On this episode of The Disciple-Making Parent Podcast, we listen as Tim Challies shares a deeply personal “story of grace” from the aftermath of losing his son, Nick. We hear what those first shocking moments were like, how grief can cloud our thinking and sap our strength, and why it’s essential to let truth—especially what we know about God’s sovereignty and goodness—lead when our emotions feel unsteady.
Topics Covered in This Week’s Podcast
03:46 Introduction: Losing and grieving Nick
09:31 Glimpses of grace
15:25 Tim’s manifesto
21:25 Five lessons about grief
29:31 Five ways to help people who are grieving
Resources From This Podcast
Tim Challies: Personal Accounts of God’s Goodness in Suffering (Previous podcast)
Seasons of Sorrow, by Tim Challies
Challies.com, Tim’s blog
A Manifesto for Times of Suffering
Tim Challies- Walking Through Deep Sorrow and Loss (Prior podcast interview)
Podcast Transcript
Chap: I am Chap Bettis and you’re listening to The Disciple-Making Parent, where we seek to equip parents and churches to pass the gospel to their children. Are you going through a deep trial or sorrow? Would you like to hear some practical thoughts from someone who’s been there? Then this podcast is for you. Hi, my name is Chap Bettis and I’m the author of The Disciple-Making Parent. And with this podcast, we continue on in our mini-series on suffering. This is our second podcast in that series, and if you have a chance, go back and listen to the previous podcast where we talked about suffering and our savior.
Well, in today’s podcast, we’ll listen in again to Tim Challies as he reflects on the goodness of God and suffering. He’ll get very personal in both his strategy, his reactions, and what people did that was helpful. He also references his manifesto in times of suffering, which I thought was very helpful, and we will put that in the show notes. This recording comes from Tim’s recent visit to my home church in Providence, Rhode Island. The Disciple-Making Parent ministry co-sponsored the conference with my church and we actually had two mini, two small conferences on Friday night. He spoke about suffering. And on Saturday morning he spoke on technology.
With today’s podcast, this is the second talk he gave that night, and he’s well qualified to help equip the saints on both topics. Why suffering? Because in November of 2020, his 20-year-old son, Nick, suddenly dropped dead on his college campus. And to this day, they still don’t know exactly why. But Tim, being ever the writer blogged, his way through his own grief, and out of that came the resource Seasons of Sorrow. I listened to the audio book, read in Tim’s own voice, and I can tell you it was very, very moving. So. I thought it might be beneficial for you to listen in on the two talks that he gave to us.
Well, Tim Challies is a well-known blogger who’s been blogging at challies.com for over 20 years. He’s posted over 15,000 posts. He’s a well-known author, including the book I mentioned already, Seasons of Sorrow, as well as many other resources as well. He’s married to Eileen and they have three children, Nick, who’s in heaven, Abby, and Michaela. And he serves as a pastor at Grace Fellowship Church in Toronto, Canada.
But before we start, I want to remind you about our newest resource, Managing Your Households Well. This is a biblical requirement for pastors, deacons, and all who aspire to leadership in God’s church: that they would manage their household well. That’s the phrase that’s in 1 Timothy. But what does it actually mean, and why is it vitally important? So check out the book wherever Christian books are sold, that’s Managing Your Households Well: How Family Leadership Trains You for Church Leadership.
And of course the second resource that we always highlight is that we give away the audiobook of The Disciple-Making Parent absolutely free. Just visit our website, thedisciplemakingparent.com, sign up for our weekly newsletter, and we’ll give you the whole audiobook for free. We’re on a mission to equip parents and grandparents to raise children who not only love the Lord and are not only disciples, but disciple-makers, taking the gospel to the world and standing as salt and light in our own country. So head on over to thedisciplemakingparent.com for your free audiobook. But for now, let’s listen in as we think about God’s goodness in suffering.
