You Wept With Us

You Wept With Us

(“When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who came with her weeping, He groaned in the spirit and was troubled.” John 11:33)

“It’s not time,” they said, “to change the way we see things.”
“It’s not time to answer the questions that plague us like parasites.”
They were right, of course. The answers whirled around the
early evening shadows that were longer than that exposed the
insane preoccupation with ignoring the obvious.
Death is death, there is no other way to explain it.
Underneath each breath, surrounding each tear like a
trapeze artist flying high, unspoken groans gave vent to
inexpressible holes left inside each heart that ever lost
the unimaginable. Now that hole in our heart weighed us down
like an iron anchor hitched to the ground.

I’m sorry we expected you so early. I apologize for pursuing
you. Our tears had not let up for the four days since he
fainted casually dead. We sat with him in his sickness but
we never imagined he would live us without a concrete goodbye.
It’s not time,” they said, “to change our awkward lives.”
It's not time to ask why we always lost the questions with
holes in our pockets.
The day began with sighs and groans and you showed up and
wept with us. You wept with us.
The pangs we felt like swords in our chest were pangs he
took upon himself. He mirrored our grief,
he reflected our heartache, he took our sorrow as his own.

We followed him to the grave as we craved his company.
The sun was setting and we wondered where his weeping
would carry us. We watched in anticipation as the tomb was
opened and his words; brief as a summer shower, invited life
to walk out of the grave like the earth giving birth.