I don’t often use this place to write personal posts, but this one is some (at times disconnected) ramblings that are personal. I think so many of us grieve and lose throughout the course of our lifetimes, that it feels fitting to write about grief.

The week of Christmas 2023, my cat was diagnosed with chronic kidney disease. By April 2024, he was end-stage and given days to weeks to live. The kindness of God, the prayers of his people, and a Facebook group devoted to this disease are the reasons Joseph is still here today.

But he began to decline in February of this year, and he isn’t coming back. I think there was one Lazarus miracle for him, and that was all. As Lazarus would again die, now it comes time that soon Jo is going to die.

These years, not much guts me anymore. Mostly I can be a stoic Norweigian, but Jo’s pending death is doing a number on my heart and mind. And I know that everyone else that has lost a person or a pet that is dear to them knows what I’m talking about.

Thankfully, I have a therapist that is walking through this with me, and is not afraid of my crying.

The other week she told me that “grief is love” and when I am in the throes of grief to remind myself that I’m just loving Jo.

Intellectually, it helps to believe that Jesus is the resurrection and the life. But at the heart level, that feels ethereal and untouchable. Perhaps, Jesus came to destroy death, but it feels like an eternity until death will actually be over with and won’t hurt us anymore.

It is easy to believe these things, but where is a weeping Jesus on an ordinary Thursday?

I can and often am a very heady person, but when the rubber meets the road, I am nearly all emotions, feelings, and irrationality in the face of hurt.

This afternoon, I am thankful for Charles Spurgeon who felt life deeply, struggled immensely, and said these words, “A Jesus who never wept could never wipe away my tears.”

And Kate Bowler who said in her newest book, Joyful Anyway, that one of the fantastic ideas she has already tried to solve the ache was Jesus. “The greatest source of love I know. Savior of the world, great bringer of truth, truly God, and present before the foundations of the earth were laid. Reeeeaaaallly not a solution to the problem of pain, sorry.” Af first read, it sounds almost heretical and contradictory to what she said before the last sentence. But as I’ve sat with it today and had waves and billows of grief assault me this afternoon, I think she might be right.

Jesus is not a bandaid. He doesn’t solve for x in the equation of pain. Cognitively, I can believe that he is the solution to the problem of pain, but in my heart, I don’t believe that, because it is not what I feel.

A Jesus that weeps is not a Jesus that can be reduced to a solution to that troubling, annoying problem of pain, grief, and loss.

Jesus died to bring us to God – and that is earthshatteringly massive compared to being a medicine to pain in this present life. And I have to think he’d be okay with that. I won’t reduce him to remedies or solutions. Nor will I try to tell my heart that what it feels is false.

Jesus is the ULTIMATE end to pain. Full stop. He will wipe away all of our tears in the new heavens and earth. But that is not the same as being a solution to pain in the here and now.

I trust in Jesus to the depths of my being and I am leaning heavy on eternity. But he is not a solution to my pain today.

“This is the end of the world. But it isn’t. It’s only the end of mine.” – Kate Bowler in No Cure for Being Human

And yet, “while I breathe, I hope.”

And hope in a Jesus who weeps.

And this:

Fear is not my future
You are
Sickness is not my story
You are
Heartbreak’s not my home
You are
Death is not the end
You are

(Kirk Franklin & Maverick City Music)