How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever?

How long will You hide Your face from me?

How long shall I take counsel in my soul, 

Having sorrow in my heart all the day?

How long will my enemy be exalted over me?

Consider and answer me, O Lord, my God;

Enlighten my eyes, or I will sleep the sleep of death,

And my enemy will say, “I have overcome [her].”

And my adversaries will rejoice when I am shaken.

But I have trusted in Your lovingkindness;

My heart shall rejoice in Your salvation.

I will sing to the Lord, 

Because He has dealt bountifully with me.

Psalm 13

Patrick developed a mantra for our little family for when we were in transition periods. I don’t know if he read it or heard it somewhere, or if was from his own imagination. But when we were in a place where we were leaving something loved for something new, and we were grieving the leaving, he would say to the kids and me, “Being sad means that we loved deeply.” 

And we had plenty of occasions to use it. A little move from the city where we met and married and started having babies, to a new city. Then a bigger move from the friends and church that embraced us in that place, plus fairly local grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins, to the far away and completely unfamiliar in Ireland. Saying earthly good-byes to three of our four parents, all while we lived overseas. Then having to leave our beloved Emerald Isle and the community and ministry we had plunged into there, to return to the U.S. The death of our beloved cat who had made the trans-Atlantic trip with us both ways soon followed. And then we had only the echoes of Patrick’s words, as we suffered the loss of our mantra-maker himself in the fall of 2021. 

So much stacked-up loss. Honestly, there were times the sadness could get so deep that it was hard to remember that its source was love. The howling cry of “How long, O Lord? ….forever?” in Psalm 13 resonates keenly whenever grief once again sideswipes us. I can curl up tight with the Psalm-writer in this one, a ball of anguish and questions on the cave floor. It is hard to remember in this place that the mourning is deep because the love is deep. 

In this place, I so easily “take counsel in my soul,” just rolling things around inside my own mind and heart. Those days of grief seem endless. I can imagine a gloating, godless crowd of “enemies” saying, “Look, she trusted in her God, and now she’s worse off than before. Why bother?”

But by Divine Wisdom, the Psalmist won’t let us stay here, in our miserable knot. He first knows to ask for God’s Light to come in and flood out the darkness of that cave. This line echoes back to Matthew 6:22-24 for me. There Jesus says, “The eye is the lamp of the body, and if your eyes are clear, your whole body is full of light.” 

So in the midst of not knowing when his sorrow will end, he stands up and takes hold of the Light. He declares trust in the Lord’s loving nature. The ESV calls it steadfast love. The NIV calls it unfailing. The NASB calls it kindness. The Psalmist looks over his shoulder, having just desperately cried out how forgotten he felt, and knows what he is feeling does not negate God’s real character: a Lord of love – who happens to be an excellent Gift-Giver. Yes, he seems to say, I cannot yet see the end of being really, ridiculously sad, but I also know my life overflows with so much I don’t deserve… “He has dealt bountifully with me.”

We mourn deeply because what we were given was good. Patrick was a really fantastic husband, daddy, friend, son, brother, disciple, teacher, guitar-player, artist, writer, nick-name-maker, adventure-starter, and belly-laugher. What a good, real gift to have had in my life. My friend, the things and people you mourn were each a gift. The gift was generous, lavish, rich. It was bountiful. And it is worth missing. 

Oh, and one more thing: because of that bounty, the Psalm-writer says he will sing. Shoot, it is hard enough to talk when emotion-fraught, let alone sing. And that’s not all, of course. The whole painful thing is written for a choirmaster. Yeah, let’s all gather around and sing our pleading sadnesses together in a croaking choir, that sounds like fun. But here’s the beauty. We’re not actually just singing the pain and saying how awful it is, we are normalizing the existence of these sorrows. And we are pouring over top of those seeping wounds the balm of the truth of our Lord.

Listen. The hardest songs for me to sing are the ones that declare that God has been good to me, that God has been faithful, that He is a firm foundation, that He has never let me down, that He turns things for my good. When those songs start, something in me wants to cross my arms and declare that I cannot truthfully sing that; I mentally dissent! Oh, but, friend, these are the songs I need to sing the loudest, with my hands held the highest. I need to sing until the soundwaves of truth reverberate not only in the air around me but in my throat and in my gut, rippling through every tear streaming down my face and right up to those shaking fingertips. I remember quite clearly, having to will my voice out and my hands up to sing “It is Well” at both my dad’s and my husband’s funeral within a year of each other. And in all these songs now I think, if I could do it then, I can still do it now.

I claimed Psalm 13 for this Lenten devotional, choosing from several psalms I read on my phone on a Bible app. The next day I opened the Bible I’ve been carrying for the last several years to Psalm 13 and was greeted by my own handwriting in the margins and a date. April 28, 2022, nearly six months to the day after Patrick’s passing. I had underlined the word “bountiful” and had written along the side: “Seasons that change us – make way for different growth, not reverting to what was before. Making way for what is yet to come. And past seasons have prepared me for the Now.”

I’m grateful for that newly grieving widow and her eyes that were lit clear for a moment long enough to know that something is still down the road for us. Since then, there have still been lots of days of gut-wrenching sorrow, mixed in with those hopeful days. But ultimately I can say: I was given good gifts by a good God. And I grieve those that are gone. And I worship a God who is still giving good gifts. Deep grief is deep love.

A psalm of mourned love, based on Psalm 13

How long, O Lord? 

How long will an ocean of tears be just behind my eyes? 

Hot sorrow like a new sunburn under my skin?

How far down this reluctant road 

Until I would no longer trade it for what might have been?

Will I ask You these things

All my life?

Sorrow-full loss

Is proof of love.

Grieving a good I no longer hold

Is evidence that I was given good at all.

So.

I will worship the Giver of the good.

I will still love the gift that is gone.

And I will look to You and see You reaching out

With more good gifts to put in my hands.