I have been writing about suffering, sorrow, and the hope of heaven for as long as I have been writing on this site. For many years I wrote about these things as truths I believed but had only rarely been called to live. Then, on November 3, 2020, my son Nick—a 20-year-old seminary student, engaged to be married—suddenly collapsed and went to be with the Lord. Since that day I have written my way through grief, and much of what you will find on this page reflects that.
This page gathers the best of what I’ve written on suffering, grief, loss, and heaven into one place. Whether you are enduring a season of sorrow yourself or walking beside someone who is, I hope it will serve you well.
Our Hardest Day
Let me begin where our family’s sorrow began. On the morning after Nick died, I sat down to write the hardest words I have ever had to type: My Son, My Dear Son, Has Gone To Be With the Lord. In it I described what Aileen and I resolved that first terrible evening:
We don’t want to do this, but we can do this—this sorrow, this grief, this devastation—because we know we don’t have to do it in our own strength. We can do it like Christians, like a son and daughter of the Father who knows what it is to lose a Son.
The piece ends with the words that have carried us since:
But for now, even though our minds are bewildered and our hearts are broken, our hope is fixed and our faith is holding. Our son is home.
Everything else on this page is shaped in some way by that day. But God, in his kindness, had been preparing me for it, for I had been writing about suffering long before suffering became so personal.
What God Does in Our Suffering
Scripture insists that suffering never comes to God’s people apart from his purpose, and that it is therefore always significant, never meaningless. In 8 Ways God Works Suffering for Our Good—an article that draws its points and much of its wording from Thomas Watson’s A Divine Cordial—I traced how suffering teaches us, purifies us, and conforms us to Christ: “If Christ’s head was crowned with thorns, why do we think ours should only ever be crowned with roses?” And the conclusion: “The worst that God ever does to his children is to drive them toward heaven, toward himself.”
One of God’s purposes in suffering is to equip some of his people for a ministry few of us would ever choose. I wrote about it in The Ministry of Sorrow:
This is a sacred ministry God calls some to undertake on his behalf. Those he calls are ordained to it not by the laying on of hands but by the emptying of their arms, the breaking of their bodies, the shattering of their hearts. He calls them to lose so they might bless, to grieve so they might comfort, to suffer so they might strengthen, to endure so they might encourage. He calls them to submit to him in their sorrows, that they might be a light in the darkness, a song in the night.
How To Grieve Like a Christian
Three years before Nick’s death, I wrote How To Grieve Like a Christian, an article built on Paul’s words in 1 Thessalonians 4. The first lesson is simply this: Grieve! It’s good and right to grieve. But there is a distinctly Christian way to do it:
Christians experience grief but without despair, sorrow but without defeat, sadness but without hopelessness. It’s true sorrow and true hope. These things don’t cancel out one another. We feel the great weight of sorrow and the great thrill of hope.
And the ground of that hope is the resurrection of Jesus Christ: “While our loved ones have left us, they have not ceased to be. They’ve simply gone on ahead. Because Jesus rose again, they will rise again. Because Jesus conquered death, they will conquer death. Because Jesus lives, they live.”
Grief, I have learned, is not only to be endured but stewarded. In Grief Should Always Make Us Better, written a couple of months after Nick died, I explained the resolution I had come to:
I have accepted this suffering as something God has given me in sacred trust. Like talents and time and money and everything else God sovereignly bestows, I believe it can be stewarded faithfully or poorly. It’s my intention to steward it well, for I’m convinced I’m responsible for it and accountable in it.
I need to add a word of realism here, and I offered it in Grief Can Be So Lonely: “Grief is lonely even in community, lonely even when surrounded by loving and helpful people.” No friend, however faithful, can fully understand or fully comfort. “But there is hope, because even if other human beings cannot fully understand our sorrow, God most certainly can.”
Trusting God in the Dark
Times of loss are tests of faith, and faith in such times is rarely effortless. In What Does It Mean To Trust God in Our Trials? I described what belief looks like on the hard days:
Faith is often choosing to believe in the face of grief, the face of adversity, the face even of doubt. Faith is not less than intellectual, but is certainly far more: it is grasping and reaching toward divine promises, taking hold of what God has said to be true, clinging to it with whatever conviction we can muster, and pleading—pleading earnestly—that God will be powerfully present in his grace and comfort.
