Blessed Mourning

After his wife died, C. S. Lewis wrote in a notebook, "No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear." Later he published those notebooks under another name, because he did not want people to know they were his.

You may have become very good at the kind of answer that ends a conversation. You give it at work, and in the car with your mother, and the talk moves on the way you have trained it to.

In this verse Jesus is not calling grief a good thing. He is announcing who the kingdom belongs to, and His list keeps landing on the people at the bottom of the room: "the poor in spirit," then "they that mourn," then "the meek." This is a list of people in need, and each one is given a promise from God. The tense of the comfort matters too: "they shall be comforted." Some of that comfort comes now, a piece at a time, through people, through Scripture and through sleep. The rest waits for the day God wipes away every tear Himself, one face at a time.

This morning, before anything else, give your grief twenty unhurried minutes with God. Turn off the music, put away the phone, and do not try to make the time useful. Say the name. Say what was lost. Let it be exactly as bad in front of God as it really is. Jesus promised comfort to people who mourn, and He keeps His promises. People who only manage how they look never reach that comfort, because they never bring Him the grief.

Daily Manna runs on a two-year cycle. The year two reading for day 49 is Whose Earth It Is (Psalm 24:1).

All 365 readings in Daily Manna