No Map of the Valley
It occurs to me the Bible never offers us a map of the valley of the shadow of death. The places where the Wisdom literature, or the Psalms of Lament, run right up against our grief, pain, and loss are long on candor and short on answers. The Psalmists alternate between confession, complaint, and trust. Sometimes they curse their enemies. Job wants to file charges against God. Some of the Prophets wish God would just get it over with already. Some of them die in Exile, receiving no more than visions of Jerusalem restored. Of all the things the Bible is, it most emphatically is not a self-help manual. There's no plan for walking through grief, no promise that if you do x, y, and z, it will all be better in the morning. What we get instead is a promise God will not abandon us, given to people who had lost everything. The Assyrian and Babylonian conquests and the exiles which followed shattered the Hebrews' world. Into such cataclysm, God speaks. The servant songs in Isaiah s...