In the early days after Nick’s death, I knew I would face the temptation to despair, to descend into self-pity, or to charge God with wrong. So I wrote A Manifesto for Times of Suffering—a declaration to read often and hold myself accountable to. It later became a chapter of Seasons of Sorrow:
By faith I will accept Nick’s death as God’s will, and by faith accept that God’s will is always good. By faith I will be at peace with Providence, and by faith at peace with its every decree. By faith I will praise God in the taking as I did in the giving, and by faith receive from his hand this sorrow as I have so many joys. I will grieve but not grumble, mourn but not murmur, weep but not whine.
Though I will be scarred by Nick’s death, I will not be defined by it. Though it will always be part of my story, it will never become my identity. I will be forever thankful that God gave me a son and never resentful that he called him home. My joy in having loved Nick will be greater than my grief in having lost him.
Of course, faith does not silence every question. In When God Took Away: His Goodness in My Grief I admitted that Nick’s death “shocked us, devastated us, and left us wondering why. Why would God choose this for us, and why would God choose us for this?” In that article I tell how old writers like Theodore Cuyler, F.B. Meyer, and J.R. Miller counseled and consoled me in the most difficult days and darkest hours.
The Long Road of Grief
Grief is not an event but a road, and I have tried to mark its milestones honestly. On the first anniversary of Nick’s death, I wrote A Year of Sorrow, a Year of Gratitude, a Year of Grace:
I am grateful for the gift of heaven. Never has heaven been more real, more present, more precious, more close. This year has given me a whole new longing to be there—to be where Christ is, where Nick is—to be in that place where all fears are stilled, where all sorrows are soothed, where all tears are dried.
On the third anniversary I wrote Three Years Later: What I Miss Most—a father’s honest accounting of all a son leaves behind. “He is already there. I will eventually catch up.” And on the fifth, Nick Has Been with the Lord for 5 Years:
There is no better response to grief than to bow the knee in submission to God and to say, “You do all things well.”
And later in that same piece:
I know he is a good and loving Father who has displayed through the cross that his will is best, even when it doesn’t look that way to human eyes. I know that if I can trust him with my soul, I can trust him with my son. And so even when my mind doesn’t understand, my soul still submits.
The road passes through holidays as well as anniversaries. In Christmas Bitter and Christmas Sweet I observed that “love and grief are like the daffodils of early spring in which two flowers bloom from a single stem. There is no grief where there has not been love and no love that comes without risk of grief.” And in The Death of My Son and the Birth of My Savior, written before our first Christmas without Nick, I explained why the two belong together: “Because Jesus lived and lives, I can have confidence that Nick lives and will live.”
Comforting Those Who Grieve
Many people ask how to care for those who mourn—what to say and what not to say. Drawing on the counsel of other bereaved parents, I answered in Helpful Things You Can Say to Grieving Parents. Of all the phrases I suggest there, this one may matter most:
It is a tremendous blessing, then, to have one or two trusted friends offer this assurance: “I will never grow tired of your grief.” This makes those friends a safe harbor for expressing sorrow, whether weeks, months, or even years later. It blesses the sufferer to know they will always have someone who will listen patiently as they pour out their broken hearts.
One thing that never comforts is comparison, which is the instinct to rank one person’s sorrows against another’s. I addressed it in Comparative Suffering:
Yet I am convinced there is little benefit in comparing sorrow. No one gains comfort by diminishing their grief in relation to another person’s. Likewise, no one gains comfort by amplifying their grief in relation to another person’s. Grief deserves comfort, but comparison is not comforting.
The Hope of Heaven
Since Nick died, no place has been more on my heart and no subject more on my mind than heaven. “It still shocks me to write the words: I have a son in heaven.” In The Music of Heaven I described what congregational singing has come to mean to me—how the church on earth and the church in heaven are one choir:
And so, when I stand with God’s people to sing God’s praises, I have a new awareness that I do not sing alone. We as a church do not sing alone. Rather, when we lift our voices, we join them with the singing voices of the saints of all the ages. The earthly and the heavenly, the militant and the triumphant, the ones longing for Christ’s presence and the ones basking in it sing as one, for we are one.
The essay closes with the image that gives it its name:
As the piper’s music once carried across the lake and reached my ear, the strains of heaven’s music carry across time and space to touch my heart and give me hope.
Heaven means the most to those who have suffered the most. That is the theme of The Harder Our Earth, the Sweeter Our Heaven:
We know that heaven will be a wonder for all who are admitted, a place of perfect peace and perfect satisfaction for all who enter its gates. But surely heaven will be a greater wonder still for those whose joys were fewest, whose sorrows were deepest, whose earth was most distant from heaven.
