Gracious is the LORD, and righteous; our God is merciful. The LORD preserves the simple; when I was brought low, he saved me. Return, O my soul, to your rest; for the LORD has dealt bountifully with you. For you have delivered my soul from death, my eyes from tears, my feet from stumbling; I will walk before the LORD in the land of the living…
What shall I render to the LORD for all his benefits to me? I will lift up the cup of salvation and call on the name of the LORD, I will pay my vows to the LORD in the presence of all his people. Precious in the sight of the LORD is the death of his saints. (Psalm 116:5-9; 12-15)
I heard from my dad this morning that his oldest sister, my Auntie Margaret, went home to be with the Lord this morning. She had experienced significant medical issues for many years, though as recently as Sunday was doing better. A persistent infection caused her condition to worsen quickly this morning. Sadly, my cousin and his wife, who have cared beautifully for Margaret for many years, were not able to be with her when she died because of a Norovirus outbreak at the facility where she lived.
Margaret lived near Southampton, England, most of her life. She was a part of the “low church” (less liturgical) of the Church of England. As we were separated by the Atlantic Ocean, I did not know her well growing up. My relationship with her really began when she and my Uncle John flew over for our wedding in 1993. Allie and I corresponded over the years via Christmas cards, other letters, a few times by phone, and in person when she and my Auntie Carol visited in 2008.
That visit was special for us in many ways. The ladies worshiped at CTR the Sunday that they were here; at the time we met in the chapel at First Baptist Church on Union Street. They came to one of Jonathan’s soccer games, and read stories to his fourth grade class at Mt. St. Mary Academy. We spent quite a bit of time that visit talking–I found it fascinating to get an “insider’s” perspective on my dad’s childhood and emigration to the states–and I learned about Margaret’s relationship with the Lord. She could see, coming from a country where the evangelical church is also a very small percentage of the population, that there was a great need for gospel-driven churches here. She expressed such incredible encouragement to us and pride in us in the mission to which God had called us. Margaret even contributed financially to the church on occasion afterwards. I will never forget how much that affirmation meant to Allie and me personally during a very vulnerable season in the history of our church.
So Auntie Margaret’s passing leaves me with a lot of mixed emotions: relief that she is free of physical pain, joy for her homecoming with the Lord, and sadness that we won’t be together again this side of heaven. I’d like to share a liturgy I found today that expresses many of the feelings in my heart today. Maybe it’s a comfort for you too.
LITURGY FOR EMBRACING BOTH JOY AND SORROW
From the book Every Moment Holy, Vol. 2: Death, Grief, and Hope © 2020 Douglas McKelvey
Do not be distant, O Lord, lest I find this burden of loss too heavy, and shrink from the necessary experience of my grief.
Do not be distant, O Lord, lest I become so mired in yesterday’s hurts, that I miss entirely the living gifts this day might hold.
Let me neither ignore my pain, pretending all is okay when it isn’t, nor coddle and magnify my pain, so that I dull my capacity to experience all that remains good in this life.
For joy that denies sorrow is neither hard-won, nor true, nor eternal. It is not real joy at all. And sorrow that refuses to make space
for the return of joy and hope, in the end becomes nothing more than a temple for the worship of my own woundedness.
So give me strength, O God, to feel this grief deeply, never to hide my heart from it. And give me also hope enough to remain open to surprising encounters with joy, as one on a woodland path might stumble suddenly into dapplings of golden light.
Amidst the pain that lades these days, give me courage, O Lord; courage to live them fully, to love and to allow myself to be loved, to remember, grieve, and honor what was, to live with thanksgiving in what is, and to invest in the hope of what will be.
Be at work gilding these long heartbreaks with the advent of new joys, good friendships, true fellowships, unexpected delights. Remind me again and again of your goodness, your presence, your promises.
For this is who we are: a people of The Promise—a people shaped in the image of the God whose very being generates all joy in the universe, yet who also weeps and grieves its brokenness.
So we, your children, are also at liberty to lament our losses, even as we simultaneously rejoice in the hope of their coming restoration.
Let me learn now, O Lord, to do this as naturally as the inhale and exhale of a single breath:
To breathe out sorrow, to breathe in joy.
To breathe out lament, to breathe in hope.
To breathe out pain, to breathe in comfort.
To breathe out sorrow, to breathe in joy.
In one hand I grasp the burden of my grief, while with the other I reach for the hope of grief ’s redemption.
And here, between the tension of the two, between what was and what will be, in the very is of now, let my heart be surprised by, shaped by, warmed by, remade by, the same joy that forever wells within and radiates from your heart, O God.
Amen.
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