Austin's Blog

You should be over it after a year. I intended to love my son for a lifetime. I dearly and deeply love him now. I will continue loving him in the life after this life, the life that lies after my dying. To say that the bereaved should be over it after a year or something is wrong with them says more about the person with the egregious expectation and assumption. Do you realize what has been lost? Was my child not infinite in value, beauty, dignity, worth, and profundity? If so, then grief will endure longer than a year. According to Dr. Brad Hambrick, “Grief is the celebration of a good gift from God through tears.” Not to celebrate my child would imply the gift and the Giver don’t matter.

There are no right and wrong ways to grieve. This is hallowed ground in grief seminars and literature, but it is not always true. If you’re harming yourself and others in your grieving, that is obviously a wrong way to grieve. If you’re repressing or ignoring your grief, that is obviously a wrong way to grieve. Furthermore, there are proper and improper ways to grieve as Christians. We don’t grieve as those who have no hope. Our grief is informed and molded by the Scriptures and our trust in the resurrected Christ. We are hopeful as we are hampered down in our grief. We do not believe the lie that our loved ones simply cease to exist, that death is natural, or that this loss alone defines our lives. Michael Horton notes, “The reason that believers do not mourn as those who have no hope (1 Thess. 4:14) is not that they know death is good, but that they know that God’s love and life are more powerful than the jaws of death.”

It would be wrong to excessively grieve in such a way to belie or demean the precious truths that define and undergird our lives. Nancy Guthrie wisely encourages bereaved parents saying, “In the midst of grief, however, the bereaved parent must not and cannot simply listen to their own desperate thoughts. They have to talk back to those thoughts with the truth of God’s Word, which provides perspective and generates genuine healing and hope for the future.”

If you’re grieving, you’re showing a lack of faith. This notion is just silly. One third of the Psalms are lament Psalms. Some of the godliest men and women of Scripture were known for their grieving, weeping, and lamenting. Jesus who is truly God and truly man grieved during his life and ministry. Those who think this have a deficient view of faith for some of the greatest works of God have been borne out of some of the deepest sorrows. George MacDonald points out, “No words can express how much the world owes to sorrow. Most of the Psalms were born in the wilderness. Most of the Epistles were written in a prison. The greatest thoughts of the greatest thinkers have all passed through fire. The greatest poets have ‘learned in suffering what they taught in song.’ In bonds Bunyan lived the allegory that he afterwards wrote, and we may thank Bedford Jail for the Pilgrim’s Progress. Take comfort, afflicted Christian! When God is about to make pre-eminent use of a person, He puts them in the fire.” We can grieve and trust the God who knows our grief without contradiction.