Was there an empty seat at your table this Thanksgiving?
This has been a hard stretch for our New Life family. Several church members have recently passed away over the last several weeks. In addition, several more have lost friends and family members.
Loss comes unbidden and with it arrives grief.
Grief is difficult during any season, but the holidays have a way of stoking the embers of grief.
How do you survive grieving the death of a loved one? There is no recipe, no quick fixes. You will need the presence of God, the comfort of community, and time. David promises that, “The Lord is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit” (Psalm 34:18). God’s goodness and grace don’t stop there: God heals the brokenhearted and those crushed in spirit.
Mourning isn’t something to be fixed, but a journey to walk. Sometimes wise and empathetic voices from afar can you on that journey.
In Seasons of Sorrow, Tim Challies reflects on the tragic and unexpected death of his twenty-year-old son, Nick, due to an undetected heart issue, and the year of grief that followed. Challies is honest and vulnerable. He shares that “...one of the hardest parts of my loss is that all my feelings of love remain, but there's no way to express them.”
Challies is also biblical and wise. Challies confronts the depth of his loss, pressing deep into the unsearchable, good sovereignty of our Lord. He reminds himself that, “God’s sovereignty is a sweeping doctrine that touches every aspect of life across every moment of creation and every corner of the universe. There is no moment, no spot, no deed, no death, that falls outside of it.” But what merit is there if God is sovereign but not good? Challies explains, “God’s goodness does not vary with our circumstances but is fully present and on display in our worst moments as well as our best, in our most lamentable experiences as well as our most joyful.”
Challies highlights the importance of community in his grief process. If someone near you is grieving, know how important your presence is to them and be bold in asking uncomfortable questions in love. Challies talks about the special significance of those who came around him who had experienced deep loss in their own lives. If you are navigating grief, you need community around you. I would highly encourage you to consider a group such as Grief Share where you can process your grief with others who share a similar depth of loss. It is not weak to seek help and express your hurt to others.
Seasons of Sorrow is a wise and grounded book and would be my first recommendation as a resource for those in the midst of grief.
Where Seasons of Sorrow will meet you in the valley of your grief, it’s beneficial to have a resource to prepare you for the journey of grief from a more theological or philosophical perspective. To that end, my second recommendation is the late Timothy Keller’s Walking with God through Pain and Suffering.
Keller’s books range from the incredibly accessible: The Prodigal God and Counterfeit Gods, to the slightly more rigorous, but still very accessible apologetic, The Reason for God, to the more rigorous practitioner’s guides such as Generous Justice or Preaching. Part of Timothy Keller’s gifting was his ability to write so well in each of these genres. Walking with God Through Pain and Suffering is Keller’s most rigorous book.
Keller deals with the subject of pain and suffering philosophically, theologically, and practically. Each treatment is successful on its own, and combined they pack a punch as Keller engages mind and heart alike.
Contemporary westerners are repelled by suffering and death. On the stage of world history, our fear of death is abnormal. Keller quotes an author at The New York Times Magazine, who, after the tragic sniper shootings in the Washington DC area reflected, “The fact is, staving off our own death is one of our favorite national pastimes. Whether it’s exercise, checking our cholesterol or having a mammogram, we are always hedging against mortality. [And yet] despite our best intentions, it is still, for the most part, random. And it is absolutely coming.” This aversion to suffering and death is a cultural deficit causing us to approach the topic with naiveté.
To give us a firmer grounding, Keller wades through the philosophical arguments for the existence of evil, pain, and suffering. Ultimately, Keller doesn’t believe that any of the philosophical arguments are fully persuasive. And yet, Keller doesn’t believe that the lack of any of these arguments holding up under strict scrutiny does not spell doom for the theist: “the problem of senseless suffering does not go away if you abandon belief in God. If there is no God, why have a sense of outrage and horror when unjust suffering occurs to any group of people?” Keller pushes this further, quoting Evelyn Underhill: “If God were small enough to be understood, he wouldn’t be big enough to be worshipped.” Keller shifts the burden of proof from the theist to the atheist.
Keller suggests that our perspective might be terribly askew: “If there really is an infinitely glorious God, why should the universe revolve around us rather than around him? If we look at the biblical God’s standards for our behavior… it may occur to us that the real riddle of evil is not what we thought. Perhaps the real puzzle is this: Why, in light of our behavior as a human race, does God allow so much happiness?” Perhaps the biggest question is not why there is pain and suffering, but why is there joy?