Tim Challies: So I thought for this second session, I would just share what my wife and I called a story of [inaudible]. Shortly after Nick died, we were given the opportunity to speak at his church, which is Third Avenue Baptist Church in Louisville, Kentucky. And they asked us before the service during their Sunday school hour if we just share some accounts of God’s goodness in our times of grief. And so we sort of put together some thoughts on that. And we began just by saying the hardest day, the hardest stretch of our life, strangely, began with a text message of all things, a text message from someone I had never actually even met.
Our daughter Abby had begun dating a young man, and on the evening of November 3rd, 2020 he texted my wife this message that says, “I don’t know if you heard, but Nick collapsed. They think he had a seizure. They think he’s breathing.” That was a very confusing, difficult text message to get. We’re 600 miles away. Aileen and I, along with our youngest Michaela, we were at home in Oakville, Ontario, Canada. Our two oldest, Nick and Abby in Louisville, Kentucky- Nick in his third year of seminary, Abby in her first year of Bible college. You get a text message like that, my first thought I was going to get to the car and I’m going to start driving. I’m just going to try and close the distance between myself and my son.
But you remember there’s a pandemic on in those days and the United States had closed its land border, so Canadians were not allowed to cross into the US by land. We were allowed to fly. You remember the confusion of COVID. It was forbidden to drive, but okay to fly at that time. And so I thought, Maybe I’ll drive to the border and just plead my case. Please, here’s what’s happening. But I just realized that would be futile. And so there’s really not much we could do. Nick had never had any sort of medical issue. We weren’t aware of anything. He had never had a seizure or anything like that. He never really had anything more than a cold and having his wisdom teeth out. So there’s no reason to think that anything serious had happened. And so we just waited and paced and waited and prayed, and we heard words like “unconscious” and “CPR” and “ambulance” and “emergency room.” And eventually I got the call that every parent dreads. It was the doctor who called from the ER and just said, “I’m sorry, we did everything we could, but there’s nothing more we could do.”
So just like that, our world just. . . Absolutely unexpectedly out of the blue our world just fell apart. Nick’s heart had simply stopped beating. God had taken Nick to himself. So as we turn to this second session, I don’t want to provide a theology of grief. I’ve talked about some of what the Bible says about grief. I don’t want to tell you all the Bible says here, but I just want to tell you some of what my family learned as we passed through this unexpected time of intense grief. I’m no expert on grief. I, I don’t know that there’s anyone in the world who’s really an expert on grief, but we can become experts on our own grief and just start to share that experience with others, understanding that there’s overlap between that experience and yours.
So the next few days, of course, were a blur, and even now we have trouble remembering parts of it. We didn’t know how deeply grief can affect your memory, just how much it reduces your capacity to think and decide and remember. What we do remember is pain and confusion. A friend who said, “Just get to the airport. When you get to the airport, we’ll make sure there’s a plane waiting for you.” And then I remember sitting on an airplane just completely in shock. And in the wee hours of that first morning, just starting to write.
Writing is always the way I process things. I don’t really know what I think or believe or feel about things until I write about them. And so I just started writing, even then at 30,000 feet flying our way down to Louisville. And that writing would eventually start feeding into the blog posts I was sharing, mostly just because people wanted to know what was going on. I’ll tell you more about that. But it eventually fed into Seasons of Sorrow, that book that you were told about.
So Nick died in the United States. We live in Canada, and this was a very confusing time, again, with Borders closed and everything. Nick’s friends and my family were in the United States. My family lives in Georgia. Our friends and Aileen’s family were in Canada, and so we had a memorial service at Southern Seminary so my family and his friends could say farewell then. Four of us, my two daughters and Aileen and me, we flew back to Canada and had 14 days of strict in-our-house quarantine, nobody able to visit under penalty of law. So two weeks just completely isolated in our home, just trying to process this with the four of us. Come to terms with it. So many decisions to make, so much paperwork. We had to hire a service that could return his remains. Bring a coffin back from the US to Canada. The day our quarantine ended, we held a funeral service and laid Nick to rest in the cemetery close to our home. And in a sense that that brought to a close this first little segment of our journey through grief.
