THOSE AMONG WHOM WE CAN WEEP

(Post by: Madie Hobbs – Blogmas Day Twenty-Seven 2023)

Grief teaches a person a lot, don’t you agree?

I must confess, I wish I was never forced to learn this way. I wish sadness and longing were not apart of our world. I wish I could live out my days without fearing grief and the heartbreak that comes with it. I wish there was not such a permanence to loss.

We often believe that in this world, to lose something is to lose it forever.

This is a concept I have been violently wrestling with. In the middle of this struggle, I have been exposed to so much more than grief. Anger has bloodied my lip. Fear has doubled me over. Terror has squeezed me to the point of suffocation. Questioning has kept me awake for hours on end. Confusion has battered my brain. Each adversary has come over me in sweeping waves, threatening at times, it seems, to pull me out to sea.

But just as I start to give in to the tug towards a vast and endless unknown, I remember that I am meant to be a warrior. A person who doesn’t let the grief show. Someone who carries on as if nothing has yet changed and nothing ever will. Someone who pretends her armor is not unbearably heavy.

Many of you may be exhausted by the topic of loss. You may be wondering when the happy posts are coming. All I can say is, somehow, the Lord always gives us a theme for Blogmas that speaks to all of you just as much as it speaks to us. This year, loss has both fortunately and unfortunately been it.

One thing I have realized amid all this, is that if everything I wish for, an absence of sadness, longing, grief, and heartbreak was granted, something else would also evaporate in the process.

Love.

For is it not love which is the root of all loss and heartbreak? Does this fact not also offer us some comfort in the middle of what seem to be entirely unnatural emotions? For rest assured, dear reader, these emotions were meant to be unnatural. The Lord never intended for our love to have consequences of a torturing kind. He intended for it to simply be beautiful. To never be fractured.

But our decision to choose the decay of sin over what was meant to be an eternal love has fractured it.

Thus, we endure grief, strife, and heartbreak seemingly with no respite in sight.

But a respite has come.

Many of us may feel as though we are experiencing that 400 years of silence Lilly wrote about yesterday. 400 years of war and pain with no end in sight. Only conqueror after conqueror.

In The Return of the King, the third installment in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, the people of Gondor felt much the same way. They spent most of their lives fighting against an evil who remained forever more powerful than them. An oppressing evil lurked just beyond their borders, threatening to invade at any moment. They sat constantly on a precipice of darkness.

They sat, some believed, on a loss that would mean forever.

But their respite finally came.

After Aragorn, the rightful heir to the throne of Gondor, leads an army against the oppressive darkness and gains victory over it, Gondor is saved. But the people would be called upon to fight again, to protect more than themselves, far sooner than most of them liked.

When the man who people assumed would become their new king came into the city and looked around at the faces of his people, he became overwhelmed with grief himself. He looked around at the destruction the enemy had inflicted before their defeat, the weariness of the warriors, and the faintheartedness lurking in every chest.

One of the other characters urges Aragorn to ride into the city as a victor. As a new king come to claim his throne. As a conqueror. But the wise king refuses. He says that the kingdom was not at all in need of a king come to claim his goods. Rather, they needed a healer. Someone to come in and stop their bleeding. To bind their wounds. To sit at their bedsides and sing songs of old, full of beauty and love.

The people needed to find those among whom they could lay down their armor that became so heavy. They needed to find those among whom they could weep over their abundant loss, and still be seen as warriors.

He chose to be that healer, and he accomplished far more than any king sitting on a faraway throne could have.

I often imagine this is how the Lord viewed us before He chose to send His Son. I can see Him looking down at us after His 400 years of silence and recognizing that the people He loved did not need to be conquered. They needed to be healed.

Thus, He took on flesh so He could mend ours.

He became that among which we can weep openly over our loss, and He weeps with us.

He became that to which we can offer our brokenness, our grief, and our despair, and He steps out onto the waves sweeping us away. His hand reaches into the deep and clasps ours with the strength only of one who loves eternally.

He beckons us to take up our armor once more, for surely, we still have one more fight in us.

Most importantly, He mends our heart, and softly nudges us to love once more, though the end may be grief.

For to love, is to live.

“The world is indeed full of peril and in it are many dark places. But still there is much that is fair. And though in all lands, love is now mingled with grief, it still grows, perhaps, the greater.” ~ J. R. R. Tolkien