MY MOTHER DIED when I was twenty-six. She was only fifty-seven. A few years before her death, she was diagnosed with cancer of the larynx. She fought it bravely, but, in time, it overtook her, and all too soon, by our accounts, she died.
We had a service led by an Air Force chaplain at a local funeral home, and we traveled in solemn procession to the cemetery, where, as they say, we laid my mother to rest.
I was a student in seminary at the time, and the next day I returned to class and tried to keep my mind on my studies. A few weeks after my mother’s death, I began to notice some unusual physical symptoms. I won’t tell you what they were; they are a little indelicate. But I will tell you: I was a little frightened, and so I did what I hardly ever did at that time of my life. I made an appointment to see a doctor.
The doctor, of course, examined me, did some tests, and then he sat down with me “Mr. Butterworth,” he said, “I’ve looked over your test results, and I have to tell you: I don’t find anything wrong.” I didn’t say so, but I didn’t believe him. He was the doctor, to be sure, but I knew that something was wrong.
The fact is, my whole world was wrong. My mother had always been in it, but now she wasn’t. And I needed her. I needed her comfort, her assurance. I was a grown man, but I still needed my mother. The doctor, I could tell, was an efficient man, busy with the demands of an exhausting medical practice. I was aware of the fact that he didn’t have time to talk with me. But I asked him anyway. “My mother died a few weeks ago,” I said. “Do you think that could have anything to do with it?”
He looked at me blankly. With all his knowledge, it was a question he wasn’t prepared to answer. He was all about exam rooms with stainless steel furnishings, diagnostic testing, standard procedures, accurate diagnoses, and carefully kept medical records. But he wasn’t inclined to cross the threshold into the messy terrain of a heavy heart, weighed down by grief.
I did not fault him. To tell the truth, I didn’t really expect him to answer my question. As he predicted, the symptoms soon disappeared, and my fears of some dread illness disappeared with them. But I did learn something from that day in the doctor’s office. I learned that, when you’re weighed down with grief, you need to talk about it, and, because you need to talk about it, you need someone to listen.
In Isaiah, chapter 35, there is a wonderful description of what God promises to His hurting people. There are two images He uses to comfort us. One is that of a desert transformed into a garden. “The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad,” He says; “the desert shall rejoice and blossom like a crocus” (v. 1). If you have gone through a loss recently, you may be feeling like you’re in a wasteland that stretches in every direction as far as the eye can see. There is no comfort to be found. It’s like having gritty sand in your clothing and the intense heat of the sun beating down upon your weariness. There is no refreshment to be found. You long to find just past the next rise an oasis where water is abundant, and the landscape is filled with the color of flowers and vegetation. You long for life once more.
The second image is one of a group of travelers. They have been exiled far from home in a strange and terrifying land. But now they are on their way back to the familiar surroundings of they life they once knew. “The ransomed of the LORD shall return,” Isaiah says, “and come [home] with singing; everlasting joy shall be upon their heads; they shall obtain gladness and joy, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away” (v. 10). Sounds inviting, doesn’t it? O how we long for sorrow and sighing to flee away! In your season of loss, you may feel stranded, exiled even, displaced and homesick. You yearn for singing and gladness. You long for a comeback, a way to come back to the joy you once knew.
These two images form a sort of sandwich around the middle of the passage. And in the middle part, God discloses how he will transform our deserts into gardens and our exile into a homecoming. Again, there are two things to notice. One is something we are to do; the other is something we are to believe.
What are to do is share our sorrows. We are to listen as others talk, and we are to talk as others listen. It’s a novel idea, isn’t it? There is an old proverb that says, “A sorrow shared is half the sorrow.” In times of distress, we need each other. So God says to us, “Strengthen the weak hands, and make firm the feeble knees. Say to those who have an anxious heart, ‘Be strong; fear not!’” (vv. 3-4a).
This is what Under Angels’ Wings does. It provides a way for people to come alongside each other and encourage each other, listening to one another and sharing their stories. And when they do, weak hands are strengthened. Feeble knees are made firm once again. The desert becomes less lonely; there is the hope for a return from exile.
So, that is what God tells us to do. Strengthen one another. Talk and listen to one another. Then, in addition to giving us something to do, he gives us something to believe. In verse 4, He says, “Behold, your God will come…. He will come and save you.” This is an announcement. This is the good news, the gospel. “God will come and save you.” Believe it.
We need each other, but what we need from each other is a witness to God’s promise to save. The reason there is sorrow, of course, is that there is death. And the reason that there is death is that this world is broken. And we are the ones who have broken it. No sense denying it; we are the ones who turned Eden into a desert. And, even though we have the power to break it, we don’t have the power to restore it.
But God does. He turns deserts into Eden. He mends our brokenness – and you know how He does it? He mends our brokenness by sharing our brokenness. That is what Jesus did when he came from heaven and sought us. He yielded himself to death in the fullness of its devastation. He held nothing back. Death took from Him everything He had. It left no life in Him, no hope for Him. He died in the desert of human ruin; and in His death He was exiled far from the heart of God.
But he made a comeback. He transformed the desert into a garden. He reversed the exile and made it a homecoming. He died, but he was raised again from the dead. And in his resurrection, He forged our comeback. In the New Testament, we read, “Since therefore the children” – that’s us! – “share in flesh and blood, he himself likewise partook of the same things” – that is, he became human and shared our plight; why? – “[so] that through death he might destroy the…power of death…and deliver those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong slavery” (Heb. 2:14f.). You see! He makes the desert a garden. He turns exile into homecoming. His comeback is our comeback.
One of my favorite authors is a Russian writer by the name of Anton Chekhov, and one of my favorite stories is one he entitled “The Lament.” It is about a cab driver in Moscow in the late 1800s. Cabs back then, of course, were horse-drawn buggies. At the beginning of the story, we learn that the coachman, a man named Iona Potapov, has recently lost his son, and he is overwhelmed with grief. Nevertheless, life goes on, which means he has to work.
In the course of an evening, he picks up several passengers, and none of them, of course, has any idea of the heavy burden he is carrying in his heart. He tries to talk about his grief, but no one will listen. He tries to tell them, but they don’t care. They have parties to go to or meetings to make, important appointments to keep, and they have no interest in hearing what he has to say. In the end, he is left on the street alone. There is no one to listen to his heart’s cry. No one, of course, except his horse. So, he takes her face in his gentle hands, lays his head on hers, and, weeping, begins to pour out his heart.
When we hurt, we I need others – you and I – to share our pain. That is why God instructs his people to encourage one another with words of comfort and to speak to one another of the promises of God.
I urge you: If you are going through a time of grief, find some one to share it with. There are people who will not only listen; they will listen well. Our grief support group, which calls itself Under Angels’ Wings, is made up of people just like you, people who have sustained the loss of someone they dearly loved and who, like you, need a way to share their sorrow. I hope you will consider taking advantage of this group’s accessibility. I urge you not to wait. When Henri Nouwen’s mother died, he wrote to his father, “Real grief is not healed by time. It is false to think the passing of time will slowly make us forget her and take away our pain” (A Sorrow Shared).
We need more than time. We need each other. And we need the promise of God. He makes the desert a garden, and He turns our exile into homecoming. And that’s the comeback for which the heart yearns.