And I tell you, there’s probably nothing more difficult we’ve ever needed to endure than just seeing that casket be lowered into the ground. And yet, even with all the pain, it did mark a kind of closure, the end of one phase and the beginning of another. So as I tell you a little bit about our experience, I want share not just what happened, but as I was asked at Nick’s church, to share some glimpses of God’s grace we encountered and experienced along the way. And the first one is this: that in our hardest moments, God gave us the ability to live out what we believed. We took that as God’s grace. God helped us to get some crucial theology in place before we entered into this time of sorrow and loss and, and our task then was just to deploy that theology, to believe it and to enact it. In those moments, God had put us in good churches that taught the truth well. And so long before this happened, we had already established in our minds that God is sovereign. God oversees and superintendents all that happens in this world. We knew that God is good, that his disposition to one toward us is one of kindness, of fatherliness. He loves us, he’s for us.
And then came this huge challenge. And we found that even when these things may not have felt true, God might have not felt kind, or might not have felt like he was acting in a way that was good, we had a choice. We could choose to believe our feelings, what our hearts, what our emotions might have been telling us, or we could choose to believe what our minds knew to be true, what we had been taught and accepted was true. And we had to learn that our emotions cannot inform truth, rather truth must inform our emotions. We had to subject our emotions to the truth and what we learned. We trusted that God hadn’t abandoned us, but he walked with us. He prepared us. We had to choose to see his presence, but he was there.
So for two weeks it was just the four of us at home. And then for the next few months, it was just us trying to come to terms with all of this. And these are really hard days. If you’ve experienced a really heavy tragedy before, a really sudden tragedy, you might know that you often live with this kind of lingering sense of doom. Like he is waiting for the next tragedy. If God did this, why wouldn’t he also do that? If he took this person, why wouldn’t he also take that one? So if the girls, if our daughters slept in for longer than we thought they should, we’d just find ourselves pacing, waiting for some noise, some sign that they were alive, that they were okay. And if they still slept on, then Aileen might sneak up to the room. Just listen for the sound of breathing, just like you do with an infant. You know, just make sure they’re alive and then you could relax again. And we were just so afraid in those days, having received that huge shock.
But then the school holidays ended and it was time for Abby’s second semester to begin. So just a few months after Nick had died, Abby said, “I want to go back to school.” Her boyfriend was there, now, her husband, her friends were there. That was her place. That was her people. And she wanted to go. And so even though it was still COVID times, there were still all sorts of restrictions, she had a student visa. She was free to go. And we knew she needed to keep on living. And so I think it was only two months after Nick died, Abby went back to school. And that was a hard, hard thing just to let her go again, knowing she would be far away, we’d be disconnected again. And we’re just afraid. We’re afraid of God, afraid of what God might call us to do. Having called us to bear one heavy burden that he might call us to bear another. Before Nick’s death, we knew that God could choose to do anything he wanted to do in our lives. But after Nick’s death, we knew he might, he would actually ask us to do very hard things, anything that would serve his purposes and further his glory. And we were afraid, afraid of what God might ask us to do.
And so here’s another little glimpse of grace. As we pondered these things, God just allowed us to have a little more trust than fear. We were fearful, but God gave us just a little more trust than we had fear. And so letting Abby go, letting go, letting her go back to school was just an expression of our trust in God and our faith in his sovereignty. We knew that God had the right to choose what he willed for our lives, for our children’s lives, and he wanted us to trust him with our daughter. And so I walked her to the airport. I gave her a hug. And off she went. In that first year, I found myself reading a lot of books by people who had lived in days past, the days when the death of a child was far more common than it is today. You read about people like John Owen, who lost almost all of his children before he died, et cetera. That wasn’t as uncommon as it is today. And something I found as a common theme in their writing was something along these lines. They would say, I’m truly, genuinely sorry that you’ve experienced this loss, and I grieve with you. I grieve for you. However, please don’t stop pressing on in life. God still has work for you to do in this world. And it’s a little line I read, God’s work must not be kept waiting. Will you stop to weep? And so of course, you’ll pause for a time. Of course, you’ll just slow down for a time. Of course, you’ll weep and you’ll breathe. But then you’ll need to dry your tears and you’ll need to press on. You’ll need to keep pressing on toward the goal. They help me see that there would be this temptation to just take yourself out of the race when you’ve experienced a heavy blow. But that God’s calling is still upon us and God’s mission still needs to be carried out, and that we’re still to accept these burdens from his hand and press on. And the helped me see as well that God’s providence has this way of revealing God’s purpose. God has purposes in our loss and we’re to receive that as something precious from him, and as I said earlier, just turn it outward. Turn it outward in love for God and service to his people.
