evermore

Is sung to in its stead by mother's mouth

Till, sinking on her breast, love-reconciled,

He sleeps the faster that he wept before. 

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

There is a way through, one where you reach a place of rest from your sorrows and disappointments. There will be a time when we will "lose our sense of losing." A small psalm understands the smallness we feel when we grieve: Psalm 131 gives us a simple image: that of a resting child.

O Lord, my heart is not lifted up;

my eyes are not raised too high;

I do not occupy myself with things

too great and too marvelous for me.

But I have calmed and quieted my soul,

like a weaned child with its mother;

like a weaned child is my soul within me.

O Israel, hope in the Lord

from this time forth and forevermore.

As Browning writes, there will be a time when we will have sweet rest faster than the tears come down so quickly.