When Morning Comes...
The Quiet Grief that Lives Between Forgetting and Remembering
I told you about the nights, but nobody really warns you about the mornings. And the more I think about it, the more I suspect the morning might actually be the harder of the two.
At night, at least, you know what is coming. You learn that the dark has teeth, that the quiet begins to grow loud somewhere around two in the morning, and that the other side of the bed will be cold in a way that has nothing to do with temperature. Night is difficult, but in a strange way it is also predictable. After a while you begin to recognize its rhythms, and you can brace yourself for it.
Morning is different. Morning sneaks up on you. It arrives in that fragile space between sleep and waking, that thin moment when your mind has not quite caught up with your life yet. For just a moment, maybe half a moment, you forget. And then you remember.
That remembering, every single morning, carries its own kind of loss. It is a small grief inside the larger one, like being told the news again, quietly and without ceremony, just long enough to knock the wind out of you before the day has even properly begun. Nobody warns you about that moment, the brief forgetting followed by the sudden remembering. It might last only ten seconds, but it can feel like the loneliest ten seconds of the whole day.
Eventually you get up anyway, because what else is there to do. And once you do, you begin to notice that morning has its own geography of grief.
The coffee pot is usually the first place it appears. If you spent years sharing life with someone, the coffee pot seems to know the story before you do. It is still set for two. You may find yourself reaching automatically for two mugs before your hand stops in midair. Or you make a full pot because that is what you have always done, and now half of it goes cold on the counter.
The bathroom carries its own quiet ambush. His razor still rests on the shelf. Her robe still hangs on the hook. You have not moved them yet, partly because moving them feels like a decision you are not ready to make, and partly because leaving them there allows you to pretend, just for another day, that nothing has changed. The problem, of course, is that leaving them there means you see them every single morning.
There is no good option, only the one you can manage today.
The chair at the kitchen table that nobody sits in anymore. The second toothbrush. The voicemail you have not deleted because it still carries her voice, and you are not ready for that silence yet.
Morning is full of objects that used to mean nothing and now mean everything. Over time they begin to feel like something else entirely. Monuments, maybe. Small ones. Quiet ones. Devastating ones.
Here is something else about morning that takes a while to notice. The world does not pause for it.
At first that can feel almost cruel. The birds outside the window continue singing as if nothing has changed. The neighbor pulls out of the driveway at the same time he always does. The mail still arrives in the afternoon. Someone down the street is mowing the lawn, and for a moment you want to step outside and ask how it is possible that ordinary life is still happening.
Life just keeps moving. The audacity of it can feel almost offensive.
And yet, after standing at enough gravesides and sitting with enough families during the early days of their loss, I have begun to notice something about mornings. Morning is often where the story quietly begins to turn. Not because the grief has disappeared. It has not. Not because the pain suddenly lifts with the rising sun. It does not, at least not for a long time.
But morning carries a kind of stubbornness that night does not have. A quiet persistence that shows up whether you invited it or not.
There is a story in the Gospel of John that has always stayed with me. Mary goes to the tomb at dawn. Not midday when the sun is high, and not later in the afternoon when the world might feel a little less fragile. She goes at dawn, in that earliest and most uncertain light, when it would have been easier and perhaps more sensible to stay home. But she goes anyway, carrying her grief like something she cannot set down.
And it is there, in that dim morning light, that she discovers the story is not finished. That moment did not erase any of it — the tomb was real, the death was real, the grief was real — but morning held something she could not have imagined while the night was still heavy around her.
I am not going to paper over anyone’s grief with a resurrection metaphor. Your loss is real. The empty chair is real. The cold coffee is real. But I do believe that morning carries something within it. It carries a stubbornness and with that, a quiet insistence that the story is still being written.
Maybe that is what grace looks like in the early days of loss. Not comfort exactly and not answers. Certainly not the feeling that everything is suddenly okay, because everything is not okay and pretending otherwise helps no one.
Sometimes grace simply looks like morning. Morning arriving again, uninvited and persistent, refusing to not show up. The coffee pot still working. The birds outside the window completely unaware of your pain. The light coming through the same window it always has, landing on the floor in the same place as yesterday, as if it has not yet heard the news.
At first that can feel like cruelty.
But maybe it is not.
Maybe it is the world quietly insisting that there is still a day here. And that day, however fragile it feels, still belongs to you.
You do not have to be okay in the morning. Not yet. Maybe not for a long time. You are allowed to sit with the second mug still resting on the counter. You are allowed to let the coffee grow cold. You are allowed to stay in the chair by the window longer than is practical, watching the neighbor mow his lawn and feeling the strange distance between his world and yours.