And all those lessons culminated in what became a kind of manifesto for me, a statement of purpose. And it’s something that continues to guide us today. I’ll read a portion of it for you. So I’d read all those books. I’d sort of gotten all that in my mind. I just started to write, here’s how I want to live out this grief. And so I wrote,
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. I will not waver in my faith, nor abandon my hope, nor revoke my love. I will not charge God with wrong.
I will receive this trial as a responsibility to steward, not a punishment to endure. I will look for God’s smile in it rather than his frown, listen for his words of blessing rather than his voice of rebuke. This sorrow will not make me angry or bitter, nor cause me to act out in rebellion or indignation. Rather, it will make me kinder and gentler, more patient and loving, more compassionate and sympathetic. It will loose my heart from the things of earth and fix it on the things of heaven. The loss of my son will make me more like God’s Son, my sorrow like the Man of Sorrows.
So I added a few more things to it. That was just my way of trying to figure out how I was going to live this and what God was calling me to do through the sorrow, understanding he wasn’t calling me to become bitter or enraged against God. He wasn’t calling me to act out against God was calling me to just accept this as his providence, and to to press on with it.
Another glimpse of grace came on November 3rd, 2021. So we’re now at the first anniversary of Nick’s death. And this little glimpse of grace taught us the importance of the local church in grief. As the anniversary of Nick’s death approached, we started thinking about, how would we mark that day? We knew it would be hard. We knew it would be painful. We realized what we wanted to do more than anything else was to spend it with our church. The year before, many of the members of our church just hadn’t been able to attend his funeral- again, restrictions, and people were still frightened, uncertain, and even then the funeral had been held in an oversized room so people could space themselves out and everyone had to wear masks so even to this day, we don’t really know who was there. We just couldn’t see. So a year on, we just asked the church, would you be willing to just come to the cemetery and we can kind of have that time now that we didn’t get to have the year before?
And it was just such a sweet and comforting time. Our pastor preached little message and we sang a few songs and we wept and we rejoiced together. And it took us a long time to understand that Nick had been taken from our family, but not just from our family. He had been taken from our church. He had transferred his membership to his church in Louisville, but one of the ladies in our church came to us and said, “Nick was a son of this church.” And I thought, Yeah, that’s, that’s exactly it, right? We have sons that grow up through the church and we all know them and love them. So it was their loss too. And that evening we got to grieve as a fellowship, as a community, as a congregation. That was a huge blessing to my family, and I think a blessing to the church.
It’s been six years now since Nick died. In some ways it seems very long, in some ways it seems very short. There were many firsts along the way, even firsts that came before that first anniversary: the first Christmas, first birthday, first Mother’s Day, first Father’s Day. How about the first family photo where you’re supposed to do your church photo and you’ve always had a family photo, and you do a big smile and you’re all there with your arms around each other so you can be in the directory and then here you are with one family member gone and you have to have a new photo because he can’t be in that photo any more. Just little things, right? These little sneak attacks that come upon you. These little grief ambushes as I’ve heard somebody call them.
