Grief & God's Presence

"The Lord replied, 'My Presence will go with you, and I will give you rest.' Then Moses said to him, 'If your Presence does not go with us, do not send us up from here. How will anyone know that you are pleased with me and with your people unless you go with us? What else will distinguish me and your people from all the other people on the face of the earth?' And the Lord said to Moses, "I will do the very thing you have asked, because I am pleased with you and I know you by name." (Exodus 33:14, 15, 17) There is a saying I've mentioned before.  It goes like this:  All life includes change. All change includes loss. Every loss needs to be grieved. COVID is quickly disappearing from our memory.  Strange that it should—such a major, life-changing moment as it was.  A similar thing happened after the Flu pandemic of the early 1900's though.  People just moved on and quit talking about it as quickly as they could.  And yet, a conversation I had yesterday reminded me of the fact that over these past years of COVID, so many of us experienced a huge acceleration of change and loss in our lives.  It struck me then that a real burden of grief continues to linger in the background for many of us, whether we always realize it or not.  It comes out as anger, as loneliness, as busyness, as anxiety—all sorts of different ways—but it's there. We might forget, but many of the most significant stories of our scriptures live in that same place with us.  It is Good Friday with Jesus on the cross… with the disciples mourning through a long Saturday… with Job on the ash heap… with David in the valley of the shadow of death… with the Israelites in the wilderness. It's well-trodden territory. Two things permeate each of those bleak valleys of grief, doubt, and loss: our questions and the God we ask them to.  Like Jesus' "why?" of forsakenness in the garden or Moses' "how?" in the desert.  God heard each question, as He does all our doubts and laments.  For Moses and the Israelites, he even answered directly: "I know you by name. My presence will go with you, and I will give you rest." That was far from an immediate solution. It would still be 38 years more in the desert before the Israelites arrived in the promised land. That's a long time of doubt, wandering, and grieving—longer by far than COVID lasted. But the Israelites survived and even flourished under the some of the harshest conditions of change, loss, and scarcity on earth in that time—not because they had any control, or because they grinned and bore it, or avoided it altogether—but simply because God's presence was with them, and His promise of rest stood before them.  It turns out: that was enough. In Hebrew, the word for God's "presence" is the same as the word for God's "face." The blessing of "the Lord make His face to shine upon you" is all about God's presence.  That blessing isn't about things changing back to the way they were before or new things coming to fill up what's been lost—it is about God's presence with us through whatever changes we experience. The strange conviction of our faith is that a God who is Immanuel—with us—in the valleys of our pain and grief is enough. So, take heart: God is with you.  What griefs from the changes and losses of these past years do you still carry that you might share with him today?