A Season of Grieving

September 29, 2006

There seem to be times, months, weeks, days when everyone around me is surrounded by grief. Before classes begin, prayer requests come tumbling out for people who have lost grandparents, for people fighting cancer, for people grieving the death of a child, for tragedies of all colors and stripes.

We are in such a season now it seems, down here in our small community. Each day brings more bad news of another cancer diagnosis, another death, another illness we don’t understand. It is so easily overwhelming; so easy to wonder where God can be in the midst of all this grief.

And I want so badly to fix it all, to bind up the grief and the doubts with healing and hope. I go to classes eager to learn how we do this, how ministers fix it all, make it better, bring God into the situation in order to heal the world. But over and over again I hear we cannot fix it; I hear that we are only witnesses, we point to the grief, we name it, and we point beyond it and attempt to name grace. And over and over again I bang my head into my desk and wonder if I have not chosen the most innane, helpless, frustrating career ever invented.

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These seasons of grieving seem to have no bearing on calendar or nocturnal seasons; they come of their own accord and leave again as more joys than concerns surface on the prayer board and we move more lightly through our days in this community.

For now though, until this season of grieving wears itself out, all I find I can do is pray the prayer, ‘keep watch God. Keep watch with those who weep in the night, with those who wait for morning with heavy hearts. Keep watch."

Posted in reflections by Sarah Walker Cleaveland