How Do You Mourn Well?

A few of us have been making our way through the Beatitudes. To go through any study at all, I am grateful I have some prayer support. What I enjoy about the prayer support is the one I get from one of my favourite people on the planet at the moment. I love this brother so much and he has a superb way of just bringing godly calm and peace to any situation.

So, I explained the plan to him, and he duly prayed for God to be glorified in the study that followed. In our conversation I shared my desire that the study would help those going through it to see the role that mourning should play in the life of the believer. As it transpired, the next day my good friend suffered a loss in his family. It brought matters home to me about the issue of mourning.

It was significant as well considering the exploration the few of us made in the issue of mourning. I love it when people question the Bible – not in an accusatory fashion, in a genuine wondering why fashion. We looked at the people of Israel’s response to the death of Moses and how the record stated that the people mourned his passing for 30 days. Someone wondered, “Why did they spend that much tie mourning over him? Surely not all of the people mourned for that long. I mean I can imagine a lot did for a while, but all the people, for that length of time? Why?”

Exploring issues like that got us to appreciate why mourning individually and corporately is important. It was also cool to address how Christians mourn too, because there was reference made to what Paul of Tarsus suggested that believers should mourn differently to others. That didn’t mean that there shouldn’t be mourning, though, because when Stephen died there was mourning by godly men for a godly man.

All those issues came together in a big challenge to me again about what it is to mourn well. It feels as if in this day and age nothing is really given to help with mourning should look like. I am not by any means suggesting there is a one suit fits all approach to to mourning, but there is something that surely we can learn from history and from others as to what it is to really mourn.