God's Great Sorrow

13 days left.  13 days until the love of my life is gone. I am working in the yard, packing, preparing for our annual company seminar, getting ready to travel back to the states.  We are working together, taking care of the plants, settling into our new house in Nicaragua, enjoying this place in life while we take care of the daily chores.   We are savoring the days of sun, ocean views, coffee on the back porch in our rocking chairs and we at the same time looking forward to getting home, getting him the help he needs to get past the depression, time to spend with his parents, time to heal.  We talk about it…everyday we talk about it…how he is feeling, what he is thinking.  He talks about getting better, his plan to get better.  We see his psychiatrist the day after we get back.  We have a plan, we have hope.   

One year ago, 13 days were all I had left with the love of my life and I had no idea.

This is all I can think about.  Memories of our beautiful life together flood my thoughts, all day long, every single day.  It is impossible to be productive, to be present, because my mind, my heart is in the past, trying to get back those precious, priceless moments of oneness.

The memories have come with tsunami force lately.  I can vividly recall his face, his voice, his touch, the first time he put his hand on my face and said “I love you.”  I can recall what he looked like on the flight to Mexico for our wedding.  I can see his hands perfectly, hear his laugh, feel his heartbeat against my cheek as I lay my head on his chest.  Is this a dream?  A nightmare?  Maybe I’ll wake up and it will be over.  

There are no words for this kind of grief, this kind of sorrow.  There is absolutely no way for me to articulate the intensity of this sadness.  You cannot possibly know unless you have been there.  In the middle of this storm, Good Friday is drawing near and it is there, amidst the horror, the agony, the pain and suffering that I draw my comfort.

Taken from my journal:
I wrestle with the searing pain of this relentless grief, swirling emotions, tormented thoughts and agony…..it’s all real.  The pain is too great, the sorrow overwhelming.  I desperately want to be done with it.  It is exhausting.  God, I want to be done with it! It knocks me off my feet and there I come face to face with Jesus, his tear-stained cheeks, his sweaty, bloody, furrowed brow, begging  God, “if there is ANY OTHER WAY, please let this cup pass from me.” I know this feeling.  I know this agony.  I know this Jesus.

The collapse of my spirit, my complete brokenness, coming face to face with sorrow has been a turning point in my relationship with God.  My God not only experienced suffering, anguish and fear as a man, but is deeply familiar with sorrow as our loving Father. God knows the pain of loss, the deep sorrow of grief more than anyone.  This sacred first hand knowledge of of our pain, this commonality with God has brought us closer than ever.  

Wait….we can have things in common with God? Absolutely!  We were created in His likeness.  He breathed into us HIS BREATH.  But how do we experience this closeness to our Savior?  Your relationship with Him grows as any other relationship.  Perhaps it simply begins as a friendly encounter, a need, a want to be better, live better or understand life better.  It may begin with a verse or song that bring you hope, that give you peace.  You may say bedtime prayers, attend church services and experience moments of closeness. For awhile that is enough to satisfy you, but enter tragedy, enter sorrow, and you will know a different side of God than you have ever known.  When suddenly your relationship is called upon to provide more than anecdotal wisdom, and momentary peace, when life hangs in the balance, you now have the opportunity for a closer, deeper more intimate relationship.  Through the tears and the screaming, the heaving pleas for mercy and vomiting emotions, He becomes the God who holds back your hair, strokes your back, brings the cold towels and rubs your shoulders.  He hovers over you with kindness.  He kneels beside you, picks you up off the floor when all physical strength has failed you. After that experience with God, you will never look at Him the same.  He is no longer a distant, loving father, a kind benefactor, a wise counselor: He is your soulmate, your closest friend, more trustworthy and loyal than your own spouse.  I have never felt closer to God than through the greatest sorrow of my life, grieving the loss of the greatest love of my life.  Why?  Because God understands sorrow and grief better than anyone.  

Just as I have mourned deeply for Jon, God has sorrowed even more for me and for you.  That anguish for my broken heart, my children, my constant ache and longing for my beloved, is sacred.  It is my closest understanding to God’s constant ache and longing for us when we were separated, when He was torn away from His beloved.  We were created to be one with Him, to be in the perfect love relationship with our creator.  How tragic when we choose a different path apart from Him, when we lay waste to ourselves because we feel unworthy or unable to bear our own burdens.  Can you imagine the pain it causes our creator?

