A date on the calendar.
An unexpected run-in at the grocery store.
Something that makes you laugh and want to share.
You find yourself reaching for your phone.
For a split second, you forget they're gone.
Then you remember.
Those dates keep passing. The cards and calls and casseroles stop arriving. You find a new routine. Well-meaning folks ask how you're doing, and you find answers that will not make them uncomfortable, which stories you can tell without the awkward silence.
Grief requires energy.
Remembering can sometimes hurt.
And as time passes, the people around us give subtle signals that it’s time to move on.
The world around us keeps spinning.
In a thousand unspoken ways we hear the same message – Get over it.
But Scripture does not tell us to get over it.
The Bible does not demand that we capitulate to the world’s timeline.
First Samuel introduces two distinct markers—two monuments, two names—that defy the demand to make peace with loss or succumb to despair.
Ichabod. The glory has departed.
Ebenezer. Thus far, the Lord has helped us.
On All Saints Day, we need both.
A woman is in labor. News reaches her before the child is born, coming in cascades of pain. Israel's army has been defeated. Thirty thousand soldiers dead. Her husband, Phinehas, has been killed, along with his brother. Her father-in-law, ninety-eight-year-old Eli, collapses and dies at the news. The ark of God, the visible sign of Divine presence, has been captured by the Philistines.
All of that in a single day. Everything shattered. She learns the news and her body goes into labor. Against the backdrop of absolute ruin, she gives birth to a child.
The women surrounding her do the thing well-meaning people always do. They attempt to reassure her, reaching for words of hope. They try to cover the wound with platitude and cliché. The King James Version reads, “Fear not, for thou hast born a son.”
You know, look to the future! Choose joy! Move on.
The 1611 text continues, “But she answered them not. Neither did she regard it.”
She will accept no silver lining.
With her final breath she names her son.
A monument to the pain of her people.
Ichabod. The glory is gone.
And then she dies.
Let’s not rush past this moment in the story.
This unnamed woman has lost her husband, her family, her nation’s future, even the presence of God. And still, she is expected to rejoice. No. She will not perform. She will not be consoled.
Maybe you know what that pressure feels like.
You’ve heard people say that things will get better when you are trying to survive the next ten minutes. You know what it’s like to be assured you have so much to live for when everything you lived for is in shambles around you.
I remember standing in a funeral home, cold fluorescent lights, beside a young man at his father’s visitation. His dad had died tragically and unexpectedly. The son was unraveling. You could see the strain as he greeted an endless line of distant family and local friends. He wanted to be anywhere else on earth. As his pastor, I wanted to protect him.
A man walked up, patted his back, and said with absolute certainty, “I know it’s hard right now, son, but in time you’ll see that this was all a part of God’s plan.” The grieving son stared at him in sheer bewilderment. He nodded, turned, and walked away weeping.
Grief does not demand an explanation. We need a witness.
Ichabod. The glory has departed.
Scripture does not redirect her.
She tells the truth. The loss was real.
No amount of reassurance could make that untrue.
There is a kind of religion that cannot bear a sentence like hers. A fragile faith that teleports us from cross to resurrection, demanding comfort before grief has had its say.
The Bible tells this woman’s story.
And if, on All Saints’ Day, Ichabod is written on your heart, I want you to hear this:
You are not failing at faith. You do not have to pretend.
You are in the Bible. There is room here for the truth of what you have lost.
Three chapters later, the captured ark has returned to Israel, but Israel has not returned to the life it knew before. The dead are still dead. The losses at Shiloh are not forgotten.
Twenty years pass. The people gather at Mizpah to confess their sins, and the prophet Samuel prays for them. But the Philistines hear of this assembly and march out to crush them. The people, terrified, beg Samuel:
Do not stop crying out to God on their behalf.
And the text says, the Lord thunders with a mighty voice against the Philistines. They are thrown into confusion. Israel is delivered.
After the battle, Samuel takes a heavy stone and drives it into the dirt between Mizpah and Jeshanah.
He names it Ebenezer.
Stone of Help.
Thus far the Lord has helped us.
Thus far.
Samuel looks back to testify, but he cannot tell his people what tomorrow will bring.
The stone is no crystal ball. It marks the place where God’s people proclaim:
We did not come this far alone.
Thus far is a testimony. And it is confession.
Samuel can testify to God’s faithfulness behind him.
He cannot know what lies ahead. Neither can we.
Samuel does not ignore the bodies on the battlefield.
Ebenezer does not erase Ichabod.
It stands as a monument to God’s faithfulness, a witness to how far the Lord carried them.
The glory has departed.
Thus far, the Lord has helped us.
This is the faith we practice on All Saints Day.
We aren’t here to pretend that death is not real.
We won’t claim that the empty chair can be filled.
The sting of our grief stands as witness to the depth of our love.
So we will say the names of those we love and feel the grief their absence evokes.
We do it because remembering is one way we tell the truth of our lives.
Even in the fog of grief, we can look back and say:
Thus far, the Lord has helped us.
Not by preventing the tragedy, but in the voice of a friend who didn’t stop calling.
The silent grace that arrived on days we had no words to pray.
The people who showed up when they could not fix anything and simply would not leave us alone.
We sometimes forget those moments.
That’s why Samuel puts a stone in the ground.
I've been thinking about stones this week. A memory came to mind. The summer our son Ben was six, we were out walking in our favorite place — Montreat, North Carolina. Actually, he was flying ahead on his scooter, and I was trying to keep up. We came across a stone with a dedication plaque, a memorial to a young person who loved that valley and left it far too soon.
Ben asked me about it. I did my best to explain it in a way I thought he could understand. We moved on.
Nearly an hour later, he turned to me.
“Dad, when you die I want you to turn into a graveyard so that I can remember you. And when I die I will be in the same one since we are best buddies, okay? This is making me cry a little so I don't want to talk about it anymore. But I'm not scared. Okay?”
The rest of the walk was quiet.
I will die. Ben will die. You, too. We find it difficult to say so out loud.
But there is a gift in remembering our lives are finite.
We do not have forever to tell people what they mean to us, to make things right, to show up, to pay attention.
We have this life. We have the people who have shaped it.
That is why we set stones in fields. Why we put names on plaques and windows.
These memories and monuments do not erase the loss. They give memory a place to live. Someday, someone will ask what it means, and we will say the name again.
That is what we are about to do.
Some names will be read aloud. Many will be held in the quiet places of our hearts.
I will remember.
A grandmother who taught me how to swim and made the best lasagna.
A mentor who showed me that ministry is a gift even on its hardest days.
Saints of the church whose witness is woven into the fabric of who I am.
Friends whose birthdates aren’t that distant from my own.
You will remember.
We reach for them.
We hear their words in our voices.
We tell the truth about what we’ve lost.
We give thanks for what their lives made possible.
We entrust them to God’s mercy.
Ichabod. The glory has departed.
Maybe so. And yet. And yet, thus far, the Lord has helped us.
And that is grace enough.