Good "Mourning"

“Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted” (Matt. 5:4)

This second beatitude, with its futuristic promise, could be transmuted into a holy wish: “How blessed I would be if I could shed tears of suffering without rebelling or complaint.”

Sorrow did not exist in the Garden of Eden. Man brought it to the earth in response to Satan’s nefarious lure. And man’s now corrupt intellect continuously manages to increase it in every possible way. It is found not just in the universal experiences like bereavement, depression, diseases, famine, and calamities like storms, avalanches, floods, earthquakes, etc., Most human suffering flows from the malice of other humans: conflicts and disappointments in families, fiendishly designed weapons that grow more deadly every day, endless varieties of cunning crime, injustice, torture, war, etc. How many tears man wrings from fellow humans through Satan’s wicked ploys!

Man is an absent-minded child, a thoughtless superficial child, a spiritually retarded child, unless, through grace-enhanced tears, he becomes a mature, thoughtful, noble person with an intuitive grasp of the sublimity of God’s positive or permissive will in every hardship—even those arising from the malice of enemies—human or demonic. Only those who weep or have wept with a heart of imperturbable love for God and tender compassion for fellow humans can know the hidden value of life’s troubles fashioned or permitted by the God of love.

Only pain-seasoned, love-pulsing souls can fathom to some degree the mystery in—and embrace the hidden value of—any and all of life’s hardships. They live in the pattern of Jesus, who, in his human nature, “learned obedience by what he suffered” (Heb. 5:8). The tears of such a person are not a sign of weakness but of perfection; but this is true only for grace-splendored souls who are always resting in the arms of a tenderly consoling Lord. These are those described in Hebrews 12:11 as having been “trained” by their suffering.

They know how to love their weeping brothers, how to understand them in their grief, how to help them with their goodness, for they are fully aware how bitter it is to weep alone. And in their own tribulations they know how to love God, because they have realized that every pain or trial brings raw grief if not viewed in the soothing warmth of God’s love. They have understood that sorrow can be soothed if tears are shed on God's heart on which they rest. And they have also learned that resigned tears, without complaint or rebellion against the providence that allows them, do not cause faith to be weakened, nor do such trials allow one’s prayer life to become barren.

Yes, those who truly keep loving the Lord while they weep, with a love that doesn’t diminish but actually grows during their anguish—“they will be comforted,” not only in the very midst of that adversity, but especially when they reap the unimaginable reward for such sanctifying suffering. That’s heavenly coinage!