I am often asked what churches and individual Christians can do to care for and comfort those who are enduring times of grief. It is a question I am always glad to receive and one I am always glad to attempt to answer. And there is a lot individuals and communities can do to bring comfort—they can pray, they can be present, they can provide meals and other forms of help, they can remember important dates and continue to express care for months or even years into the future. In these ways and so many others, they can help bear the burdens of those they love.
Yet I also feel the need to speak a word to those who are enduring the time of trial and it’s a word of realism. Over the past few years, I have had a lot of grieving people reach out to express a sense of deep loneliness. They sometimes wonder if their friends have failed them or whether their church has neglected to fulfill its duty toward them. And for those who are enduring the trial of grief compounded by the trial of loneliness, I say this: Grief is lonely. Grief is lonely even in community, lonely even when surrounded by loving and helpful people. Grief is lonely when you are the only one grieving and lonely when you are grieving with others. Unfortunately, but unavoidably, it’s just plain lonely.
Thousands of years ago Solomon wrote this proverb: “The heart knows its own bitterness, and no stranger shares its joy” (Proverbs 14:10). What he meant to make us ponder is that no other person can fully know or understand what we are enduring in our sorrows. In fact, we ourselves cannot fully know or understand what we are enduring in our sorrows. We simply don’t have the ability to plumb the depths of our own hearts and then bring expression to what we find there. We don’t have the knowledge, the understanding, the words. And if even we can’t adequately express or even comprehend our grief, how can others? How can they fully comfort us? More realistically, we will need to expect and be content with comfort that is partial and incomplete.
We simply don’t have the ability to plumb the depths of our own hearts and then bring expression to what we find there.
But there is hope, because even if other human beings cannot fully understand our sorrow, God most certainly can. In fact, he can understand us at a level we cannot even understand ourselves. He is the high priest who is able to sympathize with our every weakness, the one who willingly receives all of our burdens for the beautiful reason that he cares for us (Hebrews 4:15, 1 Peter 5:7). He is the one who looks on the heart and who knows us better than we know ourselves. What is hidden to us is revealed to him and what is opaque to us is clear to him. His comfort comes at the level of the heart, mediated to the inner man by the Spirit who dwells within.
Yet even then we cannot expect to press on completely healed and whole, for this is neither the time nor the place of ultimate comfort. God has purposes in our grief. He means for us to carry them without being fully healed, to bear them with confident submission, to carry them all the way to the finish line. He means for those griefs to shift our eyes and hearts from here to there, from time to eternity, from this place of sorrows to that place of bliss.
Those who are enduring a time of grief can and should expect to receive comfort from the ones who love them and care for them. Yet it will be like the comfort they themselves have offered to others in the past—loving, caring, and well-intentioned, but necessarily incomplete. Such comfort is to be received gratefully yet also realistically, for our sorrows must ultimately be entrusted to the one who sees, who knows, and who understands all things—the one who has promised that soon enough, when his plans and purposes are complete, he will make all things right.
