I attended a one day retreat at Angola today. The topic was The Beatitudes and I was asked to give a talk on “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted. Matthew 5:4.
I discussed the mourning process that accompanied the death of my son and went on to discuss some general principles about mourning. I believe we don’t mourn enough. We should mourn when we lose something and then move on. A failure to mourn leaves us in a limbo between our past and our future.
I further told the guys that are many things we should be leaving behind: our old lives after we come to Christ, habits that we enjoyed but which are sin and need to be left behind.
It is interesting that Jesus call the Holy Spirit the Comforter. One of His purposes is to lead us through mourning as we transition from the life of a sinner to the life of a saint. That transition, that period of mourning and comfort, explains why he is blessed who mourns.
Upon returning home I found something new to mourn. I discovered that nearly a month of my postings have not been delivered to my Amana Prayer Partners or my family. That represents the vast majority of folks who receive the blog. A feeling of sadness (mourning perhaps) accompanied the revelation that a month’s worth of postings have been largely uncirculated. Although I do the blog principally because I need to spend that time each day considering the things of God, I am also hopeful that occasionally others are aided. There is no practical way to recapture the past month. It’s gone. I choose to ignore the possibility that no one missed the postings.
Time to move on into 2011. I pray that it is a growth time for all of us.
Be blessed.
Nick
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