Make us one, Lord!

In Heidi, I find it ironic that they call him "AlmUncle" {Uncle of my soul?} Soul-Uncle? Still, their considerations were that his sins had found him out, in his grief and that he had received some just deserts for his earlier sins that they weren't privy to. What a horrible direction in grief? Still, it often is the case that the Christian position is to remind the grieving soul of their ultimate consequence.

I hardly think it the focus of the soul to itself in grief. But, on the goodness and mercy of God.

It is of the Lord's mercy that we are not consumed, because His compassions fail not. They are new, like the dew... Great is Thy Faithfulness!

I have found in my grieving, that even though my conscience is instructed on this from earliest of life, that is the first truth to vanish in grief. The goodness of God, the mercy of God and the love of God vanish under the severity of God, in grievous conditions.

So many times I awoke in post-partum to look at the baby and think that they were changing color before my eyes and going septic, like baby Benjamin did. The Holy Spirit would minister to my soul, but everytime I would see another person the fear would be that they would touch the sensitive area that would cause the tears to start, which I couldn't stop, once started. I am sure that AlmUncle had such a fear. Thus the curmudgeonic cycle. There is no way to know what of their unwitting conversation would spark the tears. You simply cannot wrap your entire body to show your grief. You cannot close your ears to their supposed comforts and many a comforting beginning conversation travels quickly into a crushing blow about some other sin or transgression that might have drawn God's wrath upon your head, as your own conscience supposes.

God is sovereign. My comfort, by the time I was grieving in Enoch's birth, was that God doesn't always kill, sometimes he has not allowed some to die at all.

Enoch walked with God and he was not, for God took him.{not enduring death}

That was some comfort, for a while.

There are awful, spiteful thoughts of God that encrust the grieving, bereft heart. They are certainly a fountain of spiritual pollution. I can imagine that God's mercy to AlmUncle and to the deserted community of grief that lived around AlmUncle would get some comfort from the innocent and simple eyes of little Heidi. She was the look of a time when faith in the soul were new. Her heart wasn't yet full of the pollutions of soul that had become the daily swamp of living for that poor deserted soul.

God's Church can reach to the heart of grief, because God has given it liberty into those forsaken regions. Lord, grant comfort, In Jesus' Name, Amen.