Scripture includes an interesting (and somewhat disturbing) verse I’ve always wondered about: “Though [the Lord] brings grief, he also shows compassion because of the greatness of his unfailing love.”  (Lamentations 3:32)

Most of us think of God as a grief-healer, not a grief-bringer. People have said to me, “The heartaches you’re experiencing have all filtered through God’s loving fingers.”

I can’t say those words have ever brought comfort, though they have spoken the truth. But that verse from Lamentations goes one step further than admitting our grieving comes to us filtered through God’s hands. It says that he sometimes brings it.

This is tough to swallow. Why would God do that? Why would he initiate grief?

Maybe the answer is in the second half of the verse where it says he shows compassion and has unfailing love toward us. The experience of grief feels more like being set out in the cold than being covered with compassion, but maybe God’s version of compassion somehow includes grief.

In the deepest part of my grieving for Nate, the tears and deep sobs that came out of me that first dark winter were, in a way, a strange kind of relief from the constant heartache. I’ve said many times in these blog posts that Nate never told me not to cry, because he believed each new cry let some of the sadness out.

I’ve heard the same thing from others since then, and I firmly believe it. During my first winter without Nate, I’d walk Jack around the neighborhood late at night and bawl almost uncontrollably. And 40 minutes later as we walked back into the house, me with mascara running and eyes swollen, I felt slightly better.

Maybe the Lamentations verse is trying to teach us that the whole process of grieving is God’s pressure valve for our hearts. Without experiencing the heartache, tears, sobbing, and moaning, we’d be so bottled up inside we’d practically burst. And thus the “unfailing love” part makes sense.

We get additional clues in the next verse: “[The Lord] does not enjoy hurting people or causing them sorrow.” The NIV says he doesn’t “willingly bring grief to anyone.” In other words, God wasn’t the one who willingly brought death, injury, disease, and dysfunction of all kinds into our world.

His original desire was that nothing about our lives would cause grief. But then sin entered, and all of the above grief-causers came with it. He needed a way to help us through, and the grieving process as we know it, is it.

I don’t think there’s any other way to interpret those two verses, because I truly believe God when he says he loves with unfailing love.

“Let the one who walks in the dark, who has no light, trust in the name of the LORD and rely on their God.” (Isa. 50:10)