A Year-Long Journey Through the Sermon on the Mount: Week 6

Chapter 6 – Mourning

 

“Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.” (Matthew 5:4) This is the beatitude that we’re examining this week, and my question is how can you feel blessed while grieving?

 

Grief is a difficult emotion. You can experience grief over anything from the discontinuation of your favorite chocolate bar to the death of a loved one and everything in between. To grieve is difficult but it’s also natural. It is only human to be sad when something changes in your life that you didn’t want to change. The difficulty with grief is that you don’t know how it’s going to affect you. Will it be a single tear? Will it be uncontrollable sobbing? Will it be deafeningly silent? The other hard part of grief is that you never know when it will hit. You could feel it immediately, or in a few hours, or a few days. Maybe you thought you finished grieving and then a picture, a smell, or a song comes along and punches you right in the gut and slams you back to the beginning of the grief process. Grief is a difficult emotion that throw you for loops your entire life. So how could you possibly feel blessed while you’re grieving?

 

There are many reasons why people grieve, why they mourn. It could be a small thing, or it could be a big thing, and the size perspective is personal. But no matter what they are mourning, or why they are grieving, there is still a blessing to be had. And that is the blessing of the ever-loving presence of God. Even in the times we feel nothing will ever make us happy again, God is there for us. Even in the darkest of valleys, God will be there for us. It makes me think of Psalm 23, “Even though I walk through the darkest valley, I fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me.” As well, the Poem Footprints in the Sand says, “I noticed that at many times along the path of my life, especially at the very lowest and saddest times, there was only one set of footprints. … ‘My precious child, I love you and will never leave you. Never, ever, during your trials and testings. When you saw only one set of footprints, It was then that I carried you.’”

 

To mourn means that your heart has been broken. The blessing is that God will be your comforter through it all.