The house of mourning

Matthew 5: 4

4 ‘Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.

We experience a deep and profound sadness at the loss of someone, some role in life and / or a state of being that we love or highly value. We mourn! Have you ever felt that you have lost the person you know yourself to be? This experience of: ‘I don’t know who I am anymore’ is not so uncommon. We can live large pieces of life perhaps thinking we have it sorted; it’s all working out just right and then we experience loss. The fragile and time limited nature of life strikes home. We lose a loved person from our life, we lose our health, job, we lose a child born or unborn, we lose a ministry or a marriage we lose our faith. Suddenly our identity is all in question. Who am I and how did I get here to house of mourning? Don’t despair; loss is the road and mourning is the vehicle out of Denial. The loss of the ‘delusional self’ the person we thought we ought to be to fit the present culture and set of circumstances; the Sadducee, Pharisee, Zealot, Essene, Tax Collector, Sinner or member of the fickle crowed. All the personas that hide who we really are; they are just character faces for the stage play of life. Jesus calls us out of the stage character to let him/her die. We are called to experience the mourning and loss; Jesus calls calls to that place called regret, to the place of turning to Him for the comfort of a new identity of who God created us to be. We have been created to be participants in the liberation Kingdom of Jesus but the route is humility and mourning; we must lose our lives to gain them. Qohleth, the writer of Ecclesiastes writes this in chapter 7:2;

² It is better to go to the house of mourning
   than to go to the house of feasting;
for this is the end of everyone,
   and the living will lay it to heart. 

We are better for knowing that we are not god in any form and knowing that we have a tendency to meet our needs our own way. To experience the loss of the ‘self of denial’ is the first step to discover the person God created us to be. The Kingdom of God is the place of comfort; the comfort that we are loved by our creator God to the point of the Redemption of us personally by His Son Jesus through the cross. We are invited to participate in what is already inaugurated by God: The Kingdom of comfort. We are blessed if we mourn all that is wrong and unjust; if we genuinely turn from it we will meet the God of all comfort (2 Cor 1: 3-5).