ALONG THE WAY · POETIC REFLECTION
The Strange Company of Grief and Hope
On grief and hope learning to sit beside one another.
Grief and hope should not know one another.
Everything within me insists they belong in separate rooms.
Grief wears black.
Hope waits dressed for a wedding.
Surely one must leave before the other arrives.
And yet…
I have found them sitting beside one another with remarkable familiarity.
Neither seems surprised by the other’s presence.
Only I am.
There are mornings grief wakes first.
It remembers everything.
It walks barefoot through the rooms of memory, touching photographs no one else can see.
It whispers names.
Promises.
The future that almost was.
Hope does not argue with it.
Hope simply remains.
Patient.
Almost impossibly so.
I once believed hope meant the absence of sorrow.
Now I think hope is what remains unwilling to die while sorrow tells its story.
Hope does not interrupt grief.
It outlasts it.
The world speaks often of freedom.
It rarely asks what freedom is for.
Some prisons have iron bars.
Others are built from comfort.
Some chains wound the wrists.
Others become so familiar they are mistaken for wisdom.
Success.
Self-reliance.
The cruelest prison is not the one whose bars you hate.
It is the one whose walls convince you that you have already escaped.
I understand that prison.
I once mistook it for life itself.
I believed I was discerning.
I believed I was whole.
I believed I had surrendered because I agreed with the truth.
Yet agreement is not the same as discipleship.
Christ was welcome in my life.
He simply was not permitted to renovate the house.
How patient He was with my half-open door.
How mercifully He refused to leave it standing.
Perhaps that is why gratitude has grown heavier than happiness.
Happiness thanked God for blessings.
Gratitude thanks Him for rescue.
For wilderness.
For exile.
For every false refuge that had to crumble before I discovered the Rock beneath it.
No pilgrim ever sang the Songs of Ascent from the valley floor alone.
Their voices rose because their feet were already climbing.
Perhaps worship has always sounded different on the uphill road.
I wonder whether grief is not simply the ache of seeing the world as Christ sees it.
Not perfectly.
Only faithfully enough to recognize the fracture.
To mourn what sin has done to beauty.
To look upon captivity without mistaking it for freedom.
To love people without surrendering the truth about what binds them.
Our Lord was acquainted with grief.
Not merely because nails pierced His hands.
But because love continually beheld what rebellion was making of those for whom He came.
“The Way.”
I cannot stop returning to those words.
The first disciples were not admired because they knew the destination.
They were recognized because they walked behind Someone.
So closely that the dust of His sandals settled upon them.
I wonder if we have mistaken information for formation.
We have filled our shelves with books about the Rabbi while forgetting to walk behind Him.
Perhaps discipleship has always been less about arriving than about remaining near enough to wear His dust.
Near enough that His pace becomes ours.
His compassion becomes ours.
His grief becomes ours.
His hope becomes ours.
It is a peculiar kingdom.
The lower one stoops, the nearer heaven seems.
The weaker one becomes, the stronger grace appears.
The one who loses life discovers it.
The one who dies begins to live.
And grief…
Grief somehow learns to sing beside hope.
Not because the sorrow has ended.
But because resurrection has already entered the story.
I do not know what another person’s freedom will choose.
Love cannot choose on another’s behalf.
That is both its glory and its agony.
The Father does not compel surrender.
Love never chains the one it seeks to rescue.
He stands at the door.
He calls.
He waits.
I have learned there is no prison so tragic as the one whose key is never turned because the captive mistakes the cell for home.
I used to ask God to spare me the fire.
Now I ask only this:
Do not let me leave it unchanged.
Strip away every illusion that keeps me from You.
Tear down every wall I have mistaken for shelter.
Renovate every room that still resists Your presence.
If suffering teaches me to walk more closely behind the Rabbi…
If grief teaches me to recognize the prison from which You rescued me…
If hope teaches me to keep my eyes upon the Kingdom while the kingdoms of this world continue trembling…
Then let my feet remain in the dust of Your path.
For I have begun to suspect that peace is not the absence of grief.
It is the presence of Christ.
And where Christ is…
Hope never walks alone.
