How to Bear Sorrow

Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me. PSALM 23:4

Meyer was a pastor for more than half a century, and he sat by a great many deathbeds and in a great many darkened front rooms. His address How to Bear Sorrow, in The Secret of Guidance, opens not with a doctrine but with a description, and it is so exact that it can only have come from long listening. You are always listening for footsteps that do not come, he writes, waiting for a word that is not spoken. The savings of a life have gone. Health or sight is failing. Or there is the gap left by death, like a clearing in the forest where the woodman has been at work. Will every day be as long as this? Has God forgotten to be gracious?

He does not rush to answer. And when he does, he gives not one answer but several, like a doctor who knows that one medicine will not do for every patient.

Others have walked this road

The first thing he says is that the road has been trodden by myriads. War, oppression, the slave trade, the unnumbered sorrows of women and children — by far the larger part of the human race, he says, has passed through griefs like ours. Jesus Christ Himself walked the path and left His blood on its stones, and the multitude before the throne came out of great tribulation. It is not much, perhaps, to know we are not alone. But it is something.

Do not talk about punishment

The second is a firm pastoral correction. “Do not talk about punishment.” Meyer allows that we may speak of chastening, for our Father deals with us as sons; or of reaping what we once sowed; or of bearing the consequences of other people’s sins. But punishment for our sins was laid on Christ.

But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed. ISAIAH 53:5

If God were still punishing us for our sins, Meyer argues, it would mean Christ’s sufferings were incomplete; and if He once began, a lifetime would not be long enough. This single paragraph has probably done more good in sick-rooms than anything else he wrote. Grieving believers very often assume that their loss is God’s sentence on them. Meyer takes that weight off.

The refiner’s fire

Sorrow is not punishment, but neither is it meaningless. “Sorrow is a refiner’s crucible,” he writes. Whatever its source, once God has permitted it to reach us it becomes His appointment, and He uses it to search and purify. We think we are wholly God’s until the fire shows us, as it showed Job, how much dross there is and how little patience.

And he shall sit as a refiner and purifier of silver. MALACHI 3:3

And God keeps the fire in His own hands. The Father is the husbandman, and His hand holds the pruning-knife; His eye watches the crucible; He will not let even the devil have his own way with us. In The Way Into the Holiest Meyer adds that affliction becomes chastisement when we see the Father’s hand in it. So long as we look only at second causes — at the people and the circumstances — we swing between anger and despair. When we see that nothing can reach us except by His permission, we can smile through our tears. The cup may seem to be mixed by Judas, but it is the cup the Father gives.

The cup which my Father hath given me, shall I not drink it? JOHN 18:11

Tears are allowed

For all his talk of the will, Meyer was no Stoic. “Tears are natural. Jesus wept.” A thunderstorm without rain is dangerous, he says; the rain cools the air. To bear sorrow with dry eyes and a stolid heart may suit a Stoic but not a Christian. There is no need to rebuke the heart that cries for the touch of a vanished hand.

Jesus wept. JOHN 11:35

What matters, he says, is not whether we feel resigned but whether the will is right. People would say to him that it was bad enough to bear their grief, but worse that they could not feel resigned. His reply, he says, was always the same: “You probably never can feel resignation, but you can will it.” Christ in Gethsemane did not feel like drinking the cup. He chose His Father’s will. So Meyer counsels the sufferer to go apart and say, deliberately and repeatedly, whenever the pain comes back: Thy will, not mine. Not because you feel it, but because you will it. And a calm will follow, which is not the absence of suffering but a peace that walks in the midst of it, as the three young men walked in the furnace.

Do not shut yourself away

His next counsel is one many grieving people need to hear. The temptation of great sorrow, Meyer says, is to withdraw, to sit alone and keep silence. Do not yield to it. When a friend wrote to him in the first shock of bereavement to say he must give up his Christian work, Meyer wrote back at once urging him not to, “because there is no solace for heart-pain like ministry.” Sorrow turned inward becomes a Dead Sea, full of salt, beside which nothing grows. Sorrow turned outward becomes the power to comfort others.

Who comforteth us in all our tribulation, that we may be able to comfort them which are in any trouble, by the comfort wherewith we ourselves are comforted of God. 2 CORINTHIANS 1:4

He goes further. Some trials, he believed, are permitted for no other reason than that we may afterwards help those who pass the same way. So watch each symptom of the pain and each remedy of the great Physician, because one day you will need them for someone else.

The afterward

Finally, Meyer bids the sufferer count on the afterward. God will not always be ploughing. You will one day see the wisdom of His choice, and discover that the thing you wanted was second best. Sorrow is a school; do not leave it without learning its lessons. And the way of the cross, rightly borne, is the only way to the everlasting light.

Now no chastening for the present seemeth to be joyous, but grievous: nevertheless afterward it yieldeth the peaceable fruit of righteousness unto them which are exercised thereby. HEBREWS 12:11

Reading him with care

In his chapter on chastisement Meyer says that those who suffer most may be heaven’s favourites, and that those who escape the rod should ask whether they are born again. The first can comfort; the second can wound, and neither should be pressed. Scripture does say that the Father chastens every son, but it does not teach that the amount of our suffering measures His love, and a comfortable Christian is not thereby shown to be a false one. Read him on sorrow for his tenderness and his good sense, which are great, and let Job’s comforters remind you that explanations offered too quickly are seldom a kindness.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. If you are grieving, stop calling it punishment. Read Isaiah 53:5 slowly and let the weight go.

2. Say Meyer’s prayer deliberately, whenever the pain returns: Thy will, not mine. Do not wait to feel it.

3. Resist the pull to withdraw. Keep one small piece of service going this month, or take one up.

4. Think of someone passing through a sorrow you have known. Write to them, or visit, this week.

5. If you are comforting someone else, resist the urge to explain their suffering. Weep with them instead.

A PRAYER

Father, I did not choose this sorrow, and I cannot feel resigned to it. But I choose Your will.

Thank You that my punishment fell on Christ, and that this cup comes from Your hand and not from chance.

Keep me from shutting myself away. Let my grief make me gentler with others.

And bring me, in Your time, to the afterward, and to the peaceable fruit of righteousness. Amen.