And now, dear brothers and sisters, we want you to know what will happen to the believers who have died so you will not grieve like people who have no hope.
— 1 Thessalonians 4:13, NLT
Years ago, I came across a short poem by Czesław Miłosz that has stayed with me. The title is Encounter.
The poem recalls an ordinary winter morning long ago. A wagon moves through frozen fields at dawn. The red wing of a blackbird flashes across the darkness. A hare suddenly darts across the road, and one of the travelers simply points at it.
Nothing remarkable happens. And yet everything happens. It is simply life—ordinary, beautiful, and gone almost as soon as it appears. The kind of moment we rarely notice while we are living it, yet somehow spend the rest of our lives remembering.
Years later, the poet remembers that morning. Both the hare and the man who pointed at it are gone, and he asks, “Where are they, where are they going?” Then he ends the poem with these words: “I ask not out of sorrow, but in wonder.”
I’ve thought about those words many times.
Our family lived and served at an international school in South Korea for eight years. Every summer our campus became one long goodbye. Seniors left for universities around the world. Teachers and their families accepted new assignments in distant countries. Friends boarded buses with suitcases stacked beneath them, waved through tear-filled windows, and disappeared toward the airport.
Many of them I have never seen again.
Goodbyes remind us how quickly life moves. A conversation. A shared meal. A laugh in the hallway. A wave from a bus window. We rarely recognize the last time something will happen while it is happening.
Perhaps that is why Miłosz chose wonder instead of despair. He does not deny the ache of loss. He simply refuses to let loss be the whole story. He marvels that such ordinary moments were ever given to us at all.
The poem reminds me of another farewell. After His resurrection, Jesus led His disciples to the Mount of Olives. As they watched, He was taken up into heaven. Luke says they were “looking intently up into the sky as he was going” (Acts 1:10, NIV).
I can only imagine what filled that silence. Surely there were tears, but perhaps there was wonder too.
This was no ordinary goodbye. Their risen Lord was returning to His Father. Death had been conquered. And this goodbye was not forever. Before they turned to walk back to Jerusalem, two angels reminded them, “This same Jesus…will come back.”
As followers of Christ, we still grieve. How could we not? We grieve because we love, and because what we have loved is precious. But Paul reminds us that we do “not grieve like people who have no hope.”
In Jesus, we remember differently. Not because we have fewer tears, but because He is our hope. In Him we lift our eyes from what has been lost to what has been promised.
And quietly, sorrow gives way to wonder.
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