Viewing entries tagged
comfort
Anyone who has watched someone close to them experience loss has felt the struggle of not knowing what to say. And listen to grieving people, and you realize that people’s well-intentioned words can cause real damage in times of loss. We need to tread lightly on the sacred ground of grief, and the Bible gives principles that can help guide our steps. Let me share four.
It’s hard to understand sometimes what God is thinking when we face painful circumstances. Knowing God could have prevented the trial we’re going through makes us question His heart toward us. Is He cold, stern, and uncaring? Does He just stand aloof and watch us suffer?
Painful trials have a way of testing our coping strategies. The Book of Job introduces a man whose suffering included unimaginable financial devastation, unrelenting physical pain, and the tragic loss of his children. His story helps us to see the limitations of some of our usual responses and gives us more effective means of relief.
Over the years, I have had many people reveal to me a terrible trial or sickness they’re facing and the sickening feeling they have that God has cursed them or punished them for some unknown sin they have committed. People brought those same kinds of assumptions to Jesus, and He opened their eyes to the many ways that God redeems the trials we face for our good.
When it comes to helping a grieving friend, nobody wants to say the wrong thing. Nobody wants to make it worse. And the fact is that almost nobody feels confident in navigating such delicate issues. I want to share some of the things I learned from Roslyn Crichton’s booklet, “How to Help Grieving People.”
Our campus worker with Power to Change invited me to their year-end conference P2C+. I was busy with sermon preparation and other ministry with the short week, and so could only spare half a day on New Year’s Eve, but it was well worth the time. I’m not sure what I expected. There were probably 800 students gathered and it would have been easy to entertain them with light talks on hot topics. What I got instead was a hard-hitting morning on the theme of suffering.