We’ll often get asked, How are you guys doing now? And we can say, “By God’s grace, we’re doing well.” All of us have been marked and scarred and a little bit battered and bruised by the experience. And we know that the journey of grief will continue. Even just recently, my grandson, he’s just over a year old now and he likes to point at photos and go “uh?” and he wants us to tell him who that is. And so we pointed at Michaela and we said, “That’s your Auntie M.” He pointed at Abby and we said, “That’s your mom.” And he pointed at Nick and we said, “That’s your uncle Nick.” And we all just started crying, because little Finnegan Safir Nicholas will never know the uncle whose name he bears. So just these little things that sneak up on you. But I can say the Lord has really been good to us and really been kind.
And I would say I’m especially proud of Aileen and the girls. Aileen came to faith quite a bit later than I did. She was 19 before she even so much has heard the gospel or ever set foot in the church, so came to faith a little bit later in life and maybe didn’t know what her faith was made of quite so much. And then my daughters one was 14, one was 17 when they experienced the loss of their brother. I can say we all love the Lord more now than we did before. All three of them have really just accepted this and don’t resent it, don’t resent God for it, have just understood this is what God means for us to bear and are pressing on.
As we thought about some of the things we’ve learned along the way, there’s five lessons about grief we thought can be helpful. The first is that you should expect the Bible to guide you in your grief. The challenge in grief, as in any other time, is just to plead with God, help me live well in this circumstance. Right? How do you want me to live in this? Expect that God will give you guidance that through his word, he’ll enable you to live well for him. That’s especially hard when your heart is broken, but God does give grace to learn, to follow and to obey. We turn to God’s word. And Psalm 23, I mean, what a blessing God’s giving us in Psalm 23. It almost sounds cliche, but is there a better place to turn your greatest sorrow or your greatest joy for that than Psalm 23, to hear about God being our shepherd?
Psalm 116:15, “Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints,” right? God’s decision to take Nick, that wasn’t haphazard or light. There was meaning, there was purpose. God had entrusted us with something rare, something precious, even in the death of a child and wanted us to steward it well. Romans 8:28, and we all know the passage, we’ve all heard people say, Don’t bring that to grieving people. That’s the wrong passage. And I say balderdash. There’s a way to bring Romans 8:28 poorly, but goodness, it is such comfort to know that God has purpose in all our sorrows. That was life to me.
And then Job 2:10- “In all this Job did not sin with his lips.” We knew there would be temptations to add sin to sorrow, and we knew Satan wasn’t going to think Well, these people had a tough time. I’m just going to relax and pull back for a time and let them catch up a little bit. No, no. If you’re deep in sorrow, you can expect Satan will ramp up his attacks. I mean, God will ramp up his protections as well, but Satan doesn’t fight fair. And so we knew there would be opportunity. In fact, very shortly after Nick died, a Christian friend of mine called me up and said, “I just want you to know it’s okay to be angry at God. It’s okay to just tell God what you think of him taking your son.” And I felt like right then I was being challenged by Satan himself. Are you going to act out at God? Are you going to accuse God of having done wrong? As if I could accuse God of doing anything wrong. But it was a temptation in that moment. “In all of this job did not sin with his lips.” I was thankful for that passage and the challenge, it lays out. So that was the first lesson: that the Bible will guide you in your grief.
The second is everyone grieves differently. We really saw this in our family and other families we’ve been close to. A mother grieves as a mother, a father grieves as a father, a woman grieves as a woman, a man grieves as a man. There’s complementarity in grief. Just as there’s complementarity and roles in marriage, there’s grief languages. It’s like, there’s love languages, however you want to say it. Some people need to talk constantly. Some people go silent. Some people want to read books. Some people can’t bear to read a book. Some people go straight to the Bible. Some people really struggle with the Bible for a time. Some people need counseling; some people are fine without it. What we found is it’s important is to allow other people to grieve according to their personality or their maturity or their faith, or just who they are.
