Esther 4:1-3

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Esther 4:1-3 
English Standard Version (ESV)

  Sometimes, I think the world needs more mourning.
  We're good at outrage, although much of the world's outrage is so social media focused that it doesn't actually change much in the world.  I'm not a big believer that signing an online petition really does much difference, although I'm sure that it does every now and again.
  We're good at cynicism as well.  We've seen so many public leaders, including many, many church leaders, fall from the towers we've placed them on (or perhaps they've ascended on their own).  We've heard so many promises and often seen so little progress that we approach much with a healthy (and in my own case, unhealthy) amount of skepticism.
  But I don't know how often we truly mourn.  When we see brokenness in the world, when we experience death and loss in our lives, do we truly stop and weep for what was lost?  When death and loss break into our own carefully ordered lives, life can grind to a halt, and our sphere of friends and family will usually slow down for a little while with us, but life continues forward, and many people push onward, often encouraging us to get over it and move on well before we're ready.  We need to remember how to mourn, how to pay attention to the broken things in the world and how they often break something in us.  We need to stop and weep, because in weeping and mourning we remember that things are not how they're supposed to be, that the world is corrupted and it's terrible, but we have a hope in a Savior who has shown the path through death and will lead us into life.
  There is great loss in the world, and we should slow down and recognize how it tears us apart and it separates us and it's painful -- in recognizing the wounds, we're better able to discover how grief separates us and come together to find eventual healing.  In mourning, we weep for what was lost and look to God for a restoration in the days to come, a restoration that can come only from God.