"Can a woman forget her nursing infant? And have no compassion on the child she has borne? Though she may forget, I will not forget you."

Isaiah 49:15

I had been in my new church just a few weeks and was making my rounds, getting acquainted. Not very many minutes into a visit, Lois began telling me about the great hole in her life left by the death of her daughter, Angela. Her grief was as sharp and fresh as if Angela had died just yesterday.

I listened closely as details spilled out. Angela had been a beautiful girl, sweet, thoughtful. It was a hot summer day. She and some friends had gone to the lake. She had drowned.

It did not quite make sense to me. The way Lois talked, I was sure the accident had occurred only a short time ago. But Angela sounded like a teenager. And Lois was 80 years old. Finally Lois mentioned the detail I had been listening for. Angela had died on her 16th birthday, more than 40 years before.

A mother's heart does not forget. Her grief does not go away.

According to traditional Christian teaching, when someone dies, he or she goes immediately into the presence of God or enters the torments of hell. In this view, before death God is limited in his interaction with people by the illusions and frailty of our bodily existence. When a believer dies, death heals this separation and leads immediately to the joy of unhindered spiritual fellowship between God and his children. So for God, death is a great boon. It is the door to heaven. We who are left bereft on earth may be racked by grief, but God's heart is gladdened by the homeward flight of his child.

The Adventist understanding of what happens when people die paints an entirely different picture of God. When someone dies, the person stops interacting with God through prayer, worship and obedience. Certainly the person is not lost to the heart or memory of God. But as an active, thinking, loving, talking human being, the person no longer exists. In the language of the Bible, the person "sleeps" (John 11:11-14). A dead person has no awareness of time or waiting. The person remains unconscious until the resurrection. At the second coming all God's people are united and taken en masse into the presence of God. They all arrive at the heavenly party together (Heb 11:39, 40).

In this view, God himself is deprived of the living companionship of a person who dies–along with the grieving family and friends. Instead of death being a boon to God, death robs God of the worship of his people (Ps 115:17). When people die, the heavenly Father no longer hears the voices of his children in praise and prayer. He has memories to cherish and a future to anticipate, but he is not in fellowship with their vital, interactive "souls."

In the story of Jesus' friend, Lazarus, we read that moments before Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead, he wept. Given Jesus' divinity, this incident portrays God's identification with human pain. Jesus knew that Lazarus was not going to remain dead. Still, the heartbreak of his friends brought Jesus himself to tears. It is a truism that when children hurt, their moms and dads hurt as much as or more than the young ones. And God, our heavenly parent, hurts for his children. When grief batters our hearts and wets our eyes, God hurts because we hurt. But there is more to God's grief than that.

God's grief is not only the response of his heart to the arrows of pain that wound us. God himself is wounded by the separation caused by death. Death interrupts God's own conversation with his child. God bears the emotional cost of the system he has designed and allows to continue even in its broken condition. When it comes to enduring pain, God asks nothing of us he does not require of himself.

This perspective of God as a grieving parent has large implications for how we view the "delay of the Advent." Why hasn't Jesus returned as he promised? What's taking so long? Explanations include: God is waiting because he wants to save more people. He is waiting for some predetermined time. He waits for evil to reach its full flower or for the gospel to be preached in all the world or for the character of Christ to be perfectly reproduced in his people.

Each of these theories has something to recommend it, and each has problems. The Adventist understanding of the nature of death does not answer the question, "Why does God wait?" It does, however, change the emotional content of the question. In addition to asking why God doesn't hurry up and rescue us from our trouble (a very good and proper question), this picture of God's grief prompts us to ask, "Why doesn't God spare himself?" If the redeemed are sleeping, waiting the great resurrection morning described so vividly in the New Testament, then every day God delays the second coming is another day he carries the wounds of a bereaved parent. Since God loves every human more intensely than a mother loves her only child, the Adventist understanding of death is a picture of a brokenhearted God.

In the traditional view of death, there is little motivation for God to bring human history to an end. Every day God is welcoming children home. But in the Adventist view, every day that passes adds to the grief that weighs on God's heart. God does not ask us to bear burdens he himself does not carry. He does not encourage us to be brave in the face of pain that he himself does not feel.

I remember listening to a funeral sermon at a funeral in Akron, Ohio. On the front row were four or five kids, siblings of an eight-year-old boy who was killed when the front wheel of his bicycle hit a rock and threw him in front of a car.

The preacher spoke directly to the young people on the front row. "Try not to take your brother's death too hard. I know you miss him, but God needed him up in heaven and that's why he took him. God must have some very important job in mind for your brother up there. Stay close to Jesus and someday you'll join your brother in heaven, and he'll show you around the New Jerusalem and tell you all about what he's been doing while you were down here working for Jesus."

The pastor was doing what a pastor is supposed to do–mining the spiritual and theological resources of his community for all the comfort and solace he could find. But I was appalled at the implications of his words.

"So are you telling me," I imagined shouting, "that every time God runs low on kitchen help in the heavenly cafeteria he throws rocks in front of little kids' bike tires? Is God really that hard up for help in heaven? What kind of God is that?"

This view, if true, would mean our deepest wounds bring great joy to God. People who are the most lovable and leave the greatest hole here on earth when they die, bring instant joy in the courts of heaven. We on earth bear all the cost of improving heaven's workforce.

The traditional view of death does offer some comfort. It places those who have died in a good place, far from all pain. And this traditional view accurately describes the experience of the person who dies. When a believer dies, the very next moment in their experience will be the resurrection and the presence of God. The time in the grave that is felt all too keenly by grieving survivors does not exist in the experience of the one who has died.

The Adventist view, on the other hand, addresses the reality of pain confronted by those who are still alive. For those who survive the death of a loved one, the immediate reality is grief and hurt. And in every death, one of the survivors, one of the mourners, is God himself. There is no benefit for God in the death of his children. He is not knocking off children to fill the heavenly kitchens or choirs. He does not forget our grief in the great joy of his communion with his children who have escaped into his presence from their earthly prisons. Instead God enters the very depths of our grief. In fact, our purest, deepest grief is but a faint reflection of God's grief. If we are able to receive it, the pain of our grief is a stern education concerning the depth and intensity of God's love.