Life is Pain
Befriending Grief as We Wait in Hope
An Advent guest post by Jamie Carlson:
My dear friend passed away last winter, leaving a grieving husband and two small children. In my life, she left the gaping hole of a friend of nearly twenty years—someone who walked with me through many important life stages and supported me in seasons of deep trial. Her loss was not my first experience with grief, but the funny thing about the land of loss is that no matter how many times you’ve been there, you still walk around wide-eyed like you’ve never seen it before.
The world becomes foreign when someone we love leaves it. When that happens, we confront the reality that being human hurts. To quote one of the greats (The Dread Pirate Roberts, of course), “Life is pain!”[1] Despite the ways we, individually, or society, collectively, try to avoid and prevent the experience of death and grief, et en arcadia ego: we never really escape it.
Nevertheless, many of us fall into patterns of avoiding grief. Worse, Christians sometimes use our hope in Christ to bypass suffering. We bring the hope of Christ too near, in some sense, and use it as a bandage to cover and hide the pain we feel. Thomas Merton said “the more you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer…the one who does most to avoid suffering is, in the end, the one who suffers most.”[2] And, according to counseling educator Andi Thacker, avoiding grief long-term does measurable harm, unfortunately, in more ways than one.[3] We misapply our hope in Christ by pasting it over the pain of our circumstances.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, we can push our hope in Christ too far away by waiting for the coming kingdom and despairing of the life in front of us. We get stuck in today’s sorrows. Personally, with every loss I seem understand more deeply that life is pain, and the pain will not relent until I am with Christ. I have a hope for the future, but not always hope that helps me exist in the world here with my grief. So what am I to do? How do I avoid ignoring my grief altogether, or avoid wallowing in it? How do I, to borrow the words of Henri Nouwen, “befriend” my grief?[4]
One example, I think, of befriending grief, is Adam—the first man to know the grief of separation and loss. After expelling him and Eve from Eden, God instructed him to work the earth from which God formed him from and to which Adam would return—a vocation one would assume came with plenty of moments to contemplate his origin and destiny. Søren Kierkegaard wrote “weep softly, but grieve long.” [5] I imagine Adam doing just that— spending the long years of his life working the dust, grieving his sin and the losses that came with it with every failed crop, every infestation of bugs, every stubborn patch of weeds. I think, in the end, God was merciful in his command. Adam’s mortality clung to him daily. He could “grieve long,” and in so doing turn to God in dependence and humility.[6]
So befriending grief perhaps looks like mirroring Adam, and facing our loss directly. Rather than avoiding or ignoring the pain, we can recognize its appropriateness in regard to the significance and value of the person we have lost, and turn to God for comfort. Dietrich Bonhoeffer said it well: “I believe we honor God…by loving and enjoying [everything we value in the life God has given us] in the full, and therefore feeling intensely and honestly the pain of whatever [has been lost] rather than being dulled to what is important in life and therefore also dulled to the pain.”[7] Facing our pain with tearful praise on our lips for the immense value of the people God placed in our lives for a time honors God and our loved ones. Wonderfully, God meets us in our pain and comes near when we cry out.[8]
Taking grief as a challenge can also help us befriend it. Our grief can be a training field to love the people around us. Kierkegaard argued that the love we show to the dead in our remembrance reflects how we love those who still live. If we lack love for those who cannot repay or respond to us, perhaps we have a more shallow love than we suppose.[9] Grief, then, can be a challenge to us to look not just to the hope of the future, but to love the people we love in the present with more consistency and depth. Our ultimate hope is in Christ, but this hope for the future should not leave us detached from the world around us. Kierkegaard had a challenge here, as well. He said our care for those we have lost should not serve as a distraction from the work of loving those who are still with us.[10]
This is nothing new, really. If you can name a foundation or organization working to cure childhood illness or prevent needless tragedies, a grieving parent is often behind it. A parent’s grief does not lessen through this sort of project, but their grief has become a launching point to care for others around them. This strikes me as similar to what Paul told the Corinthians (2 Cor. 1:3–7). Paul praises God for his comfort and encourages his audience: “just as we share abundantly in the sufferings of Christ, so also our comfort abounds through Christ. If we are distressed, it is for your comfort and salvation; if we are comforted, it is for your comfort, which produces in you patient endurance.” Hope-filled grief, then, does not have to look only to the hope found in heaven and the return of Christ. It can be hope-filled in the world in which we live, because, in Christ, the suffering we experience can be the means through which others receive comfort and gain the endurance we all need to persevere in a world with such pain. Our grief can be a catalyst for endurance to bring us—and others—to our ultimate hope to be realized in Christ.
Neither confronting my grief or taking up its challenge take away the pain of loss. But as I mourn my friend, I see both of these means of befriending and holding grief as a gift. God has not left us to sit in mourning and despair—he has not left me. He meets my grief with kindness and has provided ways for me to endure under the long wait for his kingdom. And so, by His grace, I cling to the hope of our Savior as I weep and live in longing, waiting with hope and endurance until his return.
Sources:
[1] Reiner, Rob. 1987. The Princess Bride. United States: Twentieth Century Fox.
[2] Thomas Merton, Seven Storey Mountain (New York: HarperCollins, 1948), 91.
[3] “Unhealthy Ways Grief Can Manifest When Avoided,” Aspire Counseling Blog. Accessed 12/14/25. https://aspirecounselingmo.com/blog/unhealthy-ways-grief-can-manifest-when-avoided. Sometimes avoidance can be a healthy coping mechanism for a period, but facing and processing grief is always a necessary step, and avoiding it long term leads to negative impacts, and sometimes generational harm. Andi Thacker, “20221025 179–1” Video of Lecture. Dallas Theological Seminary, Accessed Fall 2025.
[4] Interestingly, this study shows negative impacts of both avoidance and rumination, and that they can co-occur in the same bereaved person. See Maarten C. Eisma and Lonneke I. M. Lenferink, “Co-occurrence of Approach and Avoidance in Prolonged Grief: A Latent Class Analysis,” European Journal of Psychotraumatology 14, no. 2 (2023): Article 2190544, https://doi.org/10.1080/20008066.2023.2190544
[5] Søren Kierkegaard, Works of Love, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (New York: HarperPerennial, 1962), 319.
[6] Often in scripture we see the image of dust closely bound to drawing near to God in humility (i.e. Gen 18:27) or asking God to remember and have mercy (i.e. Psalm 103:14). Being returned to dust is also a common image in texts speaking of judgement (i.e. Isaiah 29:5). It seems likely, then, that Adam’s task would lead him to similar reflections, especially given God’s words to him , as recorded in Genesis 3:17–19. We also see that God’s response to Abraham’s humility (“I am but dust and ashes…”) as he draws near to God is met with responsiveness from God (Gen. 19). Indeed, God answers each of Abraham’s requests positively.
[7] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, Reader’s Edition, trans. Isabel Best, Lisa E. Cahill, Reinhard Krauss, Nancy Lukens, Barbara Rumscheidt, and Martin Rumscheidt (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2015), 251.
[8] For example, Psalm 34 and Psalm 23.
[9] Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 319.
[10] Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 329.
Jamie Carlson is a lifelong student of history, theology and the arts. She holds a BA in History, an MA in Catholic Studies, and is now studying at Dallas Theological Seminary. She lives in Minnesota with her husband and four kids, reading fiction and writing in her spare time. You can find her on X and IG @unhurriedchase and on Substack @jamiecarlson (“Unhurried Chase”).
Photo by Gadiel Lazcano on Unsplash