Tough Questions: How Do I Help My Grieving Friend?

Proverbs 17:17
Galatians 6:2
During this year’s midweek Lenten services, we’re going to tackle some tough questions. They’ll include:

• How can we know that the Bible is God’s Word? 
• How can a loving God let people go to hell? 
• Do Christians and Muslims worship the same God?  
• Is the Biblical view of homosexuality unloving? 

These are all questions that Christians wrestle with, questions that Christians have commonly posed to me through the years.

But without doubt, the question which, in one form or another, Christians ask more than any other is the one we’re addressing tonight: How do I help a grieving friend? Sometimes, the question is posed in this way: What do I say to a friend who has just experienced loss?

As Christians, we know that God commands all people to love God totally and love our neighbors as we love ourselves.

We also know that Jesus gives His followers a new commandment: To love fellow believers with the same life-giving love He gives to us.

And we’re familiar with Biblical injunctions like those of Paul in Galatians 6:2: “Carry each other’s burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ.”

But how do we show or give expression to the love Christ has given to you and me when dealing with our grieving friends?

Many of you could be standing here and offering the wisdom you’ve gained on this subject both through God’s Word and through living out your Christian discipleship. But tonight, I’d like to share what God has taught me about helping our grieving friends.

First, and most importantly, listen to your friend. Frequently, whether it's because of our own discomfort or a penchant for wanting to "fix things," we can go to our grieving friends and shower them with torrents of consoling words. But what grieving people most need is to be listened to. Their unique pain and grief need to be acknowledged.

In the Old Testament book of Job, a man is aggrieved when he loses first, all his sources of wealth and then, all of his children in a natural disaster. Three friends come to visit Job. As we’ve pointed out before, the friends do something very wise at first. They let Job "vent," allowing him to give full expression to his agony, his questions, his anger, even his anger with God. They listen to Job. For seven days.

But then, the friends make a mistake: They open their mouths. My biggest mistakes in life and in trying to help hurting people, have never come from listening. They've always come from talking.

Second, don't try to talk people out of their grief. Grief is something which, over time, follows a more or less natural course. While nobody ever “gets over” their loss, they can reach a point of acceptance. Getting there, sometimes take more time for some people and sometimes less time is required for other people. It depends on the person, their level of faith, and their particular grief. You can't truncate grief with words.

When my grandfather died, a pastor came to the visitation. My grandmother, who had gone into the hospital CCU at the same time as my grandfather was admitted to the ICU, had just been released from the hospital and was at the funeral home in a wheelchair. The pastor, who had never met my grandmother, put his hands on her shoulders and told her, "You're going to be all right. Go home and watch the Bengals game. I predict they're going to win."

Some people think that they need to give the aggrieved person a "pep talk." But such talks are really designed more to make the talker feel they've done a good turn than to do any real good for anyone else. Let your friend grieve no matter how uncomfortable it may make you feel.

Third, don't try to explain what you don't understand. When people grieve over their losses, they wonder, as all of us do, why their loss has happened. Anyone who wants to help the friend who is asking this question must resist the temptation to answer it. In all honesty, your friend doesn't want to have a rational explanation anyway. They simply want to be able to say, "This isn't fair!"

And it isn't fair. Life often isn't fair. At the end of Job's forty-two chapters, we're left with this answer to the question of why grief befalls us: We live in a world where bad things happen. In the New Testament, Jesus tells us that bad things rain on the good and the evil alike. Why that is so, no one living on this planet is wise enough to say. Only God knows the answer to the question of why and you and I don't need to play God by pretending to have that answer.

Fourth, let your friend be angry with God. A deeply faithful Christian man whose grandchild had recently died told me, "Sometimes I get angry with God. I know it's horrible; but it's true." I assured him that what he was feeling wasn't horrible. I reminded him of such people in the Bible as David and Job, who always believed in God, but also got angry with God when dealing with grief or the threat of death. And I told the grieving grandfather, "The fact that you're angry with God proves your faith in God. You would never be angry with someone you didn't think was there."

Maybe you’ve noticed this: Most of the time, when we respond to people's anger with condemnation, it only makes them dig in their heels. Trying to prove to an angry person that their anger is unwarranted is a fool's mission. God says in Proverbs 15:1, "A soft answer turns away wrath, but a harsh word stirs up anger." Letting your friend get angry with God will prevent their anger from becoming an ongoing feature in their life.

Fifth, don't avoid talking about your grieving friend's loss. Often, friends fear that if they speak of the loss or the one for whom their friends grieve, they'll make their friends feel sadder. But a grieving friend already is sad and if it seems natural to mention a friend's deceased loved one, for example, or if your friend mentions that person, you should be willing to talk about them as well.

A woman once told me, "My friends avoid speaking of my late husband like a plague. What they don't seem to understand is that when they do that, it makes me feel as though they think he was unimportant or that they want to pretend he was never there." Through the years, I have heard that grieving woman's words echoed by other grieving people. You honor your friend when you're willing to discuss with them the people or circumstances they grieve.

Sixth, pray for your friend. You should pray that God will bring them comfort, for sure. But you also should pray that God will use you as a conduit for the blessings you want your friend to receive. Whenever I visit people who are dealing with grief, I always ask God to fill me with His Holy Spirit, allowing God's love for my friend to flow through me. In John 15:5, Jesus says: “I am the vine; you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing.” Jesus also says that the world will know Him when His love is visible in us. Pray that God will love your friend through you.

Seventh and finally, share your faith in Christ. If God has allowed you to be helpful to your friend in their grief, they may wonder, whether they’re non-Christians or Christians, what allows you to be that helpful friend. You can honestly say that it isn't you who have been helpful, that you have prayed over every step you took with them and that God has guided you. You can tell them that you belong to an eternal God Who has destroyed the power of death and that anyone who trustingly follows Jesus Christ has hope beyond the grave. At the right time, after you've lovingly taken the journey of grief with your friend, that will come as very good news.

I love what Proverbs 17:17 tells us: “A friend loves at all times, and a brother is born for a time of adversity.” Call upon God in Jesus’ name to help you be that friend who loves at all times and so be a sister or brother to those who go through adversity. In this way, we will love God and love our neighbor. Amen

[Blogger Mark Daniels is pastor of Living Water Lutheran Church in Centerville, Ohio. This is the first installment of the church's midweek Lenten series, Tough Questions.]

Galatians 6:2, 5 (A 5 by 5 by 5 Reflection)

As some may know, I'm using the Navigators' 5x5x5 Bible Reading Plan for my daily times with God. Today's reading is Galatians, chapter 6. I've read this chapter many times. But today, something stood out: The seeming contradiction between verses 2 and 5.

Verse 2:

Bear one another’s burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ.

The "law of Christ," I take it, is first, Jesus' great commandment, summarizing the two tables of the Ten Commandments, that we love God with our whole beings and love our neighbors as we love ourselves.

I take it also to mean the new commandment that Jesus gave to His followers to love fellow believers as Christ has loved them, with their whole lives.

Finally, I take this "law" to encompass Jesus' great commission that all who are part of His Church make disciples.

But since Galatians 6 deals with the internal life of Christ's Church, I think Paul has in mind the first two components of what I believe he means by the "law of Christ."

The thrust of the passage is that, even in restoring those who have rebelled against Christ, being careful not to fall into temptation ourselves (v. 1), we in the Church are to bear each other's burdens.

I've seen this exemplified in the people of Living Water Lutheran Church in the days leading up to and following my wife's recent surgery. On the night before the surgery, during our Lenten midweek service, