Surrendering Sorrow

 As you may have gathered in the last 2 chapters, we are slowly working our way through the first portion of Matthew 5. So now we pick up that endeavor on verse 4: "Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted." Jesus Christ had given the strong admonition about being poor in spirit, and then this was the next thing He said in His message. This statement can be taken at face value, that is, if you are grieving, you are blessed, for you will be comforted. So for this chapter, I will use mourning and grieving interchangeably as the mood strikes. "Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted." Let's let that statement sit in our mind for a bit while we pull together some loose ends to explain the theme of surrender in this. 

 He was known as quiet Cal as a grown man, for he rarely ever spoke. His father was quiet too. His father treated words like a box of fine chocolates, and Cal noticed how his father's quiet manner was actually a strength in town meetings, he rarely got himself in a verbal corner, and when he spoke, people listened. Cal became even quieter than his father. At age 12, tragedy struck Cal's life, his mother died of tuberculosis, there was sadness, but no crying, the time came for Cal and his father to see his mother one last time. In that sad moment, his father simply said, "Don't cry." Cal didn't cry. Later, his sister died, and again no crying. He grew into a man who was known as irritable, melancholy, and difficult to be around. The young man graduated college and entered politics. He also got married and had 2 sons. He gradually rose in power and eventually became the 30th president of the United States. Calvin Coolidge was a fiscal conservative who balanced the budget, and led the nation into a prosperous time. There were faults of course, he didn't do anything to prevent the great depression, and he wasn't a very effective leader during the natural disasters that occurred during his tenure, but he was a bit of a conservative hero in the republican party, business was good, and the government actually had fiscal responsibility! Disaster struck the Coolidge family again. One of his sons got blood poisoning and died. Calvin sat by his son's bed, quiet, clutching a locket in his hand. In that locket was a picture of his mother who had died all those years ago, and a lock of her hair. His boy was dying, he pressed the locket into his son's hand, as the boy slipped into eternity, the locket fell from his hand. The president and first lady were plunged into deep depression, and yet he never truly grieved. It was during this presidency that he became known for taking long naps, at times only leaving himself 4 hour work days. He was unable to find joy in things, he blamed himself for every little thing that went wrong. There was no spark in his life, his wife struggled through all this and had an affair. Then he shocked the country and the republican party by announcing that he no longer wished to be president and would not seek reelection, and so he quietly slipped into private life, to be mostly forgotten. 

 In the very nature of sorrow, there is a "gethsemane" to go to. A place to grieve, to weep, to reflect, and to lay it all down. When you get to gethsemane, you have a choice. You can trade your sorrow by mourning and receive the Lord's comfort, or you can keep it by simply feeling sorrow for yourself, raging against the injustice, and vowing what you will do about it, and in this way, you get to keep your sorrow and never truly grieve, or mourn. Perhaps something so egregious has happened that this "gethsemane" needs to be visited again and again, ok, but in each visit, there is a choice, to surrender the sorrow for comfort by mourning or to keep it and let it rot. Then you also have the choice that Calvin Coolidge made, to never go to "gethsemane" and to let the sorrows pile up and eat his life away, from the inside out.

 On the other extreme, there is the case in history of the "other Adolf." He was a small thin man, looked down on, and regarded as a bit worthless. He wanted to be somebody though, so when he read of a new political movement seeking "justice" for Germany, and he saw a racist narrative that he was allowed to participate in, he jumped. This was his chance, his chance to be someone, to show the world that he was an important man not to be messed with. Sure, he had to kill a few people, but so what, this sorrow, pain, and disappointment that he had been nurturing all these years now had fully ripened and was properly rotten. So he did become known, as Adolf Eichmann, one of the key people involved in the holocaust, he used his gifts in organization to devastating effect in rounding up Jews into ghettos and then sending them off to concentration camps. By his own estimation, the program had 5-6 million victims. So, whatever sorrow he had, he didn't accept comfort for it. He allowed it to rot, and became a monster. 

 These are 2 very stark and dark extremes of what happens when comfort is declined. On the one hand, we had Calvin Coolidge, a generally decent man who never allowed himself to mourn, so he ignored the sorrow, and let it rot. On the other, we have Adolf Eichmann, a man who believe it or not was raised in a protestant Christian home, and yet, whatever sorrow he experienced, he held the sorrow, and let it rot. 

 So, here is the surrender element in this verse, "Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted". When sorrow comes, when something very bitter and hard to bear is experienced. Go to the "gethsemane" of your heart and weep, call out to the Lord, let it out, and then the Lord will comfort you. Let Him take your sorrow and give you comfort instead. In other words, you have a choice, you can refuse to acknowledge the sorrow and never mourn, or you can keep and tend to the sorrow in your own way, or you can accept the comfort for the sorrow by mourning to the Lord. Be honest with yourself, and with the Lord about what happened, about how you feel, and then lay it down, take the comfort and walk away. If sorrow comes to you again, even if it comes from the same pain as before, mourn to the Lord again. Mourning is essentially the way to surrender the sorrow to the Lord. 

 So what is rotten grief? Well, sorrow is kind of like a bitter fruit, it may not be tasty on it's own, but, if you give it to the Lord, He takes it from you, and gives you comfort, then, He uses that fruit to develop you into a purer image of Him. Rotten grief is like the bitter fruit after it has been sitting so long that it turned brown, mushy and generally disgusting, bitterness, depression etc. are the forms of rotten sorrow. Many times, we think our sorrow won't rot, and in so doing we become the very thing we detest so much in other people, bitter, vengeful, sullen, depressed etc. When you meet someone with "rotten sorrow fruit", pray for them, and care for them, allow the Lord to place you on standby to help them mourn when the time is right. 

 Gethsemane, is that place where you feel in your soul all the pain, you live through the pain again there, and most times the tears come. We have all been there, when emotional pain took us to such a level that we wept. What I am advocating for is, embrace that, go there with the Lord, but don't live there. Go there and let the Lord comfort you. The Lord wants to comfort you. Yet the Lord wants you to also live an abundant life, and not to build a little hut with a pool of tears in Gethsemane. Of course, Jesus, went to Gethsemane, and there He called to His father, He expressed the pain of what would happen, for He knew the future, and then when the time was come, He got up, and walked straight into His destiny, there was torture in His destiny, but there was also resurrection. So my question for us made in the image of God is 2fold. 1, Are you willing to go to your gethsemane? 2, Are you willing to leave your gethsemane? 

 Comfort, is the Lord's gift to those who are honest enough to grieve. He gives grace, and fills the void, He redeems loss, at times physically. True comfort resolves and restores in an indescribable way for it comes from an indescribable Lord. 

 This has been the 5th chapter of an eBook about surrender, the main page and other chapters can be found by clicking here.