For the Lord has comforted his people
and will have compassion on them in their suffering.
—Isaiah 49:13 (NLT)
The Lord will comfort Israel again
and have pity on her ruins.
Her desert will blossom like Eden,
her barren wilderness like the garden of the Lord.
—Isaiah 51:3 (NLT)
Grief doesn’t feel good. It is debilitating and all-consuming while in the depths of it; often irrational, untimely, and inescapable; and inherently uncomfortable—not only for the griever but also for those around them. It’s awkward and sometimes hurtful when people don’t know what to say or say the wrong thing. After the loss of our twin babies, my husband and I had a well-intentioned person tell us, “Eventually you’ll be able to move on.” Clearly, that person had no understanding of what it’s like to lose a baby. It’s not something you ever move on from, and it’s not something that gets better with time. It gets different with time, and eventually, you move forward, but you never move on.
It can be hard for others to relate to our grief and understand how to empathize with us. The good news, though, is that while people may disappoint us, God never will. 2 Chronicles 30:9 (NASB) tells us, “For the Lord your God is gracious and compassionate, and will not turn his face away from you if you return to him.”
God doesn’t look away from the tears falling down our faces because it’s not pretty to look at. He doesn’t plug His ears when we cry out in grief. He doesn’t turn away when we are falling to pieces. Isaiah 30:18 (NASB) also says, “Therefore the Lord longs to be gracious to you, And therefore He waits on high to have compassion on you.”
When our lives feel to be in a state of ruin, our Heavenly Father longs to have compassion on us and comfort us—and that’s not all. His compassion and comfort are typically not passive in nature, but rather transformative in nature.
In Isaiah 51:3 (NLT) as we read at the beginning of the post, the prophet Isaiah speaks of the Lord comforting Israel and having pity on her ruins that her desert would blossom like Eden and her barren wilderness like the garden of the Lord. Desert and barren wilderness—those may feel like accurate descriptors of the places you find yourself in after loss, particularly the loss of a baby or child. The term barren depicts emptiness and childlessness. The terms desert and wilderness depict places that are unknown to you where you may be lost, afraid, and lonely.
But the prophet Isaiah tells us that God does not want to leave us in those places. He wants to pour out His mercy on us and lead us to a place where the mending of our broken hearts can begin—where our desert and barren wilderness begin to look more like a blossoming garden. I realize that may be hard to imagine for your life now, but our God is the transformer of lives. He takes the broken, hopeless, and inconceivable and mends, restores, and works wonders:
This is what God says,
the God who builds a road right through the ocean,
who carves a path through pounding waves …
Be alert, be present. I’m about to do something brand-new.
It’s bursting out! Don’t you see it?
There it is! I’m making a road through the desert,
rivers in the badlands.
Wild animals will say ‘Thank you!’
—the coyotes and the buzzards—
Because I provided water in the desert,
rivers through the sunbaked earth,
Drinking water for the people I chose,
the people I made especially for myself,
a people custom-made to praise me.
—Isaiah 43:16, 43:19–21 (The Message version)
This truth is also exemplified in Jeremiah 31:13 (NLT), which says, “I will turn their mourning into joy. I will comfort them and exchange their sorrow for rejoicing.”
This may have been the most meaningful Bible verse to me following my loss. It was one that I held on to in the depths of my sorrow—that as hard as it was to imagine at the time, God could somehow give me joy and make me rejoice again.
Although the context of this verse wasn’t specifically referring to mourning and sorrow from the loss of a loved one, the concept is still an important one for us. The prophet Jeremiah writes this verse, inspired by God, in reference to the mourning that Israel was experiencing under their exile and captivity. God is speaking here of Israel’s liberation and restoration by which He will turn their mourning to joy, comfort them, and make them rejoice.
God gave the Israelites, who were living in a terrifying present of captivity and exile, the promise of a bright future where their lives would no longer be consumed by mourning and sorrow.
Similarly, God knows how to free us from the captivity of our grief. He knows how to make us rejoice after our sorrow. Our present now may be filled with mourning, yes, but through the Lord’s transformative compassion, that is not all that lies ahead.
Though your life will never be the same as it was before your loss, if you let God in and let Him work, He will not leave you where you are.
If this devotional resonated with you, please be sure to check out my baby loss book, As I Lay Weeping: Where Sorrow and Suffering Meet Faith and Hope.
