Last Sunday, Rhys talked on the subject of disappointment. After the service, as I made my way out to
the car I spoke to several people. Later
I was reflecting on the conversations and how each of the people I spoke to
were going through tough times in their lives.
I remember feeling frustrated that I wasn’t able to do anything to ease
their pain. When I started this blog a
little over two years ago, I mentioned that one of the first books I ever read
was called Where Is God When It Hurts? and
some months ago I read an article by that same author titled Those Who Mourn. I believe it is one of the best accounts of
how we handle life when friends and loved ones are going through difficult
periods in their lives.
Because I have written books with
titles like Where Is God When It Hurts?
and Disappointment With God, I have
spent time among mourners. They
intimidated me at first. I had few
answers for the questions they were asking, and I felt awkward in the presence
of their grief. I remember especially
one year when, at the invitation of a neighbour, I joined a therapy group at a
nearby hospital. This group, called Make
Today Count, consisted of people who were dying, and I accompanied my neighbour
to their meetings for a year.
Certainly I cannot say that I “enjoyed”
the gatherings; that would be the wrong word.
Yet the meetings became for me some of the most meaningful events of
each month. In contrast to a party,
where participants try to impress each other with signs of status and power, in
this group no one was trying to impress.
Clothes, fashions, apartment furnishings, job titles, new cars–what do
these things mean to people who are preparing to die? More than any other people I had met, the
Make Today Count group members concentrated on ultimate issues. I found myself wishing that some of my
shallow, hedonistic friends could attend a meeting.
Later, when I wrote about what I
had learned from grieving and suffering people, I began hearing from strangers. I have three folders, each one several inches
thick, filled with these letters. They
are among my most precious possessions.
One letter, twenty-six pages long, was written on blue-lined note paper
by a mother sitting in a lounge outside a room where surgeons were operating on
her four-year-old daughter’s brain tumor.
Another came for a quadriplegic who “wrote” by making puffs of air into
a tube, which a computer translated into letters on a printer.
Many of the people who have
written me have no happy endings to their stories. Some still feel abandoned by God. Few have found answers to the “Why?”
questions. But I have seen enough grief
that I have gained faith in Jesus’ promise that those who mourn will be
comforted.
- Philip Yancey
The
Jesus I Never Knew, pp 123-24