You are allowed to let morning be hard.
But here is something I have learned from watching people carry this weight. Morning keeps coming back. Every single day it arrives without asking permission and without checking whether you feel ready for it.
It simply appears again, faithful in a way that almost feels stubborn.
And somewhere inside that stubborn return there is a kind of grace. Not the grace that fixes things, but the grace that stays. The grace that quietly says, I know you did not sleep well. I know you forgot for a moment and then remembered. I know the coffee pot broke your heart again this morning.
Here is a little more light anyway.
The Unlikely Altar this time might simply be the window, the same window the light comes through every morning, landing in the same place on the floor.
It does not know your grief. It cannot fix your grief.
But it shows up anyway.
And maybe, just for today, that small and stubborn light is enough to help you begin again.
The only ticket I could get to watch The Odyssey was for an 8:00 showing on a Sunday morning. I walked into a theater that seats at least a couple of hundred people, and for a time I had the place to myself. Eventually, I counted about 8 of us in that theater. I guess most of the city was either sleeping or getting dressed for church. As the credits rolled, I had a revelation that made me chuckle. I thought I was skipping church, but what I discovered was something different. I didn’t skip church at all; I was simply sitting in a different sanctuary. You see, the movie's message was similar to the one I had preached for some 30 years as a United Methodist pastor. Somewhere between the gods and monsters, the storms and shipwrecks, and one weary man rowing across a dark sea, something clicked. The Odyssey isn't really a story about a war. It isn't even a story about a voyage. It's a story about a man who wants to go home. Amazing! A story that has survived for nearly three thousand years is built around one of the simplest longings we know. Odysseus has already tasted glory, and it cost him almost everything. He doesn't want another victory. He wants his house, his wife, his son and his dog. He wants to lay his head on the pillow in his own bed. More than anything else, he wants to stop being away. He simply wants to go home. As I sat there, another thought surfaced. Christopher Nolan seems to tell this same story over and over again. In Interstellar , Cooper crosses galaxies trying to find his way back to his children. In Inception , Cobb cannot go home until he faces the guilt he's spent years outrunning. Bruce Wayne eventually discovers that saving Gotham isn't enough if he never learns how to live as Bruce Wayne. Even Oppenheimer becomes the story of a man who creates something so world-changing that he can never truly return to the person he once was. Different men and different genres of movies, but all with the same ache and yearning. Which made me wonder if this homesickness isn't really about geography at all. Maybe it's the oldest ache we carry. Maybe underneath our ambition, our fear, our success, our failures, and even our regrets lives one quiet prayer. I want to go home. However we define it. Whatever it costs to get there. This longing, this ache doesn't just show up in movie theaters. It shows up everywhere people tell stories, including some of the oldest ones we have. There's a scene early in the Exodus story where a fugitive named Moses, a man who has been running for decades, hides out as a shepherd in the middle of nowhere. One day, he comes across a bush that's burning without burning up. A voice tells him to take off his sandals. Most sermons I've heard focus on the holiness of the ground, and I think that's certainly part of the story. But I also wonder if something else is happening too. Think about what we do when we finally get home. We take off our shoes. We stop looking over our shoulder. We rest. We breathe. Maybe, after years of running, Moses wasn't just standing on holy ground. Maybe he was finally home. That raises a question that's been following me ever since I left the theater. What is home? For some of us, home is another person. Maybe it's a relationship that needs tending, or a conversation that has waited too long. Maybe it's reconciliation. Or maybe it's making peace with the fact that reconciliation will never happen this side of heaven. For others, home is something deeper than any single relationship. It's the quiet conviction that our lives were made for something, or perhaps Someone, greater than ourselves. As a celebrant, I've sat with hundreds of families after someone they loved has died. It's remarkable what they remember. They don't tell stories about promotions or investment accounts. They remember kitchen tables. Fishing trips. The old recliner nobody else was allowed to sit in. Saturday mornings making pancakes. The sound of someone's laugh coming from another room. In other words, they remember home. Not because of the house. Because of the belonging. Maybe that's the ache hiding underneath all our other aches. We chase it in careers, hoping the next promotion will finally quiet the restlessness. We chase it in relationships, believing the right person can answer every question we carry. We chase it in bigger houses, as though more square footage could somehow create belonging. And every once in a while, if we're honest, we chase it in stories. We sit in dark rooms and watch a man row across a sea for ten years, or a father claw his way through time toward a little girl's bedroom, or a fugitive stumble onto a bush that won't stop burning — and something in us leans forward, because some part of us recognizes the ache. We've felt it too. I didn't go looking for any of this. I just wanted to see a movie by my favorite director. But that's usually how it goes, isn't it? The sacred rarely makes an appointment. It doesn't wait for a sanctuary with stained glass and a bulletin. Sometimes it just shows up in a mostly empty theater at 8:00 on a Sunday morning, hiding inside a three-thousand-year-old poem about a man rowing toward home. An Unlikely Altar, if there ever was one.
