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