How to Grieve in Hope After Losing a Loved One
But we do not want you to be uninformed, brothers, about those who are asleep, that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope. For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have fallen asleep. For this we declare to you by a word from the Lord, that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will not precede those who have fallen asleep. For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the voice of an archangel, and with the sound of the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air, and so we will always be with the Lord. Therefore encourage one another with these words. —1 Thessalonians 4:13–18
How to Grieve in Hope
How do we face up to death and what it takes from us while we wait for what Christ has promised? It’s crucial, first of all, to accept that grief is not only unavoidable; it’s also appropriate for Christians. When Paul says he doesn’t want his friends to grieve as those who have no hope he doesn’t say he doesn’t want them to grieve. He’s assuming grief. What matters to him is how they grieve. He wants them to grieve with hope and not without it.
British novelist Julian Barnes, in his memoir Nothing to Be Frightened Of, describes the moment when his brother, a fellow atheist, concluded that the claims of Christianity couldn’t hold water. It was February 7, 1952. King George VI had just died. The headmaster of his primary school announced that the king “had gone to eternal glory and happiness in heaven with God, and that in consequence we were all going to wear black armbands for a month. I thought there was something fishy there, and how right I was.”1
Barnes assumed grief and hope are incompatible. If we’re wearing black armbands, what does that say about our confidence of eternal glory? If we can’t help grieving, our hope must be empty. That is the logic.
Remember Heaven
Matthew McCullough
In these practical meditations on biblical promises, Matthew McCullough shows how cultivating heavenly mindedness shapes readers’ lives in the meantime.
But the truth is that Christians have better reasons to grieve freely than anyone else. Let’s assume for a moment Barnes’s secular perspective on the world. We come from nowhere. We are going nowhere. Any attachment we feel to each other is an evolutionary necessity and nothing more. Death will sever that bond once and for all. It’s just simple biology. Why cloak simple biology with sentimentality? What makes what’s lost worth grieving over in the first place?
But the backdrop to our hope as Christians is our distinctive view of death and of the grief it causes us. Death is more than simple biology. It is an intruder in God’s good world. It is just, but it is unnatural and bound up with sin. Human lives are irreducibly precious. They are designed by God and, in Christ, they are destined for glory. That means the only proper response to every life lost is not resignation but heart-rending, unashamed grief. We are right to grieve over death wherever we see it. We would be wrong not to.
Sometimes with the best of intentions we Christians can fall into our own version of death rebranded as life. When a loved one dies, we say they’re in a better place. We hold celebrations of life more often than funerals for the dead. And when we follow this route, sometimes we can even feel guilty for feeling so sad that our loved ones are gone. If they’re with Jesus now, why can’t I stop crying?
Let me be clear: I do believe those who die in faith are in a better place. And of course, their lives are worth celebrating. But precisely because those loved ones are precious to us, they’re worth crying over too. Our ultimate hope is aimed not at where they are now but where we’ll be together when Christ returns to raise us up.
Our best model for grieving in hope is Jesus himself. In John 11, when he approached the grave of Lazarus, he knew exactly what he was going to do. He had chosen to let his friend die precisely so that he could raise him up again, so that all who saw it might trust him as the resurrection and the life. But when he saw the place where his friend was buried, when he saw the grief of his friends who’d been left behind, Jesus himself wept over Lazarus.
Our grief is not a sign that we don’t really believe what we say we believe. It is the Christlike response to the brokenness of a world not made to be this way. Our grief is no denial of hope. It is the backdrop against which hope shines most brightly. We will never see the glory of Christ more clearly than when we look at him through tears.
But here is where we must be careful—to grieve in hope, we must keep our eyes on Christ above all, even as we long to see our friends and families again. We need to know that grief has a powerful role to play in our journey of faith while we wait for the day when he will deliver all that he has promised.
Grief can teach us how good it is to have God for our God.
If there is an exception in our culture to the general struggle to connect with heaven, it is in our longing to see friends and family again. For at least the last 150 years, this has been the dominant theme in how American Christians think and talk about heaven. According to historian Gary Smith, “In the middle decades of the nineteenth century, Americans’ vision of heaven changed dramatically, from one centered on God to one focused on humans.”2 The most popular books on the subject pictured heaven as an eternal family reunion, with a thick layer of sentimentality that left little room for God as anything more than the keeper of the family home. Andrew Jackson summed up the prevailing idea very well: “Heaven will be no heaven to me if I do not meet my wife there.”3
Reunion with those who have died in faith is a bedrock promise of the gospel. It is absolutely worth hoping for. But if when we think of heaven we’re thinking first of who we will see again someday, we are missing the point of heaven itself and the purifying purpose of grief in the meantime.
