Austin's Blog

You simply must be brave and endure it. You really have no choice in the matter. Endurance and perseverance are required. Our goal now is to live worthy and noble lives as we wait to be reunited with our precious son. We are stewards of his legacy now since we can no longer steward him through parenting. If this means, “You should not be crying. Put on your big boy pants and get on with it” then such advice, though distinctly American, isn’t biblical or helpful. John Angell James writes, “The work of grace, though it is above nature, is not against it. The man who tells me not to weep at the grave insults me, mocks me, and wishes to degrade me! Tears are the silent, pure, sincere testimony of my heart to the excellence of the gift He gave in mercy; and in mercy, no doubt, as well as judgment, He has recalled.” I will say though that child loss requires bravery and the other bereaved parents I know are some of the most courageous people in my eyes. I think often of the ladies I know within our Church who have also lost children. I almost want to rise when they enter the room because I know how much their faith costs them. They wouldn’t have made it without the Lord. They are heroes of the faith.

It is/was the will of God. And? Something being the will of God does not mean it is easier. Child loss may get easier but it never gets easy. Nancy Guthrie wisely notes, “Our culture wants to put the Band-Aid of heaven on the hurt of losing someone we love to death. Sometimes it seems like they think because we know the one we love is in heaven, we shouldn’t be sad. But they don’t understand how far away heaven feels, and how long the future seems as we see before us the years we have to spend on this earth before we see the one we love again.” The cross was the will of God (Isa. 53:10) and yet it was agonizingly difficult.

Elisabeth Elliot concurs remarking, “What is good, it is generally assumed, ought to make us feel good. For example, if it is the will of God, we will feel good about it. This is not always the case. Jonah had no good feelings about going to Joppa.” I should note that the providence of God was a tremendous encouragement and blessing to my wife and I during the great tragedy of losing our precious son. But, Puritan writer John Flavel rightly notes, “Some providences, like Hebrew letters, must be read backwards.” It is easier to see the hand of God looking back than looking around or forward, especially during the fog of suffering and grief. I would be very slow to speak so definitely and directly concerning the will of God within national and personal tragedy.

If you’re not crying, you’re not grieving. This is silly. You can grieve without tears and you can grieve through tears. Nancy Guthrie wisely points out that after a parent loses a child, grief runs in the background of everything like the operating system of a computer. There aren’t always tears though. You cannot gauge someone’s grief through how wet their eyes are. Furthermore, each person is different and each person’s relationship to the one who died was different. What this means is we all grieve in unique, person-specific ways. Some of us are more wired to weep and cry openly and others not so much. This does not mean grief is absent.