A few years ago I experienced a dramatic change in my closest relationships. My mother and six of her siblings and/or their spouses passed on in a span of two and a half years.
These were people with whom I had dined and traveled, and whom I admired for lives lived honorably and filled with love. Yet remarkably I felt free from grief. A deepening consciousness of everyone’s eternal life in God relieved me of any feeling of absolute parting. I saw that grief is not God’s plan for me or anyone. The Bible promises that we may “know the love of Christ, which passeth knowledge, that ye might be filled with all the fulness of God” (Ephesians 3:19). This fullness does not include suffering.
In Psalms 30:5, we read, “Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.” I think of the “night” mentioned in the psalm as being when evil seems to overshadow God’s goodness. It can make a situation seem hopeless and unchangeable. But there, in the second half of that statement, is the promise that joy comes in the morning.
