A few nights ago I hardly slept. Lightning flashed every few seconds. Rain pelted the dusty ground and then filled all the dry places and then overflowed out of the flowerbeds and sloshed against the curbs in the low spots of our small town. Thunder rattled the seventy-five year old bones of our cozy house, and despite the fact that I was lying comfortably next to a husband who was holding vigil, watching over us, I couldn’t rest.
Only a few hours earlier, I had joined a large crowd at a church just a few blocks from our home. We gathered there to be witnesses to grief as a heartbroken mother and father followed their son’s casket out of the church to the graveyard. He was only twenty-two years old, and the sadness poured out of our swollen eyes, like a steady rain in the middle of the night. I wonder if our shared tears will help fill in the dry spaces for his parents in a few weeks or a year from now. I don’t know what it’s like to lose a child, but I do know the importance of standing as a witness to pain, and I think we all felt the significance of the moment in front of us.
When people are hurting so deeply, it’s so hard to know how to help. I don’t know if there is much that we can do apart from committing to praying for them, because nothing we can say is going to make it better in the moment. But there is a certain ministry to grieving people when we just show up and stand in solidarity with them, extending our hearts to theirs in times of extreme sorrow. It’s an honor to bear witness to another human being’s suffering, to acknowledge it, to accept it, to help carry the burden in our own hearts. This is one way that we love one another.
As the thunder rumbled through that night, the storm itself felt like a bitter lament. I thought of that dear anguished mother just a few streets over and wondered if she was lying awake, feeling like God in His power was grieving with her. I can’t pretend to know what she thinks or how she feels or how many phases of thinking and feeling she will endure through the coming days and months and years. But one thing I know is that we won’t forget that we are her witnesses. We will hold her in our hearts, and we will beg God to bring comfort and peace in the ways that only He can.
Life in this world can be so bitter. When things happen that seem impossible to survive, when death and grief and the horrors of this broken place threaten to overtake us, one thing we can do is join hands. Link arms. We can weep together and look another’s agony straight in the eyes and ask God to show us through the power of the Holy Spirit how to hold each other up. We don’t have to do this perfectly. We don’t have to know what to do. We just have to be willing to witness the grief and trust God with the ways that He is working in it.
The rain finally stopped. The next morning, the flowers in front of our house had perked up. The storm passed by eventually, but I know more are on the horizon. That’s how life is. The sunshine comes and goes, and joy and bitterness rise and set, too. Someday graveyards and sorrow and the things that make us feel like we will die of heartache will no longer exist, but I feel sure we will remember them. We’ll remember when we were witnesses to grief. We’ll remember when we needed witnesses ourselves. Because how else will we know the overwhelming relief of the end of death and pain? In the meantime, God is near, and He will help us hold each other up. We are the witnesses. And we need each other.
Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ. Galatians 6:2
