Grief and Hope

"Do not grieve as if you had no hope."

Our lives should be a balance of praise and grief. We should praise and find joy when we see God working in the world. We should grieve when we see places where God's joy has yet to lift the burdens of the oppressed.
Jesus wept, knowing full well the outcome of his situation. He wept knowing that death is not final. This shows us that we too ought to grieve in this world. It is a broken and hurting world. However, we ought not grieve as if we had no hope (for Christ followed his tears with praise), but we certainly must grieve.
Our joy is to be overwhelming, our grief the beginning of a movement. Those who grieve without hope do nothing. There is nothing to be done in their minds. Hope is gone. This is not to be true of us. We ought not to be so hard of heart that we do not weep at the starvation of children, the rape of women, or the addictions of men. For these things we MUST weep. But our weeping must be a beginning and not an end. We have a hope!
It is our hope that turns our weeping into change. It is because we are grieved by the actions of this world that we act. If we have no grief we are really ignoring the situations around us. We are the priest who passes by the broken man dieing on side of the road. Without hope we feel helpless to act. Our actions cannot begin a change. Christ has equipped us both with grief and hope. It is often the imbalance of these two that allows us to sit comfortably doing nothing or too afraid to move. We must not allow this to continue.