Day 7 

This week, we’ve seen that

· God welcomes your honest lament.

· God hears you when you call to him.

· Jesus suffered grief and sorrow just as you do.

· Jesus has compassion on you.

· God promises to be with us in suffering.

· God promises that he has a good purpose for us that he is working out even in our pain.

This picture of grief in the Bible may not line up with what you’ve experienced. Maybe you think you have to say the right thing and pretend that you’re “over” your grief. Maybe your friends offer easy fixes. Maybe they’re convinced that your pain defines you, so they don’t have comfort to offer.

God is the ultimate grief counselor. He offers comfort for the brokenhearted. Take hold of that comfort! People who have been following the Lord for a long time often note that when they run to God’s Word in hard times, they experience his presence in deeper, richer ways.  

Today we’ll look forward to experiencing God’s presence in a way that will end all of our tears. 

Pray

Father God, I love you, because I know you have set your love on me.

Read

Jesus’s disciple John is given a vision of what will happen when Jesus comes for the second time. He describes a world in which everything has been made new.

Revelation 21:3-4

Reflect

Along with the writer of Psalm 23, we need eyes of faith to believe that God is with us during painful times. But in the new order of things, God’s presence will be a constant reality. The compassionate, watchful, tender God will finally be fully with us. That is the promise of the whole story of the Bible. It’s what we all long for, deep down. 

Respond

One of Jesus’s apostles wrote that this hope allowed him to rejoice even in his sufferings (see Romans 5:2-5). Rejoicing may seem impossible right now. That’s okay. What have you learned about God over the past week? What can you count on—hope for—from him?