Listen:
2 Samuel 12:15-23
The Lord struck the child that Uriah’s wife had borne for David, and he became very sick. David begged God for the boy. He fasted and spent the night sleeping on the ground. The senior servants of his house approached] him to lift him up off the ground, but he refused, and he wouldn’t eat with them either.
On the seventh day, the child died. David’s servants were afraid to tell him that the child had died. “David wouldn’t listen to us when we talked to him while the child was still alive,” they said. “How can we tell him the child has died? He’ll do something terrible!”
But when David saw his servants whispering, he realized the child had died.
“Is the child dead?” David asked his servants.
“Yes,” they said, “he is dead.”
Then David rose from the ground, bathed, anointed himself, and changed his clothes. He entered the Lord’s house and bowed down. Then he entered his own house. He requested food, which was brought to him, and he ate.
“Why are you acting this way?” his servants asked. “When the child was alive, you fasted and cried and kept watch, but now that the child is dead, you get up and eat food!”
David replied, “While the child was alive I fasted and wept because I thought, Who knows? The Lord may have mercy on me and let the child live. But he is dead now. Why should I fast? Can I bring him back again? No. I am going where he is, but he won’t come back to me.”
Consider:
Finality can be unbearable, but it can also be a blessing. As much as we don’t want to wait, we really don’t want to wait when the answer is uncertain. When hope lives in our hearts, when healing is a possibility or for the potential turn-around remains in the backs of our minds, “What might be” can turn into a double-edged sword of both uplifting lightness and heavy handed dread. Standing by the side and waiting is hardest when the diagnosis is maybe. Somehow, no is easier to take.
David finds himself by the bedside of a beloved child in an age where monitors didn’t hum or beep, temperatures were taken with the back of a hand, and doctors were more wish casters than professionals with training which could help. So waiting by the bed is a time of cruel hope. Maybe he’d get better like he had so many times before. Maybe this is the fever which finally takes him. I wonder what David would have done for some fever-reducing medication and a cold compress?
This is called anticipatory grief. It’s those times when you start feeling sad and preparing for the loss of someone you love who is very sick or when you know a big change or separation is coming soon. It’s the pain we feel before the dreaded moment comes.
And, as David witnesses, this kind of grief can be a gift because when you can then meet the inevitable loss with something more like peace and thankfulness the time of pain has ended. It doesn’t make the change any easier, it just shifts it to different parts of our hearts. And when that time of transition comes, we are more settled then we might have been.
Uncertainty, even when there’s hope, is painful. When the resolution comes, then we find our promised place of peace.
Respond:
Make the possibilities swirling around in your heart more concrete. First, write down all the possible futures which you can envision. Then, identify the most likely outcome. Finally, quickly list three specific aspects of those future narratives that are now impossible. Fold and set that list aside to physically symbolize releasing yourself from that lost path.
Pray:
God of Certainty, we ache in the cruel space of anticipatory grief, where hope and dread cut like a double-edged sword. It is the “maybe” weighing us down, the uncertainty which steals our peace more fiercely than a final “no.”
We pray for strength as we stand vigil by the bedside of possibility. Like David, we long for relief from the painful anticipation.
When the time of transition comes, grant us the blessing of knowing it is over, and the only way forward is through. Help us find not ease, but a quiet peace and thankfulness the long time of cruel hope has ended. Settle our hearts, Lord, so we may meet the inevitable with grounded grace. Amen.
