A friend of mine (we’ll call her Billie) shared a story with me a few weeks ago. Her friend, struggling through addiction and significant mental health issues, was in a dire place. Billie came, sat with her friend in her mess, and offered what she believed would have given her a way toward health. A better option than the alcohol.

Still drunk, Billie’s friend stopped and looked at her through the haze.

“You have no idea what my pain feels like.”

Billie blinked. She was right. She had no idea what her friend’s pain felt like.

Billie did an about face. She sat with her friend while the alcohol wore off, and instead of offering advice at that moment, she offered presence. She knew her friend had a painful story, but this stopped her to consider its impact. Billie began putting herself in her friend’s shoes. And compassion for her grew.

Grief is similar. While grief is universal (we will all grieve), it is also incredibly unique. No one else beyond God knows our particular pain. Yet that not-knowing does not mean we can’t help. The community around a griever is a key ingredient in their integration process (integrating this unwanted chapter into their story). Unfortunately, pain-avoidant people and churches often react to grievers in a couple unhelpful ways.

1. They will avoid the one in pain.
2. They will try to get you out of your pain (through reasoning, platitudes, Bible verses, truths about God’s goodness or plan, attempts to cheer the grieving person to look at the bright side).

Both options are opposite of how God responds to our grief and pain, and both are painful to the hurting. When someone attempts #2 with me, I want to look at them, and like Billie’s friend, say, “You have no idea what my pain is like.”

(Side note to grievers: when someone avoids your pain or tries to rescue you out of it, it’s likely because it will make THEM feel better. People who are uncomfortable with prolonged pain often don’t know what they are doing. They need help knowing how to walk through significant pain with God and others.)

When we’re deeply suffering, the goal, especially as Christians, is not to rid ourselves of our pain, but to enter it with our Savior. To feel it, to cry out to him in it, as Jesus and the psalmists teach us. To let him do with it what he will. Our goal should be to submit to him in it, not try to escape from it.

How does God respond to our pain?

God does not try to rush us out of our pain but meets us in it. God draws near to the brokenhearted (Psalm 34:18), and saves the crushed in spirit. He invites us to enter a process with him. He welcomes struggle and our raw honesty with him. He does not hit us with untimely truth but is patient in our process. He hurts with us. He cares so much about our pain that he’s numbered each one of our tears. He never leaves us alone in it. He bears our broken hearts, and yes, over time, he will redeem our losses.

I can hear some objections already. What about when the hurting need this one particular reminder? What if they aren’t believing a truth about God that would really help them? What if I share this one piece of advice which really worked for me?

There certainly is a time when grieving people need words of exortation, or reminders of what is true of God and them. Consider with me, however, for a moment how often these reminders come to mind when you encounter a grieving person.

• “Jesus hates the death of your brother.”
• “Let me weep with you.”
• “Because God is near to you, so too will I be.”
• “Death is wrong and ugly.”
• “Tell me what you went through, and how you’re feeling right now. I will just listen.”

These are truths and concepts from God’s word that offer compassion. Ask a grieving person how many Christians have approached them with presence and acknowledgement of their horror. It’s sadly not a large number. Instead of a variation of the above examples, grievers tend to receive messages like, “God is good”, “You are loved”, “At least they’re not suffering anymore”, “God needed an angel”.

Words of encouragement from the Bible are not what a deeply grieving person needs first, because that’s not how God initially meets them in their pain. He feels it with them. He draws near. He gives his presence, not answers or reasons. When a time does come to speak, words are best given and accepted in the context of a relationship, where the giver has first seen, known, and felt the bereaved’s pain. Personally, I will listen to the people who have allowed me to grieve, and who have grieved with me. I don’t let in people who are yelling truths about God at me from a distance. The people on Sunday mornings who approach cautiously to offer a verse or a prayer when they haven’t asked, listened, wept, sat, or just been with me, don’t get a voice at my table. The people who have, do. If you want to help, first get close. Get dirty. Feel. Grieve. Get messy with me. Then we have relationship where comfort, correction, encouragement, support, and love are welcomed.

Job’s friends did the first part beautifully. They heard of his devastation, and they came, they mourned, and they sat with Job in silence. Exactly right.

A lot of what grievers hear if they go to a church that has little space for grief is that Jesus brings victory, joy, hope, and resurrection power. I’ve heard various pastors say something to the effect that every Sunday should be Easter Sunday; a celebration of the triumph of his death and resurrection. Since Jesus rose from the dead, we have every reason to rejoice. While this is true, it is very unbalanced. Jesus’ resurrection from the dead does not negate suffering, mourning, death, loss, and trauma. The resurrection does not mean we should not grieve. Indeed, we’re called to grieve with hope (1 Thess. 4:13). Positive churches have no problem with hope. They have a problem with grieving. Romans 12:15 tells us to rejoice with those who rejoice, and weep with those who weep. We have the rejoicing down well. We need to grow in our weeping. Yes, even on this side of the cross.

