The Opened Podcast

Church has gone from being who we are to a low - where we go to. It is important that we actually remind ourselves the really important thing about being Christian so we do not become merely performative in our approach to the new life we have in Christ.

How can we best provide support to our friends who have lost loved ones? I share my thoughts drawn from my experience and a little bit of human empathy and emotional intelligence.

When our loved ones die, we have to keep living. We do not exactly move on from losing loved ones. But we move with the grief. It's like how Jay Shetty says it - grief is like a stone in our pockets. It's uncomfortable at the start. Soon, we get accustomed to it being there.I describe grief as love unrequited, not out of rejection but for the absence of the person we love. That is painful. But there is a way to move forward while still carrying the pain.

The greatest comfort for the Believer is that the loss of our loved ones in the Lord is not the end. There is more.We see this in the life of King David, and Paul admonishes that our sorrowing is not as the hopeless because when the Christ returns, those who are 'asleep' will return with him. What a great hope this is! And when the comfort of this hits us, though the pain is present in this life, we can stay confident and assured that the end is a joyful one.

I am discussing this because many Christians pointed out this model like it was the Holy Grail of processing grief and the loss of a loved one. I’ve even heard it preach. I fear that our swift adoption of many things such as this may lead to syncretic doctrines over time. There’s a Biblical way to discuss grief in the Body of Christ. It’s simple and straightforward. In our haste to get people to ‘move on’ from pain, it is important to not prod them along an unknown path with the air of spirituality attached to man-made models.