Sackcloth and Ashes

This time, nine years ago, I was at Cartersville Medical Center, waiting for my mother to die.  At 9:15 on a Monday night, she had been medicated to help her not fight to breathe.  By now, she’d removed her own oxygen mask.  Though she couldn’t say it, I think she felt like it’d compromise her dignity.  She didn’t want to leave with it on.  By now, she’d said her goodbyes.

She’d picked up her stakes.

She’d unpacked her life.

Tonight, nine years later, I am finally packing up her clothes.  Her closet still smells like her.  I remember shopping with her as she bought all of these beautifully classy outfits.  I even packed an outfit that I’d bought for her from Belk, my first job.

I’m letting her go.  And I feel so guilty.

I’ve kept her clothes because seeing them keeps her close.  They help me not feel as lonely.

Several years ago, Pastor Anderson was ministering and he said that there were some of us who were holding on to our deceased loved ones’ clothes because we didn’t trust the Holy Spirit to comfort us in our grief.  He didn’t know it, of course, but God used him to speak directly to me.  The truth of the statement went deep, but I still couldn’t confront it.

And I don’t know how I’m going to allow the Holy Spirit in.

Tomorrow, I’ll finish packing her clothes and I will take them to a women’s clothing ministry.  Nine years to the day of her passing…

Her closet will be empty.

The reality will be stark.

The loneliness.

The discomfort.

The pain.

The grief.

– July 1, 2022 Journal Entry

Nine years…  It’s strange, I know.  Perhaps even a bit unhealthy.  But quite frankly, I haven’t known how to “do” grief. 

Five years earlier, I’d lost my dad in a house fire.  Unlike with my mom, there were no goodbyes or holding on to visual reminders of life.  For the most part, everything that he’d owned had been reduced to ashes.  Life, death reduced to ashes to ashes, dust to dust. 

It took seven years for me to shed real, deep tears.

Seven years… It’s strange, I know.  Perhaps even a bit unhealthy.  But quite frankly, I haven’t known how to “do” grief.

When facing life’s most challenging situations, most people have some sort of coping mechanism, some sort of strategy to help them minimize or navigate unpleasant or difficult emotions.  For as long as I can remember, my coping mechanism has been journaling, writing it out.  But I didn’t write when my dad passed away.  And I didn’t write when my mom passed away either.  My pen didn’t go still because my heart was silent.  It went still because my heart was screaming.    

Sackcloth and ashes. 

Biblically, sackcloth and ashes were expressions of grief, external symbols of an inward state.  Sackcloth, a coarse, burlap-like cloth, was often made of black goat’s hair.  According to Crosswalk.com’s What Do Sackcloth and Ashes Signify in the Bible, sackcloth “served as a physical manifestation of the discomfort of loss or repentance.”  Accompanying sackcloth in times of national disaster or repentance, ashes illustrated ruin and destruction.  “Ash could be literal ash from burned material or dust from the ground, demonstrating our finiteness, as creatures created from dust and returning to dust…”  (Refer to Daniel 9:3; Job 42:6; Jonah 3:5-8)   Grief, expressed through sackcloth and ashes, often led to prayer and fasting.

“Sackcloth and ashes signify a position of repentance and debasement, symbolically or literally sitting in the brokenness of our lives and situation.” 

Sis, what has left you devastated, sitting in the brokenness?  Are you mourning what was or what might have been?  Is it a person?  A passion?  A purpose?  All of them, perhaps?

What are you grieving today?  Can you identify what looks and feels like sackcloth and ashes in your own life?  Do you dare to visit what lies in the cemetery of your soul?      

I suspect that, like me, you don’t know how to “do” grief either.  I mean, really, who does?  This mix of sorrow and anger and regret and disbelief and emptiness and uncertainty… who, in the frailty of their humanity, can bear such pain and pressure?

But surely the God who formed us, from the strength of His divinity, isn’t intimidated by or overwhelmed with the intensity of our emotions.

