When Life Leaves You Breathless

Death still stings.

Things are not OK right now.

And we need to mourn. It is right to mourn.

The death that sweeps away life’s breath is evidence of the not-yet. Death is not yet swallowed up in triumphant life.

… because Jesus is not yet here. 

That glorious declaration, “DEATH IS SWALLOWED UP IN VICTORY. O DEATH, WHERE IS YOUR VICTORY? O DEATH, WHERE IS YOUR STING?” does not come until… 

Until Jesus breaks open the sky.

Until His feet are back on this earth.

So as we mourn death, there is a sacred mourning for our hearts to touch–a place of mourning the absence of the One who has promised to obliterate it.

Death’s grief ushers us into deeper longing, into greater knowing and remembering, into holy groaning—we need Jesus here. 

And until He is, we mourn. We mourn death. We mourn pain and sickness.

Ultimately, we mourn His absence. 

When we try to avoid or bury death’s sting to put on our brave or happy faces, we miss the opportunity to fall over into His heart, and to peer into what He’s feeling.

We miss the sacredness of what Mary of Bethany got to touch when her brother died. We miss weeping with God, and letting our tears flow down with His.

And we miss our heart’s healing—because only those who allow themselves to break, who let their shattered pieces fall before the feet of Jesus, who let Him catch their unhindered tears, who let their brokenness bring them into the arms of the Comforter … can be truly restored.

We may try to hurry out of grief, or go over it, around it, or under it. But unless we go through it, those wounds won’t meet their healer. Instead, they’ll meet us again and again, down the road, when those “Band-Aids” we’ve put on fail to hold their stick and fall off to expose the old wound that still bleeds.

So we don’t shut our hearts down. No, we run vulnerably into His—because that’s where our hope and healing is found.

Have you lost someone you love?

Give yourself permission to feel … and to take your time. In a busy world, with busy people, and a busy schedule—remind your heart that it’s OK to go slow. Take some breaths in His presence as you drive to work today. Listen for His voice. Whisper your prayers while you prepare dinner or fold laundry. Sneak away with Him to a quiet place and open up the Word that has the power to give life to a fainting heart. Do today with Him, and trust Him for tomorrow. Just one day at a time.

Give yourself permission to fall apart … and to weep. Cry it out with Jesus. Crumble on the living floor. And let Him hold you, right there, and keep your tears. Get vulnerable with God. Get vulnerable with trusted friends, invite them into your ache, and ask for their continuing prayers.

Really, it feels scary to go there. Because for most of us, the path of grief is uncharted territory. Because we haven’t walked it before … until we have to.

But when grief hits, let yourself go to the unraveling, crumbling, melting, breaking place before God.

Go there.

Don’t go there to sulk and drown in your despair.

Don’t go there to stay. Go there to take hold of the One who will lead you out.

Go there with God. Take this road into His heart.

Go there to lean. To talk to Him. To commune with Him in a very deep place.

Go there to weep with the God who never desired that His image-bearers would die. Go there to feel even just a piece of His holy, grieving heart crying out, “Adam, O Adam, where are you?”—when He knew that He’d lost His precious son, when He knew they’d be separated, when He felt the first-ever pangs of death sweep through His earth. Feel, with Him, the grief and the hatred that He Himself has over death.

Go there to feel His tears mingle with yours.

Go there to find your healing.

Go there to let your heart touch the reality that things are not OK until … and so more fully enter into the cry, “Come, Lord, Jesus.”

Go there. And don’t rush out. Find Him, right there—in the middle of your darkest night and greatest ache. Because He’s there.

And surely, you’re going to walk through and come out of this wilderness, leaning on your Beloved.

Kinsey Thurlow is a minister at the International House of Prayer in Kansas City. She is an advocate for the fatherless and her husband, Jon is a worship leader and minister at IHOP-KC.