Pain. Sorrow. Anxiety. Anger. Relief. Numbness. Fear. Joy. The emotions that we feel when going through the grieving process are numerous. In this five-day devotional journey, we’ll explore some of the every-day practicalities involved in the grieving process, all while helping to see God as present in a time where that may not be easy to see and feel.
Will Platnick
Day 1
Scriptures: Lamentations 3:1-9, Lamentations 3:17, Lamentations 3:19-23, John 11:35
Sitting with Grief
I’ve experienced the death of my mother to cancer, watching her health slowly fail.
I’ve experienced the death of my son at birth, full-term, for reasons nobody can tell us.
My wife became chronically ill due to the actions taken to try and save my son, and with the illness went our ability to have a biological child or live a normal life that most people take for granted.
I’ve lost friends and co-workers, gone far too soon.
I’ve experienced the traumatic, sudden, and violent death of my father, who fell down the stairs in his home all by himself and hit his head so hard he never recovered. To make matters worse, it was during the coronavirus pandemic, so my family and I were not allowed in the hospital, and he died without us there.
I’m not even 40, but I’ve already experienced a life-time worth of grief and trauma.
If there is one thing I’ve learned about grief it’s that it cannot be rushed. Your feelings and emotions cannot be bottled in…at least for long. The storm needs to rage. The hurt needs to be expressed. As author, John Green, wrote, “That’s the thing about pain. It demands to be felt.”
What you need to know, though, is that you are not alone. Though the person you lost was unique, everything you’re feeling, someone else has felt before. In fact, right at this very moment, there are lots of people around the world feeling almost exactly how you feel. I don’t bring this up to minimize your pain…there’s nothing minimal about it! No, I mention this to help remind you that in and through our suffering, we’re connected not only to each other, but also to Christ.
Today, we’re going to spend some time in the book of Lamentations. Lamentations is a book by an anonymous author reflecting on the siege of Jerusalem and the exile that followed. The pain and isolation this author felt may sound familiar to you.
Today, I want you to know that it’s ok for you to feel your pain. It’s normal and expected for you to be overwhelmed. You have permission to cry. You can yell. You can scream. You can be angry. God understands what you are going through and knows your pain, intimately. And all this goes double for anybody in our society, especially men, who were taught they have to keep their emotions hidden. Even Jesus cried after he lost someone special.
We serve a God who has intimate knowledge of what it feels like to love and lose. Though it may not feel like it right now, God is with you.
Day 2
Scriptures: Deuteronomy 31:6, Matthew 5:4, 2 Corinthians 10:5
Emotions
While going through the grieving process, chances are good you might feel like, at best, God has lost your number, and at worse, that God hates you and isn’t for you.
Yesterday we talked about giving yourself room to sit with your grief and express it to God. Today, we’re going to talk about emotions.
Emotions can sometimes be hard to navigate, not just in terms of feeling them, but also what to do with them after you’ve felt them. Christians are not united in their thoughts on the role of emotions.
Some view emotions through the lens of Jeremiah 17:9 NIV which says, “The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?”. Christians in this camp often talk about how we can’t trust our sense of feelings, desires, and emotions to make decisions. Because of that, many feel like their emotions need to be stifled and shoved in a box.
Others, like the Jesuits, believe that feelings and emotions are a gift from God because that is how we were created, and God called our creation good. Christians in this camp point out that emotions and feelings can be one of the primary ways that God works in our hearts to stir us to action.
If there was ever a time to say, “Yes, but…” to both camps, it’s during the grieving process. Emotions need to be felt and can’t be repressed, but not every emotion is worth holding onto after it’s been experienced.
Grief is not a destination; it’s a process. It’s not something that can be rushed. In this process, there’s a good chance you’re going to feel every single emotion there is—sometimes all at the same time. Those days can be very tiring.
It’s those times of emotional exhaustion where you’re most at risk of attack from the enemy. At some point during the grieving process, it’s possible you’re going to feel a little angry at God. Maybe the healing you prayed for didn’t come. Perhaps someone is gone far too soon and it doesn’t seem fair to you.
Based on my personal and shared experiences of grief with those who suffered a traumatic loss, there’s a good chance Satan is going to try to tell you that God doesn’t love you or the person/people you lost. Satan may even try to convince you that God hates you and that’s why the person you love is gone. This thought might “feel” real, but it’s not.
Here’s what helped me during my periods of intense attack during the loss of my father: capturing my thoughts. In the scriptures, Paul tells us to take all thoughts captive and make them obedient to Christ. Throughout my life, this was easier said than done. What finally helped me was, as ridiculous as it sounds, saying out loud, “That isn’t true. Thought, captured” whenever I found myself under attack. Obviously, this isn’t necessarily something I would recommend saying in public with people around (unless you have your AirPods on, then people won’t know if you’re crazy or talking to someone), so say it in your mind, if necessary.
Today, recognize that while emotions are a gift from God, not every emotion is worth holding onto after it’s been experienced. Pray for the Holy Spirit to guide your thoughts and emotions as you grieve.
