"A Man of Sorrows, Acquainted with Grief"
Sometime last year I was sitting in Bible study kind of zoning out, and I hear my pastor say. “He was a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief”
I was experiencing grief so that whole phrase really stuck to me. I’ve heard it countless times in my life. Why was it so raw to me now? I’ve experienced so much pain in my life why did this hold more weight now?
Possibly because I wasn’t just holding my own grief but I’d started to acquire the grief of others. I’d started to take on a new understanding of weeping with those who weep and mourning with those who mourn. And over the past year that grief has grown exponentially. Not just my own but yours as well. I now carry the loss of three siblings. My dad got cancer a second time. The unknown of his diagnosis ate at me last year. We knew he was sick but they couldn’t say for sure what it was. My friend Beth had breast cancer, beat it and then it came back with vengeance, beat it again and now she’s sick again.
My friend Cody had a brain tumor, beat it and now it’s back and growing.
My friend Owen beat cancer twice and made a career out of helping others beat their cancer and now his body is succumbing to the effects of treatment and he’s feeling like he has no purpose.
So much grief. . So much loss. So much pain. . But God. . .
One of my favorite verses in the Bible is found in Hebrews and it says
For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sin. Hebrew 4:15
Jesus knew he was going to raise his friend Lazarus from the dead yet he wept! He grieved that death had taken his friend. He felt the pain of loss because he is fully God and fully man. He did not achieve godhood. It was not something he attained. He was and has always been God from before the foundations of the earth. Before time was created.
There is comfort in knowing that the God who created everything catches our tears in a jar (psalm 56:8)
I have spent the last two months debating with myself trying to decide what painting to submit to the state fair this year and this is what I kept coming back to every time. So that you can too can be comforted as I have been by the man who is acquainted with grief.
If you’re hurting or broken, grieving loss, sin, a hard marriage, infertility, sickness, a wayward child, something that didn’t turn out how you hoped. . .
Then this painting is for you.
I see you, I love you and I grieve with you.
“He was despised and rejected— a man of sorrows, acquainted with deepest grief. We turned our backs on him and looked the other way. He was despised, and we did not care. Yet it was our weaknesses he carried; it was our sorrows that weighed him down. And we thought his troubles were a punishment from God, a punishment for his own sins! But he was pierced for our rebellion, crushed for our sins. He was beaten so we could be whole. He was whipped so we could be healed. All of us, like sheep, have strayed away. We have left God’s paths to follow our own. Yet the Lord laid on him the sins of us all.”
Isaiah 53:3-6