When the good news of Jesus is used as an escape from pain (ex: telling a mother who lost a baby that her child is in heaven), it cheapens the good news of the resurrection. I know it sounds like trying to give this mother hope, but it actually shallows the gospel. It’s misapplied. It tells her not to address her grief, but to ignore it, minimize it, or mask her grief with a smile. You may not realize it, but escaping from her pain harms her and others. Un-addressed grief negatively affects our relationships with others and our relationship with God. It leads to unhealthy coping mechanisms, skewed theology, and more brokenness. If you try to eject her from her pain, you’re also trying to eject her from the presence and work of God that he has for her through this horror.

That mother first needs to know the depth of her grief. She needs the courage and strength to name it and feel it, and those positive words will not help. They will hinder. To actually encourage someone means filling them with courage, helping them face what they are reluctant or timid to face. “Your child is in heaven” types of platitudes are an attempt not to encourage her to enter her pain with Jesus, but to escape from it. To make her feel better. Yes, the thought that Jesus is holding her child may bring some hope, but it’s incomplete. She is living her worst nightmare. She will bear that pain of the loss of her child the rest of her life, though it will change over the years. She will need presence, patience, witnesses to her pain and her process, ongoing support. She will need to know how to wail her anguish to God. She will need people who help her face it, to learn to bear what feels unbearable. Through her aching heart, she may learn to ache for Jesus in a way she never did when her child was with her. It is in the depths of our sorrows that the riches of Jesus are found.

Telling someone who is walking through the valley of the shadow of death that the sun is out where you are is harmful. Remember, Jesus walks through that valley with us. If we’re his body, we should also walk through each other’s valleys with them.

There comes a point, when the bereaved has lived with the ripping away of their loved one long enough, when they’ve tasted and known how horrible life can be, that the promises of God become very precious in a deeper way. Jesus himself becomes more and more of a desire of your heart. Not because you minimized your pain, but because you have been with Jesus in your nightmare. Because you lament to him. Because you are living out your pain with your suffering Savior. It is an extremely costly place. Waiting for justice. Waiting to see your loved one again. Waiting for the rest of your life while aching for your faith to be made sight is a tall order. But because the darkness is much darker than you’ve ever known, God’s promises in Jesus shine brighter than you’ve ever realized. You can’t rush the process. You can’t shove God’s promises at a hurting person and expect them to light up with hope and stop hurting. It doesn’t work that way. God doesn’t work that way. He knows what it is to live with continual pain. Tears with faith. Weeping and trust. Longing and living. They’re not opposites. Sorrow and joy hold hands. God allows pain to be a process, and he is in it with us. He never asks us to only have a smile. He, above all else, understands what it is to live with so much wrong in the world.

What is so hopeful to me about this process of change is that none of us will get it right. Just like life. We’ve already all failed at loving others in their pain at some point. The ultimate question here is that if we’ve blundered and unknowingly hurt grieving people, do we see that? Do we want to learn and change? Like Billie, all we have to do is admit we have some learning to do, and begin. Listen to grieving people. With no agenda. Read some books. I have a great book list if you’re interested. Above all, ask God to make your heart for the hurting more like his heart. I like how Tim Keller ended his sermon, “Praying Our Tears.” He prays, “Father, make us happy enough to weep.”

Amen.

This post marks the beginning of a series of what traumatic grief has taught me about loving God and loving others.  

If you told me I’d be writing about grief, trauma, death, loss, and lament, and its relationship to Christian faith and church life, I think I would have laughed outright.

And here I am. Ironic, isn’t it?

It’s a difficult subject. To lay it out there right from the start, it’s a subject I have been living intensely for over two years. It’s a deeply painful one, and would be easy to avoid. Believe me, a part of me does not want to write any of this. Yet I write because it has the potential to bring healing to the hurting, a voice for the voiceless, growth and health for the church, and hope in the darkest corners life has to offer us. Above all, I write so that people will see and know God more fully through pain. 

Faith in Jesus Christ comes with many paradoxes that blow our limited understanding of him out of the water. Through defeat comes victory. Through our weaknesses we know God’s strength. Through losing everything, we gain everything. This is no different. I am finding the richest of treasure as I lean into the deepest pain I have ever known. 