There’s always this temptation to assume that my way of grieving is normal and your way of grieving is abnormal to the degree that it differs from my way of grieving. And so the person is pretty quick to come to a new kind of normal, like, I’m ready to press on in life– Now, he might think that person’s just who’s taking longer, just lingering in your grief, it’s time to move on. But no, we have to give each other time to grieve according to our personality, to bear with one another in love.
The third lesson we learned is not to obsess about why this happened or why God did it, whatever language you use there. There’s so much about God and his purposes that’s just mysterious, and that includes the why questions. We found it really unhelpful to spend a lot of time speculating on why God might have done this. We did find a lot of joy in thinking about how God was using it, though that was a crucial distinction to set aside the why stuff that’s in the realm of God. Only God knows exactly why this would happen. What we can focus on is how has God used it? What has God accomplished through it? What does God want us to do differently in our lives now that we’ve learned this lesson from grief? So that’s really steered us away from speculation. It allows the secret things to remain in God’s mind, and it steered us toward just praising him for the ways he’s worked, the ways he’s loved us and cared for us.
The fourth lesson is to be patient with yourself. We found that grief massively reduced our capacity to function in those early days. We especially struggled to do a lot of things. We learned a lot about the kind of fog that settles over you when you’re deep in grief. In fact, not too long after Nick died, we were able to meet with a couple whose son had died about 10 years prior, so they had learned a lot along the way and their very first question was, “How’s your grief fog?” And that just gave us language to understand something that had been happening, which is our capacity was just massively reduced. It was just very helpful for somebody to normalize that for us. And it’s okay that you can’t function the way you normally do. In fact, I turned to my closest friend at one point and I said, “Don’t let me make any major decisions without bouncing them off you first.” I’ll tell you why I did that. I bought a flannel shirt on Amazon, like a lumberjack shirt. That’s not me. And that showed up in the mail. And my wife bought all of us in the family matching pajamas- again, something we would never do. And we just realized there’s something going on in our brains that’s just not normal. It’s okay to buy a shirt that I’m never going to wear, but we don’t want to make big decisions without bouncing it off somebody whose mind is clearer and who’s able to not be so distracted by the fog.
The fifth lesson is just to believe the best about others. And by this I mean, as people try to comfort you, some people will comfort you poorly. Some people will come and think they’re bringing comfort when really they’re not being comforting at all. 1 Corinthians 13 tells us love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Some people said some pretty miserable things to us. They thought they were being helpful. But you know, “At least you still have other children” isn’t really that comforting when you’re grieving a deep loss. But what we chose to do was we’re not going to become angry at those people, we’re just going to a) take whatever love we can and just know they intended well. And b) it just caused us to think, we probably said some pretty miserable things along the way as well to try to be comforting, but being poor at it. So we knew in grief it would be allowed, it would be easy to allow ourselves to become bitter, to think that people should be kinder or gentler or more attentive or whatever. But instead we just chose to look for whatever good we could in people’s words and to take that as God’s blessing.
Another thing we found really helpful is if anybody brought us any scripture, we just chose to think that’s God himself bringing us scripture. Because I don’t know what your view is on gifting or anything else. But you know what I think we can all agree on is that if God is likely to act in any way in this world, he’s going to send his people with his words, right? Like if somebody’s coming saying, “I think here’s a scripture verse that I think might benefit you,” we can understand probably the Lord is somehow using his people to bring us scripture. I should think about that scripture and I should just understand God may have something for me in those words. And so we just chose to do that and there was often just such blessing and comfort to be had in those words of scripture.
Just briefly: five ways to help people who are grieving. And I do this because people often ask, what are ways I can be helpful? If somebody in my circle loses a child or somebody in my family goes through a deep grief, how can I be helpful to them? Here are five things we learned as people who are very poor at this, I think, and had little experience in this. First, just be intentional. One of the biggest gifts you can give to somebody who’s grieving is intentionality. And so one of the things we remember through those first months were unexpected people who just persisted in loving us and pursuing us, and we were really blown away. Our church is extremely multicultural and we were just blessed by people from other cultures who seemed to know how to grieve better than we Westerners do. And so some of the African people in our church, young teenagers, just knew how to pursue us and how to express grief and how to help us, just tell us they’re praying for us. Some of the Vietnamese people in our church, same thing. They must just have something to draw on culturally that we don’t. We found great comfort in people, young people especially, who were just so kind in pursuing us.
