Thursday Read: Blessed Are Those Who Mourn

Jesus began the Sermon on the Mount with the Beatitudes - a list of blessings that sound more like curses. "Blessed are the poor in spirit... Blessed are those who mourn... Blessed are the meek" (Matthew 5:3-5). These aren't the people culture considers blessed. We bless the confident, the happy, the powerful. Jesus blessed the broken, the grieving, the weak.

"Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted" (Matthew 5:4). This is strange blessing. Mourning isn't something we aspire to. We avoid grief, medicate sadness, and rush through loss as quickly as possible. Our culture has no patience for mourning - take three days bereavement leave, post a brief social media tribute, then get back to normal. We treat grief like a problem to solve rather than a process to honor.

But Jesus says mourners are blessed. Not because grief is good in itself, but because honest mourning positions you to receive comfort. You can't be comforted if you won't acknowledge you're hurting. You can't receive healing if you pretend you're not wounded. You can't experience God's presence in grief if you're too busy denying the grief exists.

There's a difference between mourning and despair. Mourning acknowledges loss honestly while holding hope. Despair sees only loss with no hope. Paul wrote: "We do not grieve like the rest of mankind, who have no hope" (1 Thessalonians 4:13). Notice - we do grieve. Christians aren't immune to sorrow. But we grieve differently because we grieve with hope.

What are you mourning? Maybe it's an actual death - a person you loved who's gone. Maybe it's a relationship that ended, a dream that died, a future that won't happen, an innocence that was stolen. Maybe it's the gap between life as you hoped it would be and life as it actually is. All of these deserve mourning.

But we're often too busy to mourn properly. We distract ourselves with work, numb ourselves with entertainment, medicate ourselves with substances or shopping or scrolling. We do anything except sit with the pain and let ourselves feel it fully. We're terrified that if we start crying we might never stop, that if we acknowledge how much it hurts we'll be overwhelmed.

Jesus didn't avoid mourning. "Jesus wept" (John 11:35) at Lazarus's tomb - even though he knew he was about to raise Lazarus from death. He mourned honestly even knowing resurrection was coming. He didn't skip the grief to get to the miracle. He honored the pain even while holding hope for healing.

Blessed are those who mourn - not because mourning is pleasant but because it's honest, and honesty is the first step toward healing. You can't move past what you won't move through. You can't get over what you won't go through. The only way out is through - through the grief, through the pain, through the honest acknowledgment of how much it hurts.

And here's the promise: those who mourn will be comforted. Not immediately, not on your timeline, but genuinely. God doesn't minimize your pain or rush your process. He sits with you in it, weeps with you through it, and eventually - in his timing - brings comfort that's real because it acknowledges the pain was real too.