Weep with those who weep

Rejoice with those who rejoice, and weep with those who weep. Romans 12:15

To be honest, I am so tired of crying. I have always been an emotionally-expressive person. Most people can tell how I'm feeling even when I think I am hiding it so well. Since my brother's death, the tears freely flow and usually at, to me, the most inconvenient times.

However, today my tears flowed for another death. My language teacher, and my best local friend here, experienced a tragic loss in her own family. Her uncle (her father's brother) went to the bazar in the morning and was healthy and well. When he came home he complained of pain in his shoulder and that afternoon, he died, most likely of a heart attack. My friend showed up at my house a few days later, eyes puffy with tears and we just sat. Not many words were exchanged but grief and hurt and loss hung in the air between us. There was mutual understanding.

Today I attended the mourning session. My heart could barely carry the burden of this time. I entered a room lined with women wailing. In the Bible, where it talks of crowds of women following a dead body wailing, that is what this was like, except within the home. The wife and daughters of the man who died sat at the entrance to the room. The women would enter and just weep with them, wailing at the top of their lungs proclaiming what a good man he was and what a tragedy this was. As painful as it was, it was an oddly beautiful experience. The ache of death is something I have come to grasp. Our humanity NEEDS to wail over the tragedy of death. When I came home for my brother's funeral, I always felt like I needed to constantly pull myself together. I always felt like the odd-one-out weeping all the time (except of course with my family who wept along with me). How wonderful it would have been to sit in a room and just weep all day and have others come just to weep with me. Even God understands this need as he led Paul to command us to weep together. We don't need to tell each other words that we think may take the pain away or lessen it. We don't need another pan of brownies or a casserole. We need tears, lots and lots of tears.

So, i cried with these women. Some of the other women were staring at me and asked if I knew him. "No, but death hurts. I understand this pain."

I know that God is not so narrow that he would take my brother away from me and my family just so I could understand death and relate to people in this land (who experience death way more often than I ever have). I would never put that on God's character. But I know that God sees the complexities and many facets of our life we never see and that he raises beauty out of the ashes. And the beauty is that my tears and pain can come alongside another. Please pray for my friend and her family.