"Because of you, Lord God, I can’t sleep. I am restless and can’t even talk. I think of times gone by and those years long ago. Each night my mind is flooded with questions." Then he says, "God Most High, what’s hurt me most is that you no longer help us." Then later in the Psalm, the psalmist has come to an insight: "You walked through the water of the mighty sea, but your footprints were never seen. You guided your people like a flock of sheep and you chose Moses and Aaron to be their leaders."

One morning a young mother was staying at home with her nine-year-old son, John. John was home from school because he was suffering a touch of the flu. Late in the morning, the telephone rang. It was a physician at the local hospital. Lynn’s husband, John’s father, was a patient at that hospital, struggling with cancer. The physician said, "Mrs. Caine, your husband died this morning."

"It’s funny," Lynn Caine said some years later, "after I heard those five words, ‘Your husband died this morning,’ I don’t remember a thing. I don’t remember what I said; I don’t remember what I felt; I don’t remember what I did. I asked John later, ‘Did I cry?’ He said, ‘No, Mama, you did not. You were trying to be brave.’"

Lynn Caine wrote a book about her experience of suffering the loss of a husband, then sinking deeply into grief. Her book was called Widow. She said, "being a widow is like living in a country where no one speak’s your language."

Many people who have experienced grief would know exactly what she’s talking about. To lose a wife, a husband, a child, a parent, a friend, a loved one is to enter into a world of grief. It’s like living a country where no one speak your language. Plenty of people try to speak your language, of course. They’ll say things like, "You’re young, you can have another child. You’re young, you can get married again. Look on the bright side, things will get better." But it’s not your language.

When the well-known minister, William Sloane Coffin, lost his twenty-four-year-old son, Alex, in a terrible automobile accident, he said he received letters, cards and telephone calls from many friends and acquaintances, all of them well-meaning, but very few of them helpful. He said some of the worst of them came from my fellow Reverends who proved by what they said that they know more about the Bible than they do about the human heart. "I know all of the right Biblical passages," said Coffin, "Blessed are they who mourn. Weeping endures for the night, but joy comes in the morning. I know all of that. But the depth of my grief made those words unreal."

To enter into grief is like being in a country where no one speaks your language. Or, as William Shakespeare could be paraphrased to say: "Everybody knows how to heal grief, except those who actually experience it."

I think that’s why, down through the centuries, the Psalms have been such comfort and healing hope to people in the midst of grief. Many of the Psalms are about grief, but those Psalms that are about grief are not composed by people who treat grief at arms length. They are composed by people who are actually experiencing grief, like the Seventy-seventh Psalm we just heard a few minutes ago. This psalmist pours out his heart in anguish and despair. He is in a turmoil, a churning sea of grief. He doesn’t express it simply for one verse or two verses or three verses, he goes on and on and on with his grief. It pours out of him in great depth. Then in the middle of his grief, he makes an interesting decision; almost a decision of the will. In the middle of the grief he decides that he is going to remember who God is and what God has done in the past. He’s angry at God.

Luther once said we are sometimes closest to God when we shake our fist at heaven because to do that we have to trust God and God has no children more dear than those who trust him. In that trust, that angered trust, the psalmist looks and remembers what God has done in the Exodus when God rescued the children of Israel. And he comes to some interesting discoveries that actually help him in his own grief and despair.

The first discovery is that God did not redeem Israel apart from the churning waters, but in the middle of the churning waters, through the sea. The way to move through grief is not around it or to push it away, but one step at a time, one day at a time. As the German theologian, Hans Küng, has put it, "God’s love does not protect us from suffering, God’s love protects us in the midst of suffering."

The second discovery that the psalmist makes is that God helps us in our grief and trouble through other people. "You saved us through Moses and Aaron," he sees. And sometimes it’s the people who are closest around us, our neighbors, our friends, our family, people we meet on the street, who become the agents of God’s healing in our grief. Sometimes it’s when we try to be agents of healing for others, maybe especially so, that we find our own grief healed.

The Episcopal minister, George Ross, used to love to tell the story about the woman in his congregation who was having terrible difficulty getting over the grief over the loss of her husband. She even went to see her physician and said, "You need to give me a prescription to help me with my melancholy. Every day I go to the cemetery and I put flowers on my husband’s grave, but it doesn’t help. It simply drives me deeper into grief. Give me a prescription to ease my pain." Her physician said, "Before I give you a prescription, let me give you a suggestion. Instead of placing those flowers on your husband’s grave, why don’t you bring them to the hospital. I have many patients in the hospital who nobody ever visits and if you would visit them and bring them some encouragement in those flowers, it may be that you would bring a little joy into their lives." Strangely enough, even though she was resistant, she decided to do it and found that this was the turning point for her own healing. As she showed encouragement to others, she was able to drink deeply from the well of God’s own encouragement.

The third insight that our psalmist sees when he looks at what God has done is that God was hidden when God was redeeming and healing. The way the psalmist puts it is: in the middle of the churning waters, your footprints were unseen. God was there healing, bringing redemption and hope, but God could not be seen.

We know the name Charles de Gaulle, a World War II hero and president of France. What many do not know is that Charles de Gaulle and his wife, Yvonne, were the parents of a Downs Syndrome child, a daughter named Anne. Regardless of what was going on in the affairs of state, Charles de Gaulle would come home every day and would spent time with Yvonne, giving special attention to Anne. When they would put her to bed at night, Yvonne would sometimes say to Charles, "I am deeply troubled about Anne. I have prayed so often that she could be like the others. Charles, why is she not like the others?" Anne did not live to adulthood. They had a private grave side funeral service. And at the funeral the priest said, "When Jesus was on the cross, all that the world could see was suffering and death, but the hidden hand of God was at work to bring victory and redemption, just as the hidden hand of God is at work to bring healing to Anne." When the service was over, Yvonne could not pull herself away from the grave. She was stricken with grief. Charles went over and touched her on the elbow and said, "Come Yvonne, did you not hear the words of the priest? She is now like the others."

In the midst of our grief, the hidden hand of God. If you are in the midst of grief, look for the hidden presence of God in the midst of the churning waters.

Thomas Long: Absolutely. In some ways all grief is the same. It is the loss of something cherished, something loved. But not all of the loss objects are the same. To lose a child, that’s irreplaceable. To lose a loved one, that’s irreplaceable. To lose an income or a house or some object like that, that’s replaceable. Therefore, healing of something that can be replaced can happen in the present tense. It can be restored to us and God can work to make our lives restored. But to lose a loved one, we have to live with the kind of hope of ultimate restoration that’s beyond this life and in that sense the healing of our grief is larger and deeper.

Brown: Since there is a difference, is there also a difference between curing and healing?

Long: Yes. Curing is probably best understood as a medical term. Healing, wholeness, has more of a spiritual aspect. If I have a cold, I can be healed or cured by getting rid of the cold. I want the disease gone. It’s the absence of something. Wholeness and healing in the religious sense, however, is not just the absence of something, it’s the presence of something.

Brown: Can you give us an example of healing that comes from God? A story of some kind of transformation that happens?

Long: I had a good friend many years ago, a young mother who died of cancer. The last week of her life, our pastor was visiting and she made a very unusual request. She asked him if he would gather some members from the church and come to the hospital and anoint her with oil. He was unaccustomed to this. This was not part of his tradition and he said, "Oh, I don’t know. I don’t practice magic, I practice ministry." She became indignant and she said, "I’m not asking you to practice magic, I know that I am going to die." And he said, "Then why do you want me to anoint you with oil?" She said, "It would be a sign that even though my body may die, that my union with Christ is complete and I am healed in the love of God."