The point of heaven is God. He is its center, its focus, its undisputed main attraction. The psalmist writes, “Whom have I in heaven but you?” (Ps. 73:25). Yes, we will be reunited with one another in his presence. By all means, that happy day is worth longing for. But when we are reunited, we will be united around our joy in seeing him as he is, in living in a world where he is fully and forever with us. What will make our resurrected relationships all the sweeter is the fact that we’ll be centered perfectly on him, loving one another for his sake as the God whose goodness gave us our relationships in the first place. Remember what Paul said to the Thessalonians: yes, we will be caught up together. We will be reunited. But the main point is that we, together, will always be with the Lord.
If we become overly focused on seeing our loved ones again, life in the meantime feels like no more than a holding pattern. It’s straight loss, with nothing to do but wait. But grief doesn’t have to be a cul-de-sac to wait in while we run out the time we have left. It can be a precious opportunity to taste heaven’s joys in advance, with greater sweetness than ever before, because loss can drive us deeper into the love of God. It can be, as C. S. Lewis described it, a “severe mercy.”4 Grief can teach us how good it is to have God for our God.
One of the most treasured books in my library is one my grandmother gave to me shortly before she died. It’s a book by Lewis called A Grief Observed, which he wrote to reflect on his own faith after losing his wife to cancer. My grandmother bought the book for help in grieving the death of her youngest son, who died in a car accident driving home from college a few years before I was born. She absolutely devoured this book, marking its pages with underlines and marginal notes, because she wasn’t just reading it for interest. She was reading for survival.
One of Lewis’s themes she often underlined was how grief over loss tests the quality of your faith—how it exposes what you’re trusting in and, even more, shows you what is worth trusting. “You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you. . . . Only a real risk tests the reality of a belief.”5 Lewis uses rope as an analogy. It’s easy to believe in the quality of a rope that it’s strong enough to hold your weight under stress when it’s coiled in the box where you bought it. It’s another thing to trust it when you’re dangling over the edge of a cliff, hanging on for dear life. Then it becomes crystal clear what your life depends on and whether it can hold your weight. A few pages later, in the margin of Lewis’s book, is a penciled note in my grandmother’s handwriting: “The rope held me!!! God showed me he is who he said he is!”
I know her grief was excruciating. Of course, she never would have chosen it. But her grief was a refining fire. It drove her deeper into the only refuge there is. For the first thirty-five years of my life, I watched her hold that rope through the declining years of her life, as time took from her more and more of what she loved. I watched her lose basically everything but Jesus, everything but her hold on that rope. But the more she lost, the tighter she held on, and the rope held her still, all the way to the end. As she faced her own death, of course she longed to see her son again. But she also longed to see the one who had held her in her grief, who had become the center of her hope for endless love. She learned through grief that God is who he said he is.
It is through loss that God teaches us to seek first his kingdom, trusting him to add all things in time. Seek God first; restored relationships come later. And while we wait, we learn. We learn how lovely God is in himself, that he is so much more than a means to our ends—even the wonderful end of loving relationships with others. He is the source and the goal for everything good in this world, and he never changes, even as his good gifts come and go.
What is life after the death of one you love when you don’t believe in an afterlife? I’ll end with that same question recast: What is life after the death of one you love when you do believe in an afterlife and grieve in the hope of reunion? The answer is that your life, though changed, is not over. Your grief can serve the greatest purpose in your life. For as long as God gives you breath, you can still do what he made you to do in the first place. You can glorify him and enjoy him, now and forever. You can know from experience what was promised so long ago: “The Lord is near to the brokenhearted” (Ps. 34:18).
Notes:
- Julian Barnes, Nothing to Be Frightened Of (New York: Vintage, 2008), 15.
- Gary Smith, Heaven in the American Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 70.
- Quoted in Smith, Heaven, 70.
- This phrase comes from a letter by Lewis to his friend Sheldon Vanauken, a relatively new Christian grieving the death of his young wife. Vanauken won a National Book Award for the memoir he wrote about the experience and his friendship with Lewis, A Severe Mercy (New York: Harper & Row, 1977).
- C. S. Lewis, A Grief Observed (New York: Bantam, 1976), 25.
This article is adapted from Remember Heaven: Meditations on the World to Come for Life in the Meantime by Matthew McCullough.
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