Keller shows why Christianity might not be on as shaky grounding as many expect concerning the issue of pain and suffering by comparing it to the five other major alternative worldviews. Those are: 1) the moralistic view (karma); 2) self-transcendent view (Buddhism); 3) fatalism (Islam); 4) dualistic (Zoroastrianism); and 5) Secularism.
The way each of the worldviews deals with the question of pain and suffering is as follows: 1) in a moralistic worldview, suffering is caused by wrongdoing, our response is to do good, and the resolution is eternal bliss. 2) From a self-transcendent perspective, suffering is an illusion, our response is detachment, and the resolution is enlightenment. 3) In a fatalistic worldview, the cause of suffering is destiny, the response is endurance, and the resolution is glory and honor. 4) In a dualistic worldview, the cause of suffering is cosmic conflict, the response is purified faithfulness, and the resolution is the triumph of the light. 5) In a secular worldview, suffering is an accident and doesn’t mean anything at all. Our response is to avoid suffering at all costs and minimize the discomfort as much as possible by bettering our social mechanisms. But, of course, we will suffer, and so, for the secularist, “suffering always wins.” The weaknesses of these worldviews are glaring.
The Christian answer is that suffering is real, but that, when faced rightly, there can be a purpose to it. The double truths that ground the Christian response is first, we exist to glorify God—God does not exist to make us happy; and second, that God is a God who enters into more suffering than any other human on the cross.
The Christian response to suffering is perhaps best exemplified in Luther’s theology of the cross. The answer to suffering begins with a God who not only allows human beings to suffer, but suffered himself for the sake of his children. In fact, Keller asserts, “suffering is at the very heart of the Christian faith.” The power of the cross, is that, in Christ’s suffering on the cross, “evil is ‘turned back on itself.’ Or, as John Calvin expressed it, on the cross, destruction was destroyed, ‘torment tormented, damnation damned…death dead, mortality made immortal.’” There is an incredible promise and encouragement to be had in this reality. Keller says that, “When things go wrong, one of the ways you lose your peace is that you think maybe you are being punished. But look at the cross! All the punishment fell on Jesus. Another thing you may think is that maybe God doesn’t care. But look at the cross.”
So what purpose does suffering serve? On the one hand, we finite beings won’t know unless the infinite being reveals it to us. On the other hand, Keller points out several purposes. The first is moving from mere knowledge of God to a deep relationship with him: “One of the main ways we move from an abstract knowledge about God to a personal encounter with him as a living reality is through the furnace of affliction.” We are naturally selfish and self-absorbed creatures. As Martin Luther taught, “human nature is in curvatus in se, curved in on itself.” In our suffering, may we be propelled to turn away from our limited unable selves and towards the Healer of hurting hearts. May we reach for the only one who can bring the healing salve of heaven to the depth of our pain.
If we are to take Scripture seriously, perhaps another purpose for suffering might be to reshape us into the people God created us to be. Why is suffering that tool? We cannot know, it is a mystery of God. But we can be assured that if we have an infinitely good God then he must have altruistically good reasons beyond our comprehension for suffering, and perhaps more importantly, he suffers with us. God is present in the valleys of our pain, but more he sits with us in those valleys. As Keller writes, "In Jesus Christ we see that God actually experiences the pain of the fire as we do. He is truly God with us, in love and understanding, in our anguish. He plunged himself into our furnace so that, when we find ourselves in the fire, we can turn to him and know we will not be consumed but will be made into people great and beautiful."
If you are walking through grief this holiday season, don’t ignore the pain: step into community and pick up one of these helpful resources to allow your time of grief to be an opportunity where God draws you nearer to himself.
This is my prayer for us all: Loving Savior, I ask you to open up the windows of heaven and pour upon every hurting heart a measure of the healing oil of heaven that would extend to the deepest parts of our hearts where the enemy has tried to taunt us and say we’re going to hurt from this forever. I pray that God would take our broken hearts and make them whole in a way no human ever could. I pray that all who are weary, carrying heavy burdens who come to God in this season. I pray for a lightness as we experience the transference of our yoke to Jesus’ shoulders. We stand in the promise that you will give us rest.
“It is the Lord who goes before you. He will be with you; he will not leave you or forsake you. Do not fear or be dismayed” (Dt. 31:8).
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