Grief Equals Failure and Other Lies

One of the memories from my early teenage years that has really stayed with me is the birth of my youngest brother. He came into the world with a multitude of health problems, likely due to complications from losing his twin sister two months earlier to a miscarriage. Maybe that loss affected him, or maybe things had already been complicated for both of them. Either way, his birth was difficult, and he was not well. We brought him home to give him comfort and care. Coming from a church that believed in the current gifts of the Holy Spirit, we all prayed fervently for complete healing.

As his sickness ebbed and flowed, the grief in our home was palpable. It was a quiet heaviness that blanketed us in waves. People brought meals, prayed over him, and gently consoled my parents. But as is often the case, the healing that we prayed for didn’t come in the way we had hoped. Instead, it came as a more eternal answer—his death. And we added it to the list of unknowable things.

As his oldest sister, I made a speech at his funeral. I felt completely confident until I stepped onto the stage and turned to face the crowd. I wouldn’t call myself an empath, but looking at all the people and seeing the pain on their faces tightly bound up in faith overwhelmed me. I started to cry, expressing the pain I saw before me and allowing my own emotions to come up. No one reprimanded me, not even subtly, but I’ve always felt that I didn’t do my job properly that day.

There seemed to be a specific rhythm to these situations in my experience of Christianity that I grew up in. It went something like this: You find out someone is sick, and you immediately pray, speaking healing and wholeness into the situation. You don’t allow room for doubt or grief because it might undermine the healing work. If healing comes, you’ve achieved a great victory. You’ve pushed through the heavenly realms and attained synergy with God. A true 10/10 Christian. But if healing doesn’t come, there’s this unspoken—sometimes spoken—assumption that maybe your faith wasn’t strong enough, or perhaps God didn’t will it, or maybe someone fell into doubt. Then, like King David, you must accept the outcome, wash, clean yourself, and get back to life. The sooner, the better—otherwise, the negative will overwhelm the positive and life is better when we’re faith-filled and positive. I’m not saying that my branch of Christianity was to blame for these thought patterns, but as a young person growing up in an environment where the Holy Spirit is and was channelled through fallible people (myself included), these personal beliefs went unchallenged into my adult life.

I want to clarify that no one in my family or church ever looked down on me for showing emotion or stumbling through my grief. No one belittled me for my doubt or turned away from my sadness. But I feel that we all fell into this way of thinking in more subtle ways. We looked up to people who walked into funerals with radiant smiles, speaking of meeting their loved one in heaven someday. We admired parents who buried their children with saintly peace, secure in their faith that they would be reunited. The wailing of a grieving young widow was always harder to handle. Didn’t she have hope? Didn’t she have faith that she would see him again? It’s been a couple of months—she needs to pick up and move on. And one didn’t dare to question the goodness of God. That would be much too dangerous.

Now, I find myself on the precipice of another loss, feeling that familiar guilt and shame for my grief. This feeling stems from two beliefs. First, there’s a deeply ingrained notion that losses are punishments. I’ve done something wrong, I’ve sinned somehow, and now I’m experiencing loss. It’s like my Heavenly Father is taking all my treats away and placing me in the “naughty corner.” The hard part about shaking off this belief is that, in some instances, it appears in the Bible. Jonah disobeys God, and God sends a massive storm that nearly wrecks the boat, other sailors be damned. Pharaoh refuses to free the Israelites, and ten plagues devastate his country and people. Miriam speaks ill of Moses and is turned into a leper. I mean, these stories are literally recorded in Scripture.

“Now, I find myself on the precipice of another loss, feeling that familiar guilt and shame for my grief.”

Secondly, there’s the belief that the best thing I can do amidst grief and suffering is to maintain faith and hope for better things. I shouldn’t make the situation worse by dwelling on grief and loss—that’s what a hopeless world would do. We have eternal hope in Jesus, so the sooner we embrace it, the better. Right? Well you can see that in the Bible too, so it’s hard to refute.

But I’m starting to challenge these beliefs, and ironically, it’s because of what I find in the same Bible. I see Job suffering not because of sin, but because of his righteousness. I see Joseph suffering due to his calling, thrown into prison for resisting sexual temptation. I see Jesus suffering anxiety to the point of sweating blood because he knew what was coming, and it was still God’s will. Yes, people suffer because of wrongdoing, but suffering doesn’t only happen as a direct punishment. Suffering can happen for a myriad of reasons. The mistake we make is assuming wrongdoing first and sometimes solely. There are countless other reasons why suffering and grief find their way to our door. So, we should show ourselves grace, and most importantly, extend that grace to others who are facing loss.

When suffering inevitably comes, the Psalms encourage us to grieve before God, to rail against the apparent injustices of the world—but to do it to God. Sometimes grief is too big to carry, and I don’t always do a good job of holding it together. But that’s because we were never meant to carry it. We were not made to hold grief. So we must express it, and the safest way to express grief is to the only one big enough to hold it—God. Job pours out his anguish without blaming God. Joseph searches for a way out of prison but never curses God for placing him there. Jesus suffers through anxiety in Gethsemane and then walks the path of the cross, facing God the whole time. It’s important to have peace, positivity, and hope, but that doesn’t negate the power of holding and expressing grief—especially before God.

So, like many ideas I took from my childhood, I’m grateful for the good that I was given, but I’m slowly discerning which parts are true and which are not. Practicing my faith, being bold in my prayers, and believing in God’s healing have been invaluable in my life and are a gift that my parents and my church passed down to me. But I’m choosing to let go of the unspoken understanding that wrongly attributes loss to sin and regards grief as failure. Those thought patterns, I’m willing to leave behind.

It frees me to grieve when I need to, facing God with the full weight of my loss. And with a clean heart, I can ask Him to step into the situation and make things right—whatever that may look like.