Sadly, I’ve been discovering these treasures in spite of my church. It has broken my heart, because I believed that I could and should find them because of my church. Yet it’s not the case. There are many reasons for this which I will expound later, but for now, we need to start by naming a problem. It’s not a problem with every church. In fact, I’ve been delighted to hear some friends share how deeply loved and supported they have been by their home churches in times of great distress. But a common narrative I’ve heard and experienced is that most churches in our culture don’t know what to do with pain, loss, trauma, and death. 

J. Todd Billings, an author and professor and father of two, was diagnosed with terminal cancer in his 30s. He shared this in his book, Rejoicing in Lament. “Since my diagnosis with cancer, I’ve found that my fellow Christians know how to rejoice about answered prayer and also how to petition God for help, but many don’t know what to do when I express sorrow and loss or talk about death. In some sense, this lack of affective agility in their faith is not surprising since our corporate worship has lost many of the elements that are so prominent in the psalms of lament. Somehow, expressions of deep grief and loss have been evacuated from the sanctuary.”

It’s not only the sanctuary. The problem runs deep. You may be familiar with Eugene Peterson, best known for his paraphrase of the Bible called The Message. He wrote a forward for Michael Card’s book, A Sacred Sorrow, in which he asks this: “Why are Christians, of all people, embarrassed by tears, uneasy in the presence of sorrow, unpracticed in the language of lament? It certainly is not a biblical heritage, for virtually all our ancestors in the faith were thoroughly “acquainted with grief.” And our Savior was, as everyone knows, a “Man of Sorrows.” 

Why, indeed?

Many have testified to this problem, myself included. The ironic thing is: I have been part of the problem. Before my mother’s illness and death, I had certainly known grief and loss. But I, too, was embarrassed by tears, uneasy with sorrow, and did not know how to lament. As a committed church volunteer, I responded poorly to people’s pain. Over time, I realized the way I handle other’s pain is closely related to how I handle my own. My unhealed wounds and my unhealthy coping mechanisms were influencing how I navigated any sorrow. For example: one way I dealt with significant pain was to avoid feeling it. Numb the pain. I would unconsciously then seek to avoid others’ pain as well. Feeling their pain would mean feeling my own. And that would be unbearable. So I would avoid it with unhelpful platitudes such as, “At least you have ______.” Or I would simply avoid people in deep sorrow, because I didn’t know what to do.

Our personal, unhealthy coping mechanisms are not the only reason churches and Christians handle pain poorly, but it certainly is one of them. 

My beloved mother’s diagnosis of tongue cancer, her suffering as I cared for her, and her death six months later, changed me. Trauma, grief, and loss were now part of my life. I began to see the problem. I saw how clueless I had been. And I began to see how we could help.

Sheldon Vanauken writes on the death of his wife in A Severe Mercy, “That death, so full of suffering for us both, suffering that still overwhelmed my life, was yet a severe mercy. A mercy as severe as death, a severity as merciful as love.” 

I cringe to say this. I don’t like it. And I have found it to be true. That hell-ish season of our lives, of losing Mom, is proving to be a severe mercy. 

There are many good works already written on grief, lament, death, and navigating loss. Nancy Guthrie, Mark Vroegrop, Rob Moll, Clarissa Moll, Michael Card, J. Todd Billings, and Jerry Sittser are a few of my favorites. I don’t mean to replicate their work but move it a step forward. Grief and lament are a vital part of our Christian life, and one that is often undertaught, misunderstood, and absent in our church life. It does not have to be this way. How do we open the doors to the lessons grief, lament, death and loss have for us? Particularly if we are in a culture that avoids pain so intentionally? How do we reclaim our biblical heritage of sorrow and lament? Not as a masochistic exercise, but by acknowledging and entering the reality of brokenness and devastation we currently endure? How do we groan while we wait for the redemption of our bodies (Romans 8:23-25)? How do we learn to weep with those who weep (Romans 12:15)? How do we grieve with hope (1 Thess. 4:13)? How do we better image our God, who is near to the brokenhearted (Psalm 34:18)? 

When we choose to enter both others’ pain and our own, God, through his word, through Jesus and the Holy Spirit in us, offers us so much more of himself than we have ever known.

The church needs grieving people. And grieving people need the church. Unfortunately, many churches avoid pain and use Jesus, the gospel, and the Bible to do so. Among the many problems with this, the most serious ones are: 1. This misrepresents who God is and how he responds to sin, pain, and death. 2. This reinforces damaging theology. 3. This tells hurting image-bearers that their pain doesn’t belong in church or with God.

Nothing could be further from the truth God gives us in Scripture. 

In this series, I’ll be writing to two groups: the helping and the hurting. The Christians who want to better help the grieving, and those who are in the midst of their pain. Both are essential, and both are struggling. And both need each other.