Grief & Loss
People at church keep telling me she is in a better place and it makes me want to walk out. Why do the right answers feel so hollow?
“I have heard many such things: miserable comforters are ye all.”
After three rounds of theologically respectable speeches from his friends, Job finally tells them what their comfort has actually been worth to him. Every individual statement they made about God was defensible on its own terms. The book still ends with God telling them they had not spoken rightly. True sentences delivered to a suffering person can be badly, damagingly wrong.
“And when he was come near, he beheld the city, and wept over it,”
Luke records that as Jesus came over the hill and saw Jerusalem in front of him, he wept over the city, knowing exactly what was going to happen to it and why. He had the whole explanation in his hands and cried anyway. Whatever comfort Christianity offers, it does not come from someone who thinks understanding the reasons should stop the tears.
A path forward
Give yourself permission to say, kindly, 'I know you mean well, and I cannot hear that today.' Most people adjust immediately once they are told.
Find the one or two people who can sit with you without commentary, and spend your limited energy on them rather than on the crowd at the church door.
Take the hollowness itself to God. Tell him plainly that the answers are not reaching you. That is a more honest prayer than agreeing with words that are not landing.
Closing verse
“He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not.”
- Isaiah 53:3
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