grief

How on earth do you ever respond when someone cries out - I want him back again!

The person was sobbing, pouring out such pain and grief from deep within her heart, it seemed like the river of tears would soon become a torrent which would sweep her quite away.

Grief. Terrible, horrible, desperate, dreadful grief.

And those five words expressed the core of it all.

I want him back again!

It felt for a fleeting moment of time that I was being given a window onto the very heart of God. I felt for one brief and remarkable instant that I was being shown the pain in the heart of God. I felt in that second of insight that at last I really understood the driving force of love that lay behind the gospel which I preach.

God himself - the high, eternal, great Creator God - God himself declaring through the anguished cries of this one broken person in distress the utter desolation in his holy heart at our defiant turning of our backs and going away.

Sin, in the style of the prodigal son. And how it breaks his father's holy heart.

I want him back again!

It moved me deeply hearing this one sentence from the lips of this distraught and hurting person. I heard the heart of God, as I've never really heard that heart before, I think.

I heard his pain. I heard his cry. I heard his hurt. I heard his grief. I heard his deep and potent longing.

I heard, I think, the cry from deep within eternity which launched the costly coming of that man who would procure for wayward sinners like myself a way back to the heart and home of God.

I want him back again!

The terrible cry of an anguished heart at the centre of all creation.

But, of course, the cry that I heard was from the lips and the heart of a person across the room.

It's the cry that has risen from so many hearts in the face of bereavement, and in the context of all sorts of fractured relationships.

A man goes off with a woman not his wife. She wants him back. Or, at least, she wants to have back (if that could ever be possible now) - she wants to have back the man whom once she had. The man who thought the world of her. The man whose life revolved around herself.

A husband or a father or a brother dies. His wife, his child, his siblings want him back. Of course they do.

And what do I say in response? What can you say in response?

All I know is that God himself best understands the grief these folk are feeling.