Daily Devotional: Suffering & Lament: The God Who Sits with Us

THROUGH THE VALLEY

“When Jesus therefore saw her weeping, and the Jews also weeping which came with her, he groaned in the spirit, and was troubled, and said, Where have ye laid him? They said unto him, Lord, come and see. Jesus wept.”
John 11:33-35

REFLECTION

I taught this lesson in my Bible Study Class yesterday, and I feel compelled to share it with all my followers because it matters a great deal.

Two of the most powerful words in all of Scripture are also two of the shortest. Jesus wept. Not Jesus explained. Not Jesus immediately fixed the situation. Not Jesus reminded everyone that resurrection was coming and that they should not be so upset. Jesus wept. He stood at the graveside of someone He loved, surrounded by people who were broken with grief, and He cried.

He already knew He was going to raise Lazarus. He had told Martha that moments before. And He wept anyway. Which means His tears were not born of hopelessness. They were born of love. Of genuine, felt, present compassion for the people standing around Him in their pain. He did not rush past the grief to get to the miracle. He entered the grief first.

• He groaned in His spirit.
• He was troubled.
• He asked where they had laid him, not because He did not know, but because He wanted to go there.
• And then He wept.

This is the God we bring our suffering to. Not a distant deity who processes our pain from a safe remove and dispenses solutions from above. A God who comes to where we are. Who asks to be taken to the place of our grief. Who groans with us before He acts for us. The miracle at Lazarus’s tomb was extraordinary. But the moment right before it, the moment when Jesus simply stood in the pain with the people He loved, that is the moment that tells us the most about who He is.

When you are in the middle of something genuinely hard, you do not always need an explanation. You do not always need a solution. Sometimes what you need most is to know that you are not alone in it. That someone who understands is present. That the pain has been seen and the grief has been witnessed by Someone who is not in a hurry to move past it.

Jesus is that Someone. He has not moved on from your grief while you are still in it. He is right there, in the place where you have laid what you have lost, and He is present with you in a way that goes far deeper than any word of comfort anyone else could offer. You are not grieving alone. You never have been.

When you are in the middle of suffering, what do you most need from God, and how does the image of Jesus weeping at the tomb change what you feel permission to bring to Him in your hardest moments?

PRAYER

Lord Jesus, thank You for weeping. Thank You for not rushing past the grief to get to the solution. Thank You for groaning and being troubled and asking to be taken to the place of pain before You did anything else. We need that today. We need to know that You are present in the grief before You act on it. Sit with us in what we are carrying. See what we have lost. Witness what hurts. And let the knowledge of Your presence be the comfort we need most right now. We are not alone. We have never been alone. Amen.

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