Jon's illness has given me a new perspective on this.  His depression not only produced sadness and anxiety, but was a disorder of thinking.  The fatal danger in bipolar depression is that it is a disorder of thinking.  Thoughts become irrational, illogical, they just don’t make sense.  Even though you know it, you can’t control it.  It is a horrible, vile disease and my heart aches for anyone who is tormented by it.  But how many times are MY thoughts not right?  Our human affliction is a disorder of thinking - a propensity toward WRONG thinking when it comes to God.  Rather than lean into Him in the storm or search for Him in the night, we tend to give up. We have all committed spiritual suicide.  We (mankind) did it in the Garden of Eden and we’ve been doing it ever since.  We continue in moments of wrong thinking to insist we can’t do it, to believe we are unworthy and we give up, take ourselves out.  Whether it is sin, lack of faith, inability to accept His love or grace, we have all been there.  And when we lose the relationship with our Father, the perfect oneness with our Creator, we have lost everything.  Loss brings grief and great overwhelming bitter sorrow.  The inability to make it right brings fear, anxiety, self-loathing.  BUT while we realize the permanence of our loss, we do not grieve alone.  God sobs, too.  We are His love, His very own.  He wants us back.  His great love for us lead to His great sorrow for us, which lead Him to the greatest sacrifice ever.  How do we get back this oneness, this love relationship?  There is only one place.  We must go to the cross to find it.  And let’s be honest, we don’t like to go there.  We’d much rather talk about the glory of the resurrection.  The cross is painful, ugly, messy, unbearable, but that is where it happens - where my sorrow meets His sorrow.  Can you imagine how much that separation grieved our Creator, how much it broke His heart that His priceless treasure, in a moment of wrong thinking, gave up oneness with Him?  I can.  Have you known a love so strong or grief so deep that you would be willing to do ANYTHING to get back what you have lost?  I do.  Would you be willing to give up your own heart, your own life?  Endure any amount of pain?  I would.  Can you imagine the anguish?  I have never felt more connected to God than through this time of overwhelming sorrow.

You cannot fully know God unless you have a deep, sorrowful and poignant relationship with the cross.  The cross is what it took.  The cross is why He came.  The cross is our only hope.  It was the greatest act of love, God sacrificing himself to win back the love of His life, to undo the horror that befell us when we pulled the proverbial trigger.  And all of it was initiated in sorrow.  If not for the incredible sorrow of God over our “lostness,” we would still be lost.  That is why the cross is not something to get over, but to get INTO.  It isn’t PART of our relationship - we have NO relationship except for the cross.  If you run from your sorrow and pain, you run from the cross.  The hard stuff is where it’s at.  Will we come to the cross?  Will we allow Jesus to take ALL our suffering, to shoulder our burden completely?  Will we watch Him in physical and emotional agony, struggling for breath, with blood dripping down his face and allow him to take every last bit?  Our hearts are never more connected than when we scream and cry in pain and willingly place another tragedy upon his broken body.  If we cannot do that, we miss it.  

Don’t you see?  If we avoid the crucifixion, we miss the resurrection.  And in the same way, if we avoid the pain of our grief, we miss the blessing of his comfort, the direct outpouring of His heart for us and into us.  We want to say that it was because of His love for us, but it was also because of His great sorrow.  Great love merits great sorrow.  The amount of strength He had to bear the cross was directly correlated to the amount of His sorrow.  When we say the word “love,” we picture flowery, warm and happy images, but let’s face it - if you have experienced love at all, you know that it is often associated with heavy grief and gut wrenching tears.  Love and sorrow are often synonymous.  We do not sorrow for something we do not love.  When our child is hurting, we hurt, too.  We shed tears for those we love as we sit through funeral services for those they love.  We lie awake at night in turmoil over the problems of those we LOVE most.  Even our sorrow for the state of the world is because at some level, we LOVE this world, we want it to be better.  We only MISS those we love. You will never know this more than when you experience profound grief, profound loss.  When all is right in our world, the cross makes no sense.  Until you are completely lost, devastated, and without hope, the cross seems unnecessary, superfluous.  We have no understanding of such torturous grief until we are cast into the pit of it.  When pain comes, running from it only causes us to run into more pain and directly into aloneness.

The bullet that stopped Jon’s heart stopped mine, too.  My world came to an end.  I wanted, begged and pleaded with God to take me, too.  I lay face down on my bed but it wasn’t low enough, I had to get down to the floor, my face in the dust.  I could not even whisper a prayer.  Utterly destroyed, sobbing and wailing, I had to lay myself at the foot of the cross.  I couldn’t do it standing or sitting.  I had to be as low as possible because that’s where my heart was - outside my body, on the floor, trampled and in pieces.  And what I want you to know is this - not one time, but EVERY time, time and again, He is faithful to meet me there.  It is there, at my lowest point that I feel Jesus’ tears dripping onto the back of my neck.  He sobs with me.  He aches with me.  The oneness I have with him in that sorrow, gives me the strength I need to scoop my heart up off the ground and hand it to Him.  He is never more trustworthy to us than when we allow him in at our lowest, darkest, blackest place.  In those moments, I receive a greater love and comfort than the one I so tragically lost.  

Don’t run from the pain.  This journey of grief is not something to get over, to be done with.  The more you run from the pain, the more it will overtake you.  But if you run INTO the pain, with arms outstretched, searching for the father, the more His MERCY overtakes you. This grief is part of me forever, and in the most weird way, I am grateful for it.  It is allowing me a unity with God that I ever thought possible.  It is in my turmoil that I am able to know peace, in my sorrow that I know comfort, in my tragedy that I know victory, In my brokenness that I know healing.  

Tomorrow I will worship through Good Friday with a new understanding of God’s love, of the suffering and torment He has endured for us.  I am walking toward the cross, hand in hand with my Jesus,  because it is there I find the completeness for which we all ache. #hope #comforted #held #victorious #loved #healed