Room to Grieve

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Billy Crystal recently said he has stopped talking to God.

“No, ’cause I don’t trust Him,” he told CBS correspondent Tracy Smith. His home burned in the Pacific Palisades fire. His longtime friend Rob Reiner and Reiner’s wife, Michele, were both killed.

Suppose you were sitting across the table when he said it.

What would you say?

I asked that on my radio program because someone we know may eventually trust us enough to say it. A neighbor who buried a child. Someone who prayed beside a hospital bed and went home alone. A parent whose child never came home from school.

Would we hear their anguish, or immediately start preparing our answer?

I’ve spent forty years caring for my wife, Gracie. Her suffering began before I met her. Across her lifetime, she has endured 98 operations and the loss of both legs.

Along the way, people have told us what we should believe, how we should feel, and what God was evidently accomplishing.

Many offered explanations without acknowledging the weight of what we carried.

Rush Limbaugh used the phrase “drive-by media” to describe reporters who rushed into a story, stirred things up, and moved along, leaving others to deal with the damage.

Are we in danger of engaging in drive-by ministry?

We arrive at someone’s sorrow with conclusions before we’ve heard their story. We deliver our answers. Then we leave.

They’re still grieving. Now they may also feel guilty for struggling.

The alternative to drive-by ministry isn’t to drive slower.

It’s to stop the car, get out, and engage.

Job’s friends did that at first. One of my favorite passages in Scripture describes their arrival:

“And they sat with him on the ground seven days and seven nights, and no one spoke a word to him…” (Job 2:13, ESV)

They could see how greatly he suffered.

In this world, it’s hard to be silent for seven minutes. Seven days seems almost unimaginable.

Yet their silence offered Job companionship their later speeches often failed to provide. They left their homes and schedules to sit on the ground beside a devastated friend.

Entering someone’s grief doesn’t mean we have nothing to offer. We have God’s promises, the hope of the resurrection, and the good news of Jesus Christ.

But there is an order to how we offer care.

What do we offer first?

We show up.

We listen long enough to learn what happened at the hospital or why they dread going home. We let them finish a sentence without turning it into an opening for our favorite illustration.

Sometimes we bring supper or drive them to an appointment. Sometimes we listen to a story we’ve already heard. Sometimes we sit silently out of respect for their profound grief.

And we come back.

Grief rarely follows our schedule. Their questions may unsettle us. Their tears may bring our own. We may carry some of that sorrow home.

That’s part of the cost of loving them.

Staying beside them also means making room for words that trouble us. Scripture does. David asks in Psalm 13, “How long, O LORD? Will you forget me forever?”

Those words are in our Bibles. We ought to be able to hear them from someone sitting in our living rooms.

David ultimately recalls God’s steadfast love. But the psalm gives room for his struggle. Scripture repeatedly gives grieving people room to voice their anguish. Can we do the same, even when they say things we cannot agree with?

Even at Lazarus’s grave, knowing He would call him out, Jesus wept. In Gethsemane, He voiced His anguish to the Father. At the cross, He cried out in the words of Psalm 22, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

The sinless Savior gave voice to His sorrow. We can make room for others to voice theirs.

Christ entered our suffering. He took on flesh and dwelt among us. He knew weariness, rejection, grief, and pain. He bore our sins at the cross.

We cannot redeem another person. But we can follow Him into the room where someone is hurting.

I want grieving people to know Christ. And when I speak of Him, I want to remember how patiently He has dealt with me.

I cannot explain why Billy Crystal’s home burned or why his friends were killed. But hearing his words makes me want to pull up a chair.

“Tell me about your friends.”

Then listen long enough to hear the answer.

Forty years beside Gracie have taught me that some suffering will still be there when the conversation ends. We may have no explanation to offer when we return.

But we can return.

Over these four decades, I’ve heard more explanations of suffering than I can count. I’ve listened to countless sermons, sat with counselors, and worked through the theology.

But I’m only beginning to recognize how much I need to repeatedly hear about the Savior who was acquainted with grief. The One who entered our sorrow and bore our sins.

Tell me more about Him.

Tell me about the Savior who didn’t drive by.

He “drove” all the way in. All the way to the cross.

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