I stumble across the sale rack of men’s dress shirts and almost robotic-like, am drawn to the XXL.
$11.99 for name brand, men’s shirts. Not bad.
Bright, bold colors, I knew my dad would look good in these.
It had been a Space-Mountain-year. You know…The kind that straps you in and unvoluntarily spins you up and down in the dark.
The kind that, once you’re in, you can’t get out of.
I lift up a Van Heusen shirt, measure it with my eyes.
Yes, it should fit the man who worked with his hands his whole life, just to care for me.
But then, like a submarine, I didn’t plan it, but a current of grief drops me into, the depth of a sea of pain.
I can’t move. I can’t breathe.
My dad went to be with Jesus. He doesn’t need this shirt.
I step out of the store, still carrying the weight of the pressure of the sea on my back. I get in my car.
“Click. Click. Click.” I turn the key. Nothing happens. A dead battery. Again.
I pick up the phone and start dialing. Without even thinking, my mind is on speed dial of who to call when my vehicles have troubles.
He saved me that time I left my car lights on. I was Wedding Dress shopping with my daughter…Not long before his diagnosis.
And yet he came. He always came.
But this time, it was like a semi raced past me on the street corner, blowing me over with a giantic gust of truth.
There was no dad to call. I sat there. Still.
Swallowing hard with a lump in my throat.
My dad went to be with Jesus.
The empty parking lot glared at me, like a wide open desert, me gasping in thirst.
My dad could not come. Though he always used be there.
I see a man pass me.
His hair grey. His skin pale. Strong and robust. I then se his twenty-something year old daughter.
She looks in her Daddy’s face. He brushs his hand against her back. They walk, not necessarily talking, but just being together.
And then, like a stake, planted inside my heart. I realize that would have been me a few years ago.
But now, he is gone.
I wrestle with the pain. I want to run from the ache that twists deep inside me.
So, how do we cope? How do we go on?
This world has been covered in pain this past year. Like a dark parachute covering the earth. Loss. Pain. Grief, overtaking God’s people.
We are reeling at times.
And yet, too many struggle to express freely, the confusion that comes when so many things have changed so quickly.
Worse yet, too many ascribe to the belief that God always wants us to be happy.
That we lack faith or don’t trust in Jesus, if we don’t embrace this idea that only bad things happen to bad people.
We fool ourselves when we hold back tears, thrust our heads upward, or try to fight forward without first walking in humility…Recognizing loss is a part of life.
Bad things DO happen to good people.
I am captivated by the story of Lazarus.
Lazarus died, but he didn’t need to. Jesus was on His way. He was in the midst of His ministry of healing and delivering people.
And yet, Jesus LET Lazarus die. He LET him die first, before coming close to him.
Why? Why did Jesus LET his friend die? Was He mean? Disinterested? Selfish?
Did Jesus want the sisters of Lazarus (his friends) Mary and Martha to suffer the blast of grief we all feel when we loose someone we love?
When we are in the midst of grief and loss, heartbreak and difficult obstacles, our mind can panic.
We can plead and bargain, fight and even reject the notion that God would actually LET something bad happen to US.
We can wrestle with God, like Jacob. (Gen. 32:22-32) Pull on God and insist He do things in ways that we think are best for our lives.
But God won’t give His throne to anybody.
And He has written the story of our lives in a way, He gets glory…
Even when difficult things present themselves to us in ways we don’t understand.
The story goes, Lazarus died. (John 11)
Jesus came three days later. Jesus even greived with his friends, Lazarus’ two sisters.
This resurrection narrative was a picture of Jesus death and resurrection. But what it also is, is a message to us.
Sometimes God let’s hard things happen to the very people he loves most. It is not punishment or that we earned it.
It is not because someone was bad or they didn’t have enough faith in and of themselves to fix the situation.
Jesus let Lazarus die because He had a BIGGER PICTURE for His people. A picture Mary and Martha didn’t see at the time.
And my guess is, despite what hard has happened to you today, God has a bigger picture planned for you as well.
He might not prevent hard things from happening, but He will USE THEM for His glory.
He always brings beauty from ashes. But first, we must let go of our expectations and put our trust in Him.
My cousin messaged me the other day. She has been a life-source, great comfort through this whole process of my dad’s diagnosis with cancer and through his death.
She is the sister I never had.
I wrote back to her, “Maybe grief isn’t something we “get over”. Maybe we are supposed to carry it. Intertwine it within our life and let Him use it however He wishes.”
Grief can launch us into greater things; greater ministries, greater sympathies for other people, other understandings that we would not had, if it wasn’t for grief and the struggling we are experiencing.
I look up Lazarus’ name.
Lazurs is Hebrew for “Eleazar”. The meaning? “God has helped”.
God HAS helped! Did you get that?
God named Lazarus “God has helped” before His sickness, before His resurrection. Before the slow burial. before His healing from Jesus.
When Lazarus was rotting in the tomb, covered with burial cloth….
His name already meant, “God HAS helped”.
When Lazarus was a little boy, before he even grew ill, Lazarus’ message of hope was intertwined within Him, spoken over him every day…
Lazarus, “God HAS helped”.
The helping was on the way BEFORE the sickness, the dying or the deliverance. And my guess is, the same is true with me and you.
His HELP is woven into the very character of our lives, the very fabric of every detail of what we are going through, even before we stepped into pain or experienced the hard or the difficult.
God HAS helped. Past tense.
He knows the end from the beginning. He has seen our pain, even before we have walked through it.
Jesus knew Lazarus would die. He knew He would wait and experience the grief WITH his friends, Mary and Martha. He had a plan in the tears that run down His friends’ faces.
And even more, Jesus mourned WITH those who were mourning. And He mourns with me and you.
We are not alone in our heartbreak. We are not alone in our loss or abandonment, diagnosis and discouragement. God is near us.
He HAS helped us, preparing every detail that we might have faith, and not fall into despair.
Grief is hard.
It comes sometimes, like waves that we can’t control, burrying us in deep ways until we can’t even breathe or stand.
But there in the pain. There in the loss. There in the aching mess of our lives, Jesus draws near. He comforts us. He waits in the darkness
WITH US, until the resurrection.
We can move on from hard.
We can step forward from grief, knowing He is with us, and the light of His promise is already written in the pages of the text of our lives…
Even now, while we stand, struggling to understand.
I can feel Him in the hard. In the aching loss. In the weighted grief that strikes me, at times, when I least expect it.
And my guess is, if you stop. If you wait and listen. If you are still, and if you invite Him into your cirucumstances…
My guess is, you can feel Him too.
He stands with us in the darkness of our grief. But He is hope. There is hope.
He is the light that shows us the way.
“Weeping may endure for a night, But a shout of joy comes in the morning.” (Psalms 30:5)
