Learning How to Grieve
She looked at me with tears in her eyes. She was the one who'd found her sister—lifeless, on the bunk bed below her. The flashbacks were frequent, and most days, she would do anything to escape the crushing grief of this loss.
As a therapist, I have held space for countless stories like hers. These moments in time are hard to live, let alone talk about. Not all of these stories are about death, but all of them come with the disorienting, uncharted territory of grief. Often my clients will say, “Everyone keeps telling me I should grieve, but I don’t know how.”
The Space Between
Grief is one of those words that often gets tossed around but is hard to define. My dear friend once said that grief is the space between what is and what should be. Lots of little and big things drop us into that space. Sometimes the loss that leads to grief is huge, like the death of someone close to you. Sometimes the loss is smaller, like not getting the job you want. But no matter the size, grief is that distance between what God intended before the fall and what the fall now touches, making things painful, broken, and raw. As long as we live here, we will experience it—every one of us.
Grief looks a little different for each of us. Sometimes it makes us get quiet, not wanting to even speak of the hurt for fear it will somehow jinx us. Sometimes it makes us angry, bitter, and frustrated with a God that even allows this type of suffering. For some of us, grief looks like a sadness we try hard to hold back—out of fear that it will sweep us away like a mighty rushing river.
So what do we do with it? How do we “do grief”? And how in the world do we find God in it?
A Sorrowing Savior
The Creator of the universe knows the constant losses we feel as humans in a broken world, and he cares about all of our big and little griefs. We see this in line after line in the Psalms, in the painful rawness of Lamentations, and in the God-in-the-flesh interactions with those he loved in the Gospels.
In John 11, Martha and Mary had lost their brother, Lazarus, whom Jesus loved. They knew that one word from Jesus and this awful moment of trauma and grief would have never happened in the first place. But it had. As Jesus came to them, they were both deep in their grief. Jesus had different conversations with each of them, showing how specifically he tailors his care for each of us. But he does something even more remarkable than that. He has two specific reactions revealing his profound understanding of both the injustice and sorrow we feel in our grief.
In John 11:33, we read: “When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who had come with her also weeping, he was deeply moved in his spirit and greatly troubled.” In the Greek, this conveys furious indignation or extreme anger at what is perceived as unfair treatment. Why? Jesus knew Lazarus was going to die, and he was going to raise him from the dead, so why this reaction? It is because Jesus hates what the fall has done to us and all the grief that comes with it. Even though he knows he will restore and heal in the end, he still mourns what his beloved children have to experience in the meantime.
We also see Jesus—God himself—weeping in verse 35. This verse is not just for Mary and Martha but for us too. When you have been so wracked with grief that you can barely breathe through your sobs, the “Man of Sorrows” (Is. 53:3) sees and understands your pain too. Your grief matters to him. Stay connected to him in your grief.
Do What You Know
Taking this image of Jesus with us in our grief, how can we function while we are grieving? Often, believers want to separate things out into “spiritual categories” versus “flesh categories,” but God does not divide body and soul in the same way. He not only cares about our inner griefs but also designs tangible tools to help us stay connected to him and ourselves in the midst of them.
In John 21, we see a moment when the disciples are sitting in one of their heaviest griefs. They had been with Jesus for years, and then he was gone—and for what? It was all so confusing and devastating. What did Peter, the former fisherman-turned-disciple, do in this moment of deep grief? He went fishing. I once heard it said that, in grief, “When you don’t know what to do, do what you know.” And Peter did just that. It was familiar, comforting, grounding.
Similarly, I often talk with my clients about four anchors or life rhythms that, when practiced, help ground us as humans, even during grief:
Get regular sleep by trying to go to bed and get up around the same time each day.
Eat food that is nurturing and makes you feel energized and good.
Move your body.
Lean into spiritual rest through time with God.
It's not about getting each of these areas perfect; it’s more about trying to keep them in a certain range. When one of these areas—and it is different for every person—gets out of whack, they all start to tumble. When my clients are in grief of any level, we look at these four anchors and see which one is getting affected the most by the grief. We then practically try to pour into that anchor to bring some calming back to them during this season. So, if it’s sleep that grief has robbed someone of, we talk about ways to lean back into that anchor. Like Peter, who went fishing on the heels of all the loss with Jesus’s death, we too can figure out what our “fishing” is and use it to anchor us in a time when everything around us feels disoriented.
We all know grief, don’t we? When we get a break from it, we can get fearful of it coming back around. But maybe we don’t have to be. What if grief lets us, like Peter, see God use all of his created rhythms to ground us in the midst of it? And just like Martha and Mary, grief might lead us to experience a beautiful, connecting moment with our Savior who is weeping with us too.
