inevitable comparison

Happier were the victims of the sword

than the victims of hunger,

who wasted away, pierced

by lack of the fruits of the field.

Lamentations 4:9

In the aftermath of the destruction of Jerusalem, Jeremiah, in grief and lament, makes a painful and poetic comparison. Two horrors haunted him in the chaos. The first was the horror of the dead left from the war. The army of Israel was decimated. There were no able-bodied men left to defend a city in ruins. Most had fallen at the sword of the invaders. In Jeremiah’s mind those were the “happier” ones… the dead could rest. To be pitied were those left behind to starve in the rubble.

The refugees were gaunt, decimated physically, and traumatized. They were starving and humiliated. Some had done unthinkable things during the long siege. Some had even eaten their own children to survive. In comparing the “happy dead” with the “traumatized survivors”, Jeremiah does what we often do in grief. We try to make meaning from the messages. In so doing we often get a disturbingly wrong picture.

Comparison in grief kills any progress toward healing and repentance. At least that is what it does for me. It gets the grieving soul in a stuck place. It traumatizes and freezes the images in our brains. I tend to fight this comparison battle in three “tenses”:

1) PAST TENSE. I compare my life now to what once was not so long ago. I pine away for the past… even last year at this time seems so glorious. Instead of embracing the treasure of great memories and gifts from God, I enshrine the trauma of losing them. It is a kind of worship of pain. It is insidiously seductive, temporarily soothing, but spiritually numbing. This gets me nowhere. HOW I FIGHT IT: I must confront it when it creeps into my thinking. I must look to God, His Word, and accept a new present that will rework a better future.

2) PRESENT TENSE. I compare myself to others, usually married friends. This is often very prideful and judgmental of me… just to get that out there so you know how sinful any person, even one in grief, can be. If I know of a marriage conflict, I tell myself how stupid they are for fighting with each other. I pass my judgment on them, forgetting Joni and I had our conflicts to manage, repent from, and grow closer by resolving. This comparison makes me Pharisaical and my grief becomes “my law” that then gives me “the right” to exist as a wicked judge. HOW I FIGHT IT: I must repent of this sort of comparison as well. I must accept the reality that mine was an imperfect marriage too, and that it only gave me so many pleasant memories because of what Jesus did to make it thrive.

3) FUTURE TENSE. I only see my present hunger and what I’ve lost, so even thoughts of my future seem to be impossible to accept. Future hope exists as a kind of doctrinal statement, fuzzy at best, when I dwell on my unhappiness. I overlay my pain with the future and even though God has blessed me with some bright hopes… I forget them, or I minimize them. Really, when I am honest, I am choosing unbelief. I WANT to see God bring a bright future (even in what earthly life I have left), to restore joy and relationship, but there is still a lot of rubble I am stumbling through. This hampers my faith. HOW I FIGHT IT: I must saturate my thinking with the vision of the Kingdom to come! That is my hope! That is my future! That is what God will remake this life to experience.