Pray for Jesus

When one prays for a bereaved person, one must do so with certain understandings: There is, in one sense, no help for her. She cannot have the thing she wants. She also cannot feel less agony over it, and there is a good way in which she does not even want to, because she knows the facts.

Pray for her to be strengthened rather than injured in her faith, and at least as much, pray for Jesus.

Pray for Jesus not in the interest of Jesus, but for the purpose of Jesus. Pray that He would come back. Pray that this would be the hour when the Father looks on the face of His beautiful Boy and bids Him to stretch out His hand,

the hand that gave sight to the blind, 

the hand that blessed five loaves to feed five thousand,

the hand that lay freely on the crossbeam,

and roll up human history into one little scroll to be shelved in eternity's stacks.

Pray for Jesus to rend the heavens wide, to come with clouds descending, to come and bring pleasure eternal

to raise the dead incorruptible

that we would meet Him in the clouds;

that the thing we all know must be true,

that there is no flipping way a human being can cease to exist

would come to us also.