On the days when the grief is there, I know that joy will also come. It’s easy to feel that I’ll always be sad because of the weight of things. But that’s not true. The sad times, the times of grief, are hard, but our loving Father will walk with us through them. He’ll bring good – joy!! – into our lives in ways that only He can. How grateful I am for His lovingkindness!
Grief
Peggy Haymes
Contrary to what a lot of people believe (or hope), comfort doesn’t take the pain away. Comfort slides in beside the pain, pulling up a chair so that we have something more than sorrow in our hearts. Comfort gently expands our spirits so that we can breathe again. Comfort opens our eyes so that we can see possibility again. And on those days, whether it is the next day or five years removed, on that day when grief rears its dark head again, comfort helps us remember that pain is not all there is.
Victor Alfsen
God can do wonders with a broken heart if you give him all the pieces.
Frederick Buechner
Even the saddest things can become, once we have made peace with them, a source of wisdom and strength.
Aristeides
If any righteous man among the Christians passes from this world, they rejoice and offer thanks to God, and they escort his body with songs and thanksgiving as if he were setting out from one place to another nearby.
Aristeides (125 A. D.)- A non-Christian Greek, in a letter.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon
There is an essential difference between the decease of the godly and the death of the ungodly. Death comes to the ungodly man as a penal infliction, but to the righteous as a summons to his Father’s palace. To the sinner it is an execution, to the saint an undressing from his sins and infirmities. Death to the wicked is the King of terrors. Death to the saint is the end of terrors, the commencement of glory.
Halford E. Luccock
Sympathy is your pain in my heart.
Octavius Winslow
O child of sorrow! Will not this suffice, that you possess Christ’s sympathy, immeasurable and exhaustless as the ocean, exquisite and changeless as His being? Yield your heart to His rich compassion! Will Jesus be regardless of what I feel, and the sorrows under which I groan? Oh no! The sigh that bursts in secret from my heart is not secret to Him; the tear that is my food day and night, and drops unperceived and unknown, is known and remembered by Him!
George Macdonald
The shadows of the evening that precedes a lovelier morning are drawing down around us both. But our God is in the shadow as in the shine, and all is and will be well: have we not seen his glory in the face of Jesus? and do we not know him a little?…This life is a lovely time, but I never was content with it. I look for better — oh, so far better! I think we do not yet know the joy of mere existence…. May the loving Father be near you and may you know it, and be perfectly at peace all the way into the home country, and to the palace home of the living one — the life of our life.
Alexander MacLaren
Oh, when we are journeying through the murky night and the dark woods of affliction and sorrow, it is something to find here and there a spray broken, or a leafy stem bent down with the tread of His foot, and the brush of His hand as He passed; and to remember that the path He trod He has hallowed, and thus to find lingering fragrance and hidden strength in the remembrance of Him as “in all points tempted like as we are,” bearing grief for us, bearing grief with us, bearing grief like us.