FEAR AND GRIEF

“No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning.”* It’s a description that we are familiar with from experiences of grief in our own lives. The visceral, physical sensations of grief and fear dominate our thinking and threaten our prayers. Death seems to close in upon us and fill our horizons. It seems outrageous that so much of the world can simply go on, apparently unheeding, unconcerned, and unaffected by the loss we have suffered. At such times, there seems to be nothing we can say that is meaningful.

Any attempted words of comfort stick in our mouths and sound hollow in our own ears even as we say them. It is not a time for rationale or theology, even if our best responses are shaped by our best theology. It is a time for presence, but perhaps silence.

It is one of our most common human experiences, something we all experience at various times in our lives in different ways, but always with shock and outrage and always uniquely painful. Frustrated by Jesus’ delay, then heartbroken by the news of his daughter’s death, Jairus heard Jesus’ voice cut through his grief—“Don’t be afraid.” Jesus knew something important about grief, but also about this particular tragedy. Of course, Jairus had little option but to follow Jesus to the house where mourning for his daughter had already begun.

Jesus demonstrated His power over death, restoring the girl to life and bringing healing to the family and the community in the face of this loss.

Jairus and his wife were described as astonished at the power they had witnessed in their home.

* C. S. Lewis, A Grief Observed (London: Faber and Faber, 1962), 5.