The elders of Daughter Zion sit on the ground in silence; they have sprinkled dust on their heads and put on sackcloth. The young women of Jerusalem have bowed their heads to the ground.

Lamentations 2:10 NIV

A few months ago, I took my first pilgrimage to Israel.  Among the many sites that we visited were the temple where Jesus may have overturned the tables and the tomb from which He may have risen. When mourners came to worship at that temple, they would’ve entered and exited opposite everyone else.  And inside some tombs of that day, there were actual mourning chambers.

In Jewish custom, grief was experienced publicly and communally.

Shortly before I went to Israel, I had been studying John chapter eleven, the story of three siblings who were friends of Jesus: Mary, Martha, and Lazarus.  It was then that the Holy Spirit started to minister grief to me.  By then, my mother’s closet was empty. 

Most often, when we talk about this Bible story, we focus on its “bookends,” its beginning and its ending.  Its beginning: Jesus hears that Lazarus is sick but He doesn’t come to him immediately.  Its ending: Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead.

Today, let’s talk about its messy middle.  Let’s talk about the part where the grief is. 

Here goes… having buried their brother four days earlier, Mary and Martha are both in mourning.  They had known that Lazarus’s death was imminent, so they had called for help.  They sent for Jesus and then they waited.  And waited.  But He hadn’t come.  The text doesn’t tell us, but I wonder if, in their expectation, the sisters told their friends that Jesus would be there any minute now. And then, with each passing hour, I wonder if they grew embarrassed and disheartened. Did they think that their faith had been misplaced? Did they believe that Jesus hadn’t come through for them? Perhaps Lazarus’s memorial service was filled with mourners, and as they searched the crowd looking for the face of Jesus, they realized that He wasn’t there. Can you imagine their anguish? And then finally, days into their bereavement, He shows up.  Can you imagine their anger? Broken, the sisters tell Jesus that if He had come, then Lazarus would not have died.  In essence, if He had been there, then they wouldn’t feel this way. 

Hearing their accusation, Jesus didn’t get defensive.  He wasn’t put off by their sorrow or their anger or their disappointment, even though it was directed at Him.  In fact, He wept with them and walked with them to Lazarus’s tomb.  Jesus took the sisters to the source of their pain, to the reason for their tears.  He walked with them to the place where their grief was buried.  And when He got there, He resurrected what they thought they had lost. 

Jesus proved to Mary and Martha that not only could He resurrect, but that, most importantly, He was the resurrection.  Sisters, I believe that He wants to prove that same thing to us today.  Although their expressions of grief were different, Mary and Martha both made the same accusation to Jesus: if you’d been here then Lazarus wouldn’t have died. 

Our expressions of grief may be different too, but we likely make the same accusation of Jesus as Mary and Martha:

If you’d been here then I wouldn’t be divorced.

If you’d been here then I wouldn’t be widowed.  

If you’d been here then I wouldn’t have lost my child.

If you’d been here then I would’ve been able to have a child.

If you’d been here then I wouldn’t have gotten this diagnosis.

If you’d been here then I wouldn’t have been assaulted.

If you’d been here then I wouldn’t have been abandoned.

If you’d been here…

Like you and I, Mary and Martha were friends of Jesus too.  That, however, didn’t mean that painful things wouldn’t happen to them.  It did mean that they had someone to walk through the pain with.  And that, precisely, is the lesson: walk with Jesus until He calls life forth. 

All the sisters had wanted was a healing, but God gave them so much more.  He gave them a resurrection.  Out of their misery came a miracle.  What do you think that God is willing to give you when you let Him have your pain?

And now, I’ll leave you with this…

Over the Christmas holidays, I watched a Lifetime movie.  In it, the character said, “Big grief puts a lot of things in perspective.”  I think that God wants us to see that there is, indeed, life after loss.   

PRINCIPLE: You turned my wailing into dancing; you removed my sackcloth and clothed me with joy, that my heart may sing your praises and not be silent.  Lord my God, I will praise you forever. – Psalm 30:11-12 NIV