Finding God in Your Grieving

Finding God in Your Grieving

The Bible is a real, authentic, genuine book—filled with the stories and thoughts of real people. Whereas some grief-coping strategies may encourage you to deny your grief and try to convince you that your grief is just in your head, the Bible takes a different route. Your grief is real, your pain is actual, and there's still the opportunity for true healing.

Consider the story of David, one of the most prominent authors in the Bible. David was king of a whole nation, a military leader, a wise man, and a gifted songwriter. And yet his life was filled with sorrow: much of his life, he was being chased by a vengeful predecessor who wanted to kill him; his best friend was killed; his son died. And yet in the midst of this pain, David is able to sing out to God:

"You have turned for me my mourning into dancing;
You have put off my sackcloth and clothed me with gladness;
To the end that my glory may sing praise to You and not be silent.
O LORD my God, I will give thanks to You forever." 

What is the hope that propels David through his seasons of grief? David devotes himself to loving and serving God and he finds God to be more than enough for his hurting heart. Want to find the hope that David had? Let God turn your mourning into dancing, too. Grief is hard, but God is bigger than that grief. He wants to comfort you, to sit with you as you mourn, and to carry you through to the other side.

Human beliefs may come from our genes and we have a fundamental need to tell ourselves stories to make sense of life

Lewis Wolpert: “Few people are content to accept that blind chance plays a large part in their lives; they seek reasons, even when these do not exist.”

Children, by contrast, have a good understanding of forces, how they act and their consequences

The concept of cause was fundamental to human evolution.

With language and a concept of cause, humans were faced with dilemma. There were many important events for which they could find no clear cause. Life was tough and many children died at a young age. Volcanoes, storms, lightning, climate change and other natural disasters abounded.

But they had no explanation for such distressing occurrences.

Children provide good examples of how they will distort their own observations and "cook" them to maintain consistency with beliefs.

Our brains are programmed with causal reasoning

The world is not built on common sense; if an idea fits with common sense, scientifically it is bound to be false. History has shown how it is not easy to explain the basis for our belief that it is the Earth that goes round the Sun, and not the other way round; that force causes acceleration not motion; and that quantum mechanics underlies all physics, even if it does depict waves as particles and possess other bizarre features.

Stephen Lau

Copyright© by Stephen Lau