When the grief is fresh and intense, we might take some wild ideas for a test drive, but to move toward healing and return to joy requires that we press this one idea deeply into our souls until it begins to impact us at the level of our feelings: “I can trust God with this.” Recently I wrote a whole book about what to say to grieving people, because when we speak to grieving people, our words really matter.īut when we are the ones who are grieving, what is far more important than what other people say to us is what we say to ourselves - what we say to ourselves in between sobs, when we have more questions than answers, when the emptiness feels overwhelming, when anger is getting a foothold in our heart. Since the graveside service this week, I’ve been asking myself, what are those profoundly and eternally true things we can grab hold of in the midst of grief that will serve as an anchor for the soul, when the winds and waves of grief are coming over the bow and threatening to take us down for good? I think the answer is essentially one thing that has many iterations or implications, which is: “I can trust God with this.” So, as we search for something to grab hold of in the midst of grief that will bring comfort, or as we search for words to say to someone else who is grieving, we want to make sure that what we’re grabbing hold of, or offering to someone else to hold onto, is profoundly, fully, and eternally true. If you look for comfort, you will not get either comfort or truth - only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin with and, in the end, despair.” If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end. Lewis wrote in Mere Christianity, “Comfort is the one thing you cannot get by looking for it. Some of the very spiritual-sounding things we say to ourselves, or hear others say to us, in the midst of grief have no scriptural basis, or even contradict Scripture.Ĭ.S. Or, perhaps more often, they are only partly true. They might sound nice, but they simply aren’t true. But some of the things we grab hold of emanate from the vacuous spirituality and shallow beliefs of our modern culture, instead of from the solid truth of God’s word. Some of the things we grab hold of are profoundly true and therefore prove to steady us in the storm. When we’re reeling from the loss of someone we love, we look for something solid to grab hold of to find stability in a storm of sadness and clarity in a sea of confusion. I’ve heard people repeat things like, “She was just too good for this world,” and, “Death was the only way he could finally find any peace,” and, “I guess God just needed him more there than we do here.” And, of course we often say and hear, “He’s in a better place.” ![]() ![]() This is not the first time I’ve been around grieving people and heard them repeat something similar - a statement or idea they had taken hold of in order to try to make sense of their loss or to find comfort in the midst of loss. But as they put her daughter’s body into the ground, she was taking hold of something solidly true - that her daughter’s soul is now “at home with the Lord” (2 Corinthians 5:8), where she is safe in his care. This mom has had many difficult days and sleepless nights during her daughter’s life when she didn’t have that confidence. As I gave her mother a hug, she whispered in my ear, “She’s safe. This week I went to the graveside service for a young woman who struggled with lots of hard things in this life.
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