I gazed on the sunset tonight, and I peered hard at the edge of the world. There the clouds moved like breath among the mountains in dark periwinkle grey, and bright apricot sky stood firm, fading. There I felt the pain of what isn’t, the perfection that’s always beyond my reach, the wholeness I can’t catch or taste in its fullness. And I wept because of the distance between myself and that horizon, that I couldn’t be there at the edge of the light among the shining clouds. And because to the north a towering billow rose to heaven, deepening each second into night, into something I can’t fathom or hold.
There are so many griefs these days – in your life as well as mine. A life lost to a pernicious disease. Friends relocating. A loss of the way things used to be. It wearies me many days. It feels like an old road, and I the soul-aged traveler.
Don’t we want more? Don’t you feel pain, broken, and probably in more way than one? Among the many things that amaze me is that our Maker is well acquainted with grief. He avoids it not but enters in, and thus can tenderly carry me in my own. The following is one of the dearest passages to me, an exchange between a boy and a Creator.
“But please, please—won’t you—can’t you give me something that will cure Mother?” Up till then [Digory] had been looking at the Lion’s great front feet and the huge claws on them; now, in his despair, he looked up at its face. What he saw surprised him as much as anything in his whole life. For the tawny face was bent down near his own and (wonder of wonders) great shining tears stood in the Lion’s eyes. They were such big, bright tears compared with Digory’s own that for a moment he felt as if the Lion must really be sorrier about his Mother than he was himself. “My son, my son,” said Aslan. “I know. Grief is great. Only you and I in this land know that yet. Let us be good to one another.”
(The Magician’s Nephew, C.S. Lewis)
Grief is great. Sometimes it seems like the only true thing, but most especially on days when I don’t look up, up from my own breaking, up from my self-pity and self-disappointment. Up from the sharp realities around me to the bigger reality around those.
O my Saviour, how did you look up in your own anguish? How did you remember your Father as you wept in sorrow? How did you stand steadfast as you received injustice and the weight of the world’s sin? How did you love me even as you were pierced and crushed?
Father, into your hands I commit my spirit. I should pray this every day as I go into it, preparing myself to die to my sin, my flesh, myself. Preparing myself to go with God throughout the day. Acknowledging I am truly in his hands, both body and spirit, and he has final say over both. Remembering my Saviour, who spoke these words in his greatest act of love for me, remembering that I go forth now in that very same, deep deep love, never to be separated for all time and beyond it.
In death, my love, I loved you best.
(The Monster in the Hollows, Andrew Peterson)
I have lost much and will continue to lose. Grief will walk with me through life. Yet the greatest gain is mine, for my God looked at me and said, “My beloved.” Grief is great, yet God’s greatness is as the universe to grief’s earthly waves and oceans. The ocean is real, yet the bigger, truer thing is that God loves me. So God will walk with me through life, through death, and past even that to Life.
No matter how much I look, study, feast with my eyes, I never. Never. Never come to the end. I never understand everything. I can’t make sense of it, this existence of glory and dust. I stare lengthily at what God has made and I only feel smaller, less wise, less important, less needed. The more I open my eyes, the more I know my limits. The more I ache for Him to make everything complete and healed and perfect. The piercing beauty is a call to His children, like a horn to the battle. A signal that there is a war and I’m in it. A cry to join in the song of creation, this longing to be fulfilled once and for all. To march in step to His music, obedient to His reckless, steadfast love. To live and love with abandon, with nothing to lose because He is worth everything and cannot be lost.
Let us be good to one another.
In the morning the once-shrouded mountains shone instead, snow dusted and strong against the blue. They remind me that I am in the hands of One who will remake everything, who redeems brokenness into beauty deeper than before because of that redemption. I’m in His hands, who one morning long ago left a tomb, who made this morning as a shadow of a glimpse of another morning yet to come; on that day, death will be no more. Life will swallow it at last. This is that old road and where it leads. This is the good way. This is the way Home.
This ache is an ancient road that leads to Christ, and I will gladly walk it with my tears in faith.