There's someone I think about almost every time I pick up the phone. I don't know her. I've never met her. But she's out there somewhere, waiting in a future neither of us can see. Let's call her Susan . Susan might be your spouse. Your son or daughter. Your sister, your nephew, your best friend, or the neighbor who's always been more like family than family. She might not even be the person you'd name today. Life has a way of deciding those things for us. Whoever she is, she'll be standing in the room when the worst day comes. And it will come. Not because I'm trying to be grim about it, just because that's the deal every one of us signed up for the day we were born. None of us get out of here without leaving someone behind to clean up after we're gone. So pause for just a moment and picture her. It's the morning after you've died. The casseroles haven't arrived yet, and neither have the flowers. The phone won't stop ringing, and sleep, well, that's been impossible. Every conversation feels unreal. Then comes the call to the funeral home. Does she even know which funeral home to call? Does she know what you wanted? Burial or cremation? A church service? What music did you want played? Does she know where your important papers are? Then comes the question few people are truly ready for: "How will you be taking care of the funeral expenses?" Susan wasn't expecting that question quite so soon. And when someone asks that question, does she already have an answer? Or does she begin making phone calls she never wanted to make, hoping someone in the family can somehow pull everything together? I've seen that with more families than I can count, both as a pastor and as a celebrant. And it's not because families don't love each other. It's because nobody got around to it. After all, death always feels like a someday problem until it's a today problem, and by then it's Susan's problem, not yours. That's why I do what I do today. I still stand with families after a death as a celebrant. I also help them prepare before that day ever comes. Can I tell you something I don't say very often? Selling insurance was never part of my plan. For most of my life, I've met families after someone died. I've stood beside hospital beds, in funeral homes, and at gravesides. I've listened to stories, held hands, and tried to help people find solid ground when their world had just been turned upside down. This work came later, and if I'm honest, there are still days it feels like an odd fit. Not because I don't believe in what a policy can do, but because I'm afraid of becoming someone who sounds more interested in making a sale than helping a family. For a while, that fear got the better of me. I'd call people who had asked for information, and many never answered. Some insisted they hadn't filled out a form. A few cussed me out and hung up before I could even introduce myself. After enough of those conversations, I started wondering if anyone really wanted to hear from me. So I pretty much stopped calling. I told myself I'd get back to it eventually. Then I did a funeral. The family hadn't planned for any of it, and by the time I sat down with them, they were already scrambling to cover the cost. Thank God, the funeral home was willing to work with the family so they could move forward. As I listened to that family share their story, I realized something. When I pick up the phone, it isn't really about insurance. It never had been. It was about that family. It is about every daughter, every son, every husband, every wife, every friend who finds themselves sitting at a kitchen table trying to solve a financial problem while their heart is breaking. That's when I understood why I needed to pick up the phone again. The people who hang up on me aren't really the reason I call. The reason I call is the one person who answers. The one conversation that happens before a crisis rather than during one. The one family that gets to spend its energy remembering someone they love instead of wondering how they'll pay for saying goodbye. That's worth every unanswered call. So if your phone rings and you see my name, I hope you'll know something. I'm not calling because I see you as a policy. I'm calling because I've met your Susan. I may not know her name, but I know she'll be there. I'd rather have an awkward conversation today than watch someone you love carry a burden you could have lifted. Grief is heavy enough. Love can't stop death, but love can make sure the people left behind don't have to carry everything alone. So before we ever talk about insurance, here's the only question that really matters: Who's your Susan? Find that person. Picture their face. Then ask yourself, "If today were the day everything changed, would they be okay?" Not okay because they wouldn't miss you. They will. Not okay because they wouldn't grieve. They will. But okay because, in the middle of the hardest week of their life, they would know that one of your final acts of love was making sure they weren't left to figure it all out alone. That's what I believe this work is really about. Helping people love well, even after they're gone. After all, every story leaves someone behind.
