Come and see and weep.

It’s only early December, but I’ve officially been ready for the winter holidays to be over since late July. Question: Is it possible to teleport five weeks into the future? As much as I love Advent, I don’t have it in me this year to do the festive everything.

Yes, I have considered dressing my dog up like a reindeer, but I promise I’m not secretly a green-colored creature living in a cave above a joy-filled town, plotting to steal everyone’s holiday spirit. Besides, my pup hates headbands. I’m not a grinch; I’m exhausted.

This is my first Thanksgiving/Christmas/birthday since my divorce. It’s my first time experiencing these milestones without my kids and husband. It’s also soon the first anniversary of my ex telling me we’d be getting a divorce, plus a terminal illness diagnosis for my dog (they happened the same day, mere hours apart). And, well, the body does keep the score.

So, yeah. I don’t have the emotional capacity to be joyful and exuberant and festive this year. Put something on the calendar and we’ll circle back in twelve months.

A church that lacks a theology of suffering — an Americanized, feel-good, eternally positive church…will invariably come under fire for failing to do one of its most important jobs.

(Laura Turner at Buzzfeed)

If our love for God is only genuine and true because we have free will — because we can decide to not love God — then in that same vein, perhaps my times of joy and overflowing blessings mean nothing unless I can also have seasons of sackcloth and ashes.

I’ve spent my entire life being a (mostly) faithful church-goer. I joke that I was born on a Tuesday and in a pew that following Sunday, but it’s a joke not that far from the truth. As a pastor’s kid, we were the first ones in and the last ones out whenever the church doors were open. I’ve spent so much time in church that I’ve even memorized most hymns’ third verse.

As I’ve walked through profound grief and change over the last eleven months, I can’t help but wonder if it all would have been just a bit easier if I wasn’t a Christian. Jesus is cool and God’s yet to fail me, but I can’t always say the same for other believers. I’ve frequently found that my brothers and sisters in Christ have made this already hard thing harder.

Please don’t hear what I’m not saying: I’ve been supported, encouraged, uplifted, and shielded by a great cloud of witnesses. In my local congregation, the church elders and my community group have loved me well. More broadly, friends near and far consistently meet me in this place of mourning.

And yet — especially as we enter the holiday season — I’m met with pushback when I dare to share my vulnerability. Many people in our society think that grief and mourning should only last for about one year, at which point the person who’s gone through a loss should be “over it.” In my experience, I’ve found that Christians particularly view prolonged grief as a sign of spiritual deficit. Sure, a bad thing happened, but God is good so stop being sad.

Yes, God is good, but part of living in the already-but-not-yet involves struggling, wrestling, and yes, grieving. Furthermore, God’s loving-kindness is partially why I can grieve and be sad; the brokenness of the world stands in sharp contrast to God.

If I may be so blunt: Our inability to mourn with those who mourn is a marriage of Gnosticism and prosperity theology. When heartache lasts longer than a few weeks, we chalk it up to flesh winning over the spirit. We decide (consciously or not) that the brokenhearted don’t have enough spiritual maturity because more faith and trust in God would bind their emotional wounds immediately.

Lies we hear in this space may include:

• Ecclesiastes 3:1, 4 “There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under heaven: a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance,” but the times of weeping and mourning should be short while the times of laughing and dancing greatly outnumber them.
• Philippians 4:7 “And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus,” but we know enough about this peace that transcends all understanding that prolonged periods of sorrow are wrong before God.
• Psalm 30:5b “weeping may stay for the night, but rejoicing comes in the morning,” but you really shouldn’t weep even for the night.
• Hand your fears, anxiety, and sadness over to God, and don’t pick them up again.
• If you were leaning on God the way you should as a Christian, you’d be happy. Ongoing sadness means you aren’t relying on Him enough.
• Joy goes hand-in-hand with holiness, so a lack of joy indicates a lack of holiness.

But this is not how God views us and certainly isn’t how we’re supposed to treat one another. Yes, God is transcendent — above and bigger than our current circumstances with an eternity-wide view — but God is also equally imminent, in every moment with us.

When I read the story of Jesus resurrecting Lazarus in John 11:1–44, I’m continually struck by how Jesus responds to Mary and Martha. From the very beginning, Jesus tells his followers with him that Lazarus’ illness wouldn’t end in death. When Martha comes to meet Jesus upon his arrival, he tells her that Lazarus will live again. And then Mary comes to Jesus.

“When Mary reached the place where Jesus was and saw him, she fell at his feet and said, ‘Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.’ When Jesus saw her weeping and the Jews who had come along with her also weeping, he was deeply moved in spirit and troubled. ‘Where have you laid him?’ he asked. ‘Come and see, Lord,’ they replied. Jesus wept.” (John 11:32–35)

Come and see. An acknowledgment that Christ is Lord. And then Jesus wept.

Jesus wept.

Jesus wept.

…it wasn’t until grief and unanswered prayers moved into my own home that I began to fully understand how a theology without language for lament and sorrow was insufficient.

Sarah Bessey in Miracles and Other Reasonable Things

My pastor recently preached an excellent Advent sermon about peace and the peacemaking mission of Jesus. One of the primary scripture passages used was Matthew 5:4 and 9, “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.”

As I listened to the message, I repeatedly returned to a specific thought: Those who mourn will be comforted, but the passage doesn’t say the mourning necessarily comes to an end. It might, as it did for Mary and Martha when Lazarus was raised from the dead. That story is also a prophetic metaphor for Jesus’ death, burial, and resurrection. From an eternity-based perspective, the mourning will end, but that might not happen this year — or next. It might not happen this decade or even this lifetime.

If someone in your circle is in a place of mourning, I want to gently-yet-firmly encourage you: Don’t invalidate their suffering or placate their concerns. Instead, come and see their sorrow. Yes, affirm that Christ is Lord! But also weep.

Come and see and weep.