Second, don’t let awkward win. By which I mean, don’t be afraid of tears. People are afraid to cry. They’re afraid to make others cry or to say things that will make others cry. So we found some people avoided us because they were afraid of saying the wrong thing or they felt bad if we would tear up as they talked about Nick. We would often say, “You haven’t made us sad. We’re already sad. You’re not making us sad. You’re just joining us now in our sadness, and that’s okay.” And so for the person who’s grieving, it’s probably more hurtful if you avoid them than it is if you just come to come to them and grieve with them. Grief isn’t comfortable, so you just have to embrace the awkward.
Third way: prayer. And I mean, this can seem like, you know, thoughts and prayers. It can seem like something that’s so trite, but as Christians, we really believe maybe the absolute best thing you can ever do for somebody is pray for them. That’s especially true if you’re not really one of those first responders in their life, right? They’re their closest friends or family members. But you can always pray and prayer really, really matters. There were times when we literally knew we were being upheld only by prayer, that we were obeying God and in hard things, only because God’s people were praying. I don’t know how we knew that. We just intuitively knew it was the prayer of God’s people that was holding us together in these moments. And God was answering their prayers in that moment. So prayer matters, it’s effective. Aileen, especially in those early days, found it very hard to pray. Her faith had been rocked, as happens in a deep loss, and she’s a worrying type of person. And then her greatest fear was experienced. It just rocked her. So she struggled to pray, but she knew people were praying for her, and that was just such a blessing and comfort to her. And so as Christians, prayer is one of the most powerful things the Lord’s given us since we need to use it. And not as a sort of plan B or not thinking Well, because I can’t do something else I’ll pray. We can always pray.
Fourth thing, say their name. We often shy away from speaking of the person who has died. Again, awkwardness, or we don’t want people to cry, but one of the fears of those who’s lost somebody is that that person will be forgotten, that their life won’t have mattered. It won’t have counted because people won’t remember them. So share memories, express your love, continue to speak about that person. Just on Sunday, we had a guy who went on to the mission field years ago, and he was visiting our church for the first time in a long time. And he walked right out to me and he said, I have a Nick memory I want to share with you. And it was just a joy to hear a new memory that I hadn’t yet heard from years ago. And I was thankful to him for sharing that. So, again, you won’t make people sad when you speak of their loved one. They’re already sad. You might draw some of that sadness to the surface, but in the end, if you’ve got a funny story or a good story, a happy story, they’ll be glad to hear it.
And then fifth is to make the long commitment. Lots of people are present in the early days, but most of them quickly fade away, and that’s absolutely fine. But there’s a special ministry for those who make the long commitment. And by what I mean by that is maybe the person who died maybe put their birthday and their death day, the day they passed away, on a calendar. And just a year later from those days, reach out to the family and say, I know this is a hard day. Just want you to know I’m praying for you. Or send them flowers on that anniversary and do it for five years or for 10 years. Because trust me, on the fifth anniversary, they won’t be over it. They won’t have forgotten that that’s the day they gave birth to their son, or their son passed away. So I think a few people can make that long commitment and just agree to be present when most others have moved on.
Anyways, I’ll leave it there because I know we want to leave some time for Q&A, but I hope that just gives you a better understanding of grief. Maybe help you minister just a little bit better, a little more confidently to those who have gone through it. I think if my family would want to say anything, it would simply be that God really is present in our grief, that God really does bear with us through our grief, and he’s as faithful in our grief as he has been in our joys. And I think for all of us, we can say we love the Lord more now than we did before. We have deeper confidence in him than we did before, and together we’re more eager than ever to be in his presence and back together with Nick as well.
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