Throughout the pages of Scripture, two worlds run alongside each other like parallel tracks that never quite meet. There is the world that exists. The one we wake up in every morning. The one where the poor in spirit are overlooked, where those who mourn are told to move on, where the meek get pushed aside and the hungry stay hungry and mercy is rationed out to the people who deserve it. This is the world most of us have learned to navigate, the one we have made our peace with, the one we have quietly decided is simply the way things are. And then there is the world God desires. The world that was always meant to be. The one where the last are first and the broken are held and the overlooked are seen and the hungry are filled and mercy flows without a ledger. The world where shalom — that untranslatable Hebrew wholeness — is not a distant hope but the actual texture of daily life. Jesus sat down on a hillside and spent eight statements describing that second world. And then He preached a sermon that turned the first one upside down and inside out. We have been sitting on that hillside together for a while now. Seven posts and seven altars along with seven announcements of a world that God desires. And now Jesus says — it will cost you . Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. This is the last beatitude. And it is the only one that comes with a warning. Everything before this has been an announcement and an invitation. Come as you are. Drop the mask. Show mercy. Make peace. Be a thermostat. The kingdom of God is breaking into the world, and you are invited to be part of it. But now Jesus looks at that crowd — that tired, hoping, half-believing crowd — and tells them the truth about what joining this revolution actually costs. Because it is a revolution. You don't begin a revolution with warm and fuzzy words. The writers of the Declaration of Independence pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor. Jesus is asking for something in the same territory. Now for most of us the cost will not be physical. We are not the countless men and women around the world who are beaten, imprisoned or killed for the name they carry. Their courage is in a category that humbles everything else. But Jesus is also talking to ordinary people living ordinary lives in ordinary places. And He is telling us that when we start living the beatitudes — when we show favor to the overlooked, when we invite the marginalized in, when we practice mercy and purity and peace — we will pay a price. Maybe not with our bodies. But with our comfort. or our status or our carefully managed reputations. We might get pushed to the margins ourselves. We might get passed over and excluded. And Jesus says — "Blessed! I am still on your side. I will meet you there." Last June I posted blogs about Pride Month. I did so because I believed they needed to be posted. I believe in the dignity of my friends in the LGBTQ community. I believe they have a place at the table. I believe that when Jesus looked at that hillside full of people the religious system had pushed to the margins, He was looking at them too. I posted. And then the negative hateful comments came. And I went quiet. I convinced myself I was avoiding conflict. I told myself it wasn't the right moment. I told myself a lot of things that sounded reasonable in the moment and hollow in the days that followed. The truth is simpler and less flattering than any of that. I calculated the cost. And I decided it was too high. I was a thermometer. I adjusted to the temperature of the room instead of setting it. And the people I care about — the ones who had every reason to expect me to stay loud — watched me go silent. To my friends in the LGBTQ community — I am sorry. You deserved better from me. You deserved someone who meant it all the way through, not just when it was easy. The silence was a failure and I own it. I don't say that to make this post about me. I say it because this beatitude will not let me off the hook. And here is what Jesus says to do when the cost arrives, which is the part that has stayed with me longer than anything else in this entire series of beatitudes. He says rejoice and be glad. And here is the Unlikely Altar for this last one, and it is different from every altar we have visited in this series, because it is not a place you can photograph or a moment that happens to you while you are standing at a gas station or sitting at a graveside or watching a baseball game. It is something you do. It is the comment you type and actually post when the easier thing would be to scroll past. It is the moment in a meeting when something wrong is happening and you are the one who says so, knowing full well what it will cost you before the words are even out of your mouth. It is the June when you stay loud after the pushback comes instead of going quiet and telling yourself reasonable-sounding things that feel hollow three days later. That moment, ordinary and unremarkable, probably witnessed by nobody who would think to circle it on a calendar and call it holy, is exactly where the world God desires breaks into the world that exists. That is the revolution Jesus started on a hillside when He began calling the wrong people blessed. And He is still looking for ordinary people who want to join it, not the brave ones and the heroic ones and the ones who have already figured out how to make it look easy, but the ordinary ones who calculate the cost and decide to pay it anyway, even when they have failed to pay it before, even when the silence is still fresh enough to sting. The kingdom is closer than you think. Sometimes it looks like a bench. Sometimes a grave. Sometimes a bunt in the ninth inning, a bag of cold fries, a cheering section full of strangers, a mask finally laid down, or a box of ashes sitting quietly in a closet. And sometimes it looks like an ordinary person deciding that grace is worth the cost. May we know, may we remember, may we never forget — the God who announced grace to the overlooked, who stood at the grave and said I am with you, who cheered the names of the forgotten, who loved the face beneath the mask, who kept moving toward the ones who kept saying no — that God is on your side when the room goes cold and the cost turns out to be real and the leap feels more like a stumble than anything graceful.