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.