It is too early, but I could not stop myself — I picked up N.T. Wrights, Christians at the Cross on Monday.  It is a little book of sermons given Easter week in Easington Colliery, a very broken former mining community in England (you may know a version of it from the film Billy Elliott).  The mine closed in 1994, taking with it both the primary employer and primary source of income.  By 2007, when Wright visited there, the signs of broken shalom were everywhere, with former family abodes now being used for drug shacks, and teenage pregnancy, poverty, and obesity at appalling levels.  Wright went there to join with the Council in asking what does restoring broken community look like in this situation?

In the introduction, he writes,

“…part of the problem may be in the difficulty of moving forwards when all the symbols and local culture are pointing back.  As with an individual who has lost someone they love, part of the point of the process of grief, painful and horrible though it is, is to enable the person eventually to look about them, draw a deep breath, and make some new starts.

This isn’t just a matter of ‘moving on,’ in the fashionable jargon.  It’s a matter of looking the past in the face, owning up to the grief which we often hide, and so laying a more solid foundation for what may be to come.  I decided therefore that it was worth spending some time in facing the multiple bereavements of Easington Colliery and in weaving them together with the story of all stories, the story of Jesus on his way to the cross.  As I say more than once in what follows, I have no blueprint for what might or should happen next.  If God is at work he wil do what he will do, and his purposes are always full of surprises.  But I am convinced that when we bring our griefs and sorrows within the story of God’s own grief and sorrow, and allow them to be held there, God is able to bring healing to us and new possibilities to our lives.  That is, of course, what Good Friday and Easter are all about.”

Wright’s words are so helpful in that they acknowledge that we do not know the exact path grief will take.  Furthermore, we are often plodding one day at a time through this uncertainty of grief, asking those ‘how long’ and ‘why’ questions.  And yet, there is one thing we can do — keep laying our griefs and sorrows at the feet of the One who knows grief and sorrow more deeply than we can ever imagine.  And in that, let us be prepared, no — expectant — of God’s meeting us with a resurrection surprise!