In The Only Tears In Heaven I lingered over the Bible’s promise that God will dry every eye: “What greater promise do we have than this, that in a moment God will comfort all sorrow, that his tender hand will wipe away not just some tears, but every tear?” And in Sorrowful Departures and Joyful Arrivals I compared death to an airport—a place of tearful goodbyes on one level and joyful reunions on another—confident that “the pain of departure will be by far surpassed by the joy of arrival.”
Getting Heaven Right
Precisely because heaven matters so much, we must think about it truthfully. Some years ago a genre of books arose in which authors claimed to have visited heaven and returned. I critiqued it in Heaven Tourism:
We have no reason to look to another person’s experience of heaven in order to prove that heaven is real or hell is real. The Bible promises blessings on those who do not see and yet believe. Our hope is not to be in the story of a minister or toddler or doctor or anyone else who insists they have been to heaven; our hope is to be in Jesus Christ as God has graciously revealed him to us in the Bible.
Later, in The Bit of Heaven the Heaven Tourism Books Never Touched, I noted what every one of those books missed: sinlessness. “Where there is sin there is no heaven; where there is heaven there is no sin.” (For much more on weighing what you read and believe, see my guide to spiritual discernment.)
The same clear thinking belongs at our funerals. In I Forbid You To Say These Things at My Funeral I ruled out the clichés like “He’s with the angels now,” “God needed another angel,” “He wouldn’t want you to cry”:
There is no virtue in a stiff upper lip. There is no virtue in suppressing grief. There is no virtue in thinking that the joy of one man entering heaven ought to dispel the grief of those who are left behind. Funerals are a perfectly appropriate time to mourn—to mourn for the one who died, to mourn for others you miss, to mourn your own mortality, and to mourn the One who died so we could live.
“It’s as wrong to refuse to mourn as it is to mourn without hope.” And since death will come to each of us, we do well to be ready for it. In Do You Knock at the Gates of the Grave? I commended the old practice of regular self-examination: “We knock to ensure we are waiting, to ensure we are ready, to ensure we will go to be with the Lord we love.”
Start Here: Essays on Suffering
- My Son, My Dear Son, Has Gone To Be With the Lord. The hardest words I have ever had to type, written the morning after Nick died.
- How To Grieve Like a Christian. True sorrow and true hope, from 1 Thessalonians 4.
- A Manifesto for Times of Suffering. The declaration I wrote in the early days of grief and still hold myself accountable to.
- What Does It Mean To Trust God in Our Trials? Faith as an act of the will when believing is hardest.
- Grief Should Always Make Us Better. Receiving sorrow as a sacred trust to be stewarded well.
- Grief Can Be So Lonely. A word of realism about the limits of human comfort and the sufficiency of God’s.
- Comparative Suffering. Why we should neither diminish nor amplify our griefs by ranking them against another’s.
- Helpful Things You Can Say to Grieving Parents. Practical phrases for the friends of the bereaved.
- The Ministry of Sorrow. The sacred calling God gives to some of his people through their deepest losses.
- Christmas Bitter and Christmas Sweet. For those who face the holidays with an empty place at the table.
- The Music of Heaven. Why I can barely sing with the church without tears, and why I sing anyway.
- The Harder Our Earth, the Sweeter Our Heaven. The deepest sorrows prepare us for the greatest wonders.
- The Only Tears In Heaven. Every tear dried by God’s most tender, gentle hand.
- I Forbid You To Say These Things at My Funeral. Clearing the clichés away so a funeral can hold both grief and joy.
You can browse everything I’ve written on the subject in the suffering topic archive and the grief topic archive.
The Book
In the year following Nick’s death, I processed my loss the way I know best—through writing. Those real-time reflections, following the seasons from fall to summer, became a book: Seasons of Sorrow: The Pain of Loss and the Comfort of God. It is an honest look at grief and fears, faith and hope, and it is written for anyone who has loved and lost. If this page has been meaningful to you, the book is the natural next step.
Explore More
If you are looking for books to read in a season of sorrow, my recommended books on suffering gathers my favorites. And for words to carry with you, Comforting Quotes for Those Who Are Suffering collects passages from trusted authors on God’s purposes in our pain.
This guide is one of a series. You can find them all on my guides page.
