Meditations on Matthew 5:4 – “Comforted”

Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.

Chloe and Maddy have both been waking up with nightmares recently. It’s interesting to hear what they find terrifying. “Chloe wasn’t sharing with me!” “What happened to the worms?” “I forgot to tell Daddy goodnight!”

During the nightmare of the last year or so, I discovered something I was terrified of – the seeming absence of God. I believed He was close, but I couldn’t help feeling like He’d abandoned me. I found that the nightmare wasn’t as much the miscarriages as the feeling of being stranded.

He felt very near during and after the first loss. I remember saying “if this is what suffering as a Christian is like, I’m no longer afraid of suffering.” It really felt like He was wrapping me in a warm blanket and sitting next to me as I cried. I could sense it.

After the second one it was like the lights went out and I was alone. 

Matthew 5:4 felt like a mockery, a slap in the face. I was mourning like never before, and instead of feeling comforted, I felt stranded. I was (am) wholly dissatisfied with the notion that the verse is only talking about mourning sin. It doesn’t say that… doesn’t even imply that. It felt like a cheap cop out to explain away my sensation of abandonment in the face of tragedy. The Lord wasn’t rushing out to reassure me as I pounded on the gates of Heaven, so in a fit of exasperation I drove a stake in the ground and resolved to wait there for an answer, no matter how long it took.

After the second miscarriage one of my earliest sensations was one of a deepening, like a grinding tunneling in my core. Months later the concept started to form that the tunnel was a dry well dug by grief. I felt like I’d been tossed down this well and was blinded and alone, broken and bleeding. 

In the pitch dark everything is black at first, but when your eyes start adjusting to darkness you can see it’s not just black. Deep purple slowly comes into focus, then the darkest shades of green and blue. Incidentally sounds a lot like a bruise. These shades of deep pain have run through the veining of the world since nearly the beginning of time, but your eyes can’t see what your mind can’t comprehend.

“even if I make my bed in Sheol, you are still with me.”

Maybe the wells of our souls have to be dug down deep before our eyes can see beauty in its true depth. Not that that’s the reason we suffer- just so that we can see beauty. But it’s still a gift. A remaking. New eyes; new heart. 

Maybe that’s what “comforted” can mean.

Maybe God didn’t tell me that me right away because it can only be expressed in metaphors and words. Words. To the freshly broken heart, words are broken vessels: sharp and empty. Had I read a year ago what I wrote just now I may have vomited or thrown the book across the room. My heart needed time and careful tending before anything could be planted again.

Late this Summer I was considering how the plants in my garden don’t know when I’m tending them, or even that they are being tended. But they do eventually feel the effects of it. And I realized that was a whisper from God – that I just needed be a branch in His vineyard. That as the vine dresser, He understands the seasons and does not expect fruit in winter. He is not in a hurry for a branch to recover after it is pruned. He cares for the branch even when it seems dead. My job wasn’t to get better, to produce, to move on or to understand – it was to be still and trust that He was taking care of me.

Maybe that’s what “comforted” can look like.

I have seen a change in myself. Like a tulip opening – imperceptible yet undeniable. After months of crying out to God, desperately asking Him to make me feel Him… I find I don’t care about that anymore. Not flippantly, or as though His presence doesn’t matter. Rather, as if, perhaps, it was a non-question to begin with.

When I’d never learned to see in the dark, how could I see Him when He’s covered in the deepest shades of purple and green and blue? How can I sense the presence of the Man of Sorrows, who is well acquainted with grief when He is as the air all around me? How can one who has only known air as wind recognize he is surrounded by the same substance when the air is still? Though equally surrounded by air in wind and in calm, how alarming the calm must be! “How will I breathe? How will the world not collapse around me?”

Maybe “comforted” often looks like when the man above finds he is, in fact, breathing. That he is safe, that he has been all along. 

When I comfort my girls as they awaken from nightmares, the comforting is not simply “it’s over now,” but also, and more importantly, “it was never real in the first place.” The terror was real, but the cause was a phantom.

There is so much more mystery and depth and beauty to God when your eyes have adjusted, and you can now see Him clearly in the shadows with the kindest expression on His face. As if (in part) to say,

“I am here. I have always been here with you. The nightmare where you felt abandoned is over. You are my beloved child, and I will never leave you. Be comforted.”

And I am comforted.

Better to mourn and be comforted by God than to never have any reason to mourn.

It often seems to me that night is still more richly colored than the day; having hues of the most intense violets, blues and greens. If only you pay attention to it you will see that certain stars are lemon-yellow, others pink or a green, blue and forget-me-not brilliance. And without my expatiating on this theme it is obvious that putting little white dots on the blue-black is not enough to paint a starry sky. -Vincent Van Gogh