Daily Lesson for January 29, 2020

Today’s Daily Lesson comes from Genesis chapter 50 verses 1 through 6:

We cannot rush or hasten the process of grief. Publicly there is a time of grief for the community. Friends and acquaintances and our social networks grieve and mourn with us. They show up with casseroles, and at the funeral, and send kind contributions to the church in our loved ones memory. These are all good things; but eventually they slow and finally pass also. 

But the grieving process goes on. Like in the Lesson, burying a loved one ends up being a long, long journey even after “the days of weeping are past”.  The journey is long.  And it brings up hard things from the past, as it did for the sons of Jacob. Just as the brothers were brought to weep on the threshing floor in verse 10 of this same Lesson’s chapter, so too does grief bring us to a place where hard places in our hearts get cracked open and exposed, just as a kernel of wheat is cracked open and exposed on the threshing floor. The hurt and pain is raw, things we didn’t even know were inside us come out, and the floodgates of grief’s tears are opened. 

All that can be said of this is that this is necessary. Nobody knows quite how long the journey is. Every family and every person has to take it in their own time. The rest of the world grieves, but only a little while. But as in the story, the family and the closest of loved ones actually have to go across the Jordan to bury their loved ones. They themselves have to in some sense cross the river into the Land of Canaan. And how long it takes to get back one can never really say because in some sense some part of them will always be left there across the Jordan, in the place the world knows as Canaan, but we even now still dare to call the Promised Land . . .

NOTE: We’re reading the Bible together this year and we’ve completed Genesis!  Tomorrow’s Lesson will be from Exodus chapters 1-3.