Joy Comes in the Morning

Have you ever complained to God about His promises being unfulfilled? How many times?

You know:
I thought the Bible said You have good plans for me! (Jeremiah 29:11)

You said if I delight in You, You would give me the desires of my heart! (Psalm 37:4)

Hey, I don’t see all things working for my good here! (Romans 8:28)

How about this one?

Weeping may endure for a night, but joy comes in the morning. (Psalm 30:5). Have you wept and wept and still felt no joy? I have.

It all comes down to this: He wants to heal our grief, but He won’t if we keep holding onto it. If we feel like we are getting some sort of payback from our pain, He’ll let us keep it.

What kind of payback? Maybe your friends make extra leeway (read: excuses) for your behavior. Maybe your spouse does more work around the house to take pressure off you. Maybe you indulge in cheap romance novels as an escape. There are tons of benefits when you can elicit sympathy. But that expectation and activity keeps you from healing because it keeps you from surrendering that pattern that feels positive, yet is so destructive.

But what if there isn’t any payback? What if you are still grieving and have tried lots of times to surrender your grief to Jesus?

Why are you still weeping after all this? Maybe you are on earth’s timetable instead of heaven’s. It’s hard to wait, especially when you are in pain. I know. It took many, many years before my healing was made evident. Hard years. Years of weeping and struggling and feeling like an outcast. Years of going through the dark night of the soul.

When did the healing come and the weeping stop? In the morning. Oh, not the morning twelve hours from now. Not the morning when the sun peeks over the eastern horizon.

But the morning when the light of God comes into your life. The dawn He has designated as the day of deliverance. His days are infinite, just as He is. He sees the beginning from the end (Isaiah 46:10), and everything in between.

Keep looking for the dawn. Just as the sunrise starts with a bit of pink over a sea of darkness, our dawn starts small and expands. Just as we can enjoy watching the light spread over the landscape, we can take joy in the tiny changes we experience until the morning takes root in our souls.

And weeping leaves to make room for joy.

This is part 8 of a series on grief

Part 1|Are You Living With Grief?

Part 2|Time Heals Grief?

Part 3| I Deserve My Grief!

Part 4| How Can You Miss What You Never Had?

Part 5| Grief and Anger

Part 6| Grief and Lies

Part 7| Grief and Death

 all illustrations courtesy of freedigitalphotos.net