Austin's Blog

In Ruth 1, Naomi returns to Bethlehem after losing her husband and two sons in Moab. She is both a widow and a bereaved parent, without resources, opportunity, or the people she loved so dearly. When the townspeople recognize her and ask if she is Naomi, she responds with raw honesty, saying, “Do not call me Naomi; call me Mara, for the Almighty has dealt very bitterly with me.” The name Naomi means “pleasant,” but she chooses the name Mara, which means “bitter,” as a reflection of her overwhelming grief and suffering. Naomi’s candor in embracing her sorrow shows how deeply her losses have shaped her, and it invites us to acknowledge the profound emotional weight of grief.

We should offer our lament to God and even to others, not pretending that everything is fine. Clarissa Moll writes, “When grief takes up residence in your life, you may encounter myriad questions for God. Your anger and doubts may loom large. But as you wrestle with God, lament, and listen in the silence, you can still step forward in faithfulness, even when you don’t have the answers you want to hear.” Christians get sad. We grieve. We hurt. We ache. We ought to lament and not pretend that “sunshine Christianity” is anything less than an abomination to the pages of Scripture and faithlessness to the God of the Scriptures.

Yet, while we can appreciate Naomi’s honesty, should we take on the bitterness of grief and suffering as our identity? There’s a sense in which Naomi’s new identity cannot truly help her. Nothing—absolutely nothing—can be the enduring, immovable, and chief source of our identities in this life except what God says about us. We find our true and primary identity only in God.

Paul David Tripp writes, “If you are not resting in your vertical identity, you will look horizontally, searching to find yourself and your reason for living in something in the creation. That could be your possessions, your accomplishments, your career, your spouse, your children, and the list goes on. The problem with this is that created things were never designed to give you identity. They were never designed to satisfy your heart and give you peace. They were not made to give you meaning and purpose. Every good thing in creation is designed to point you to the One who alone is able to give you the identity, peace, and meaning that your heart seeks. It never works to look to a broken, dysfunctional creation for identity. It always leads to disappointment, fear, anxiety, drivenness, and more control than any one of us will ever have.”

Child loss and other forms of grief rob and bereave you. You feel like you’ve lost something at the core of who you are. Am I still Gabe’s dad? After my last parent dies, am I an orphan in this world? After my spouse dies, have I lost a fundamental part of me? All of that feels true, and there’s a certain weight to that reality. Yet, the grief of losing our person cannot become our new identity. We need something more stable and reliable. The only thing that can truly meet that criterion in the most meaningful way is our relationship with God. Brennan Manning famously remarked, “My deepest awareness of myself is that I am deeply loved by Jesus Christ and I have done nothing to earn it or deserve it.” Our relationship with God must be the source of our identity—not the grief of losing our loved ones. We don’t prove our love for them by how sad we continue to feel.

Perhaps the best suggestion I can offer is that losing a child will always be part of your identity because you’ll always be their parent. Death does not rob us of our parenthood; it robs us of the opportunity to parent our beloved children. A fundamental part of our identity was born with their conception, and that endures beyond their death. Nicholas Wolterstorff writes, “If someone asks, ‘Who are you? Tell me about yourself,’ I say — not immediately, but shortly — ‘I am one who lost a son.’ That loss determines my identity; not all of my identity, but much of it. It belongs within my story.” Yet, while being a bereaved parent is part of our identity, and the grief of losing them is so massive, it is not durable enough to be the primary source of our identity. As the hymn famously says, “On Christ, the solid Rock, I stand; all other ground is sinking sand.”