Two weeks after my last blog, God lifted my mom from the confinement of a deteriorated painful body and took her home to paradise. So, I’m walking through the grieving process and redefining myself without her and all that went with caring and advocating for her. My grief is an odd mixture of relief and joy and a painful vacancy. I know many of you have walked through the same emotions.
Loss takes many forms – the death of someone very close to us, the death of a relationship, betrayals, the loss of ourselves to circumstances and mistakes, the loss of health, financial loss, years lost to unhealed brokenness, loss of spiritual vitality to the devouring demands of life, or the loss of innocence.
I’ve walked through grief a number of times over the course of my life, but there was a season that was especially devastating and life-altering. In the darkness of that valley, Jesus sat with me and grieved with me as a Wounded Healer. It was His tender compassion that knitted the shattered pieces of my life into a new thing. A vision of the compassion of the Living God is absolutely transforming.
In all their suffering he also suffered, and he personally rescued them. In his love and mercy he redeemed them. He lifted them up and carried them through all the years. Isaiah 63:9 NLT
The Lord is like a father to his children, tender and compassionate to those who fear him. For he knows how weak we are; he remembers we are only dust.                   Psalm 103:13-14 NLT
You keep track of all my sorrows. You have collected all my tears in your bottle. You have recorded each one in your book.                                                                      Psalm 56:8 NLT
So compassionate is God toward us that He is deeply moved by our sorrows and feels them with us. He pens them in His book with scarlet ink issuing from His great heart. His tender compassions toward us never fail, never grow thin or exhausted. They are fresh and new at the first light of each day.
So attentive is He to us that He sits with us in our grief and so close that He collects every tear in His bottle of remembrance. Our tears are precious to Him – not one falls to the ground to be forgotten. They are bottled with the tears of Jesus and sealed among His treasures.
Sometimes our tears spill from shame and repentance. These tears open heaven and literally transform us into the image of Christ.
One of the Pharisees asked Jesus to have dinner with him, so Jesus went to his home and sat down to eat. When a certain immoral woman from that city heard he was eating there, she brought a beautiful alabaster jar filled with expensive perfume. Then she knelt behind him at his feet, weeping. Her tears fell on his feet, and she wiped them off with her hair. Then she kept kissing his feet and putting perfume on them.                Luke 7:36-38 NLT
The immoral woman was on the floor behind Jesus in her guilt and shame, unable to meet His eyes. She held His feet and wept, then wiped them with her long hair, dripped perfume on them and more and more tears. It wasn’t the expensive perfume, but tears spilling onto His feet that filled His senses and stirred His heart.
I imagine she left with new tears brimming in her eyes – tears of worship and deep joy. Among all the fragrances of worship, it’s the sacrifice of praise from a heart ravished by His compassion that rises as the sweetest.