Day 3
Scriptures: 1 Peter 5:7, John 16:33, Psalms 103:8
Dealing with Others
After we lost our son, my wife needed time to heal physically from the emergency C-section, and we both needed time to heal emotionally. We were living in a small town at the time where everybody knew everyone else. On our very first venture out, a family next to us thought that for some reason, it was a good idea to start having a theological discussion on if our son was burning in hell or not because he wasn’t baptized before he died.
Hopefully, nobody has said anything nearly as hurtful to you, but chances are you’ve heard, or will hear, some things from people that won’t be super helpful in your grieving process.
An acquaintance of ours, after hearing the bad news about our son said, “Well, think of all the fun you’ll have trying again.” This is a guy who genuinely cared for us, but I’m not going to lie, I did I want to punch him in the face at the time.
You might hear stuff like, “Heaven needed another angel” that may make you want to lose your mind. Though it can be hard, try to remember that these are people who likely love and care for you greatly, but truthfully, just don’t know what to say when someone is hurting so badly. It’s tempting to live into that anger you feel because chances are, you may be angry that your loved one is gone and having someone to take that anger out on might be appealing to your subconscious.
The other thing nobody prepared me for was how quickly I would waver between “I want a community here with me” and “I need to be alone right now, please just go away.” In the early days of grief, it’s perfectly normal for you to switch back and forth between these extremes. multiple times a day.
Even though you may be oscillating between extremes so many times that you feel genuinely horrible for the people around you, remember that you are never too much for Christ to handle. God will never abandon you.
Day 4
Scriptures: Psalms 119:50, Psalms 34:18, Romans 8:38-39
Memories
In *A Grief Observed* (a book you need to read this very moment), C.S. Lewis wrote about how he was afraid of losing the memory of what his wife H was like. He was worried about building up a false image of her in his head that would only be a shell of what she was really like.
At one point, he mentioned that he didn’t have any photos of her that were good. That probably isn’t the case for the person you’re grieving today. Given the explosion of social media and everybody having phones in their pockets, chances are you might be sitting on a veritable treasure trove of memories.
When I lost my father, it was a huge blessing to be able to head over to my Google Home, click on his face, and then only see photos of him as I walked by. This, in combination with journaling memories of my dad, helped me work through my grief in a very positive way. Instead of reliving how I found him, I focused on reliving my favorite times with him.
If you’ve ever had to clear out the home of a loved one, you know it’s a challenging, painful process. What I want you to hear is that you don’t have to value everything the same as your loved one did. Your memories of your loved ones are not in the things. A picture of the item will trigger the same memory as visually seeing it, as well. It’s perfectly normal to keep some sentimental stuff, just don’t feel like you need to adopt everything your loved one owned.
Think about writing down your memories now, while they are clearer in your head. It may be too raw to do now, and that’s OK, but think about doing this when you feel up to it. The Holy Spirit will provide you with plenty of joyful things to remember.
Day 5
Scriptures: Mark 12:30-31, Revelation 21:4-5
Moving On
Chances are you’re reading this and might be a bit angry at the title. “Move on?! Are you serious?!?”
No, friend. I’m not saying you should be ready to move on after five days. That’s unreasonable. This is just a five-day reading plan, and, like our earthly lives, it has to end sometime. Your grief is going to last longer than it takes for you to get through any reading plan or book about grief. There’s no cure. There’s no magical thing I or anybody else can say that will take away the pain you feel.
Jesus summarized all of the commandments into two: love God and love your neighbor as yourself. We often make Christianity a lot more difficult than it has to be by insisting on rigid theological convictions, but truthfully, it’s pretty simple. Note that I didn’t say easy!
The process of grieving is a lot like what happens on an airplane when there’s a lack of oxygen in the cabin, and the masks come down. You need to take care of yourself, first, and put on your mask before you can assist others. Your self-care is incredibly important right now, but it’s not everything. Martin Luther was a fan of using the phrase incurvatus in se, which is Latin for “turned/curved inward on oneself.” In grief, it is easy to become so focused on your own pain and your own suffering that you forget why you’re called to be on Earth in the first place. Now that you’ve put the oxygen mask on yourself, turning your attention to others will not only be life-changing to others, but for you, as well.
If the person you lost had a particular passion area, it could be helpful to find ways to help others by using that passion. For instance, my father was the world’s leading arachnologist (the study of spiders), and after his death I started a scholarship/grant fund in his name to help fund the research of small spiders. Obviously, nobody else’s father was the world’s leading arachnologist (which you might be glad of if you’re scared of spiders!), but you get my point. Helping to create a legacy for your loved one can be helpful in the grieving process.
Never underestimate the simple act of serving at a food kitchen or a food bank. If food isn’t your thing, there’s plenty of ways to serve others, and God will help direct you! There are so many people who need help in this world, and God has created YOU to make a difference.
You’ll find that God not only gave us these commandments, but he also wired our brains to respond positively. The fact is, helping others makes us feel better ourselves. This is God’s work at its finest!
The act of loving and caring for others can help us stop sitting in grief and gradually move us towards standing again.
Your world isn’t going to look like it did when the person you loved was still in it, but hear this: Jesus is already doing a new thing in your life, and that newness will be revealed to you, in time. Soon, there will be a new rhythm and a new way of being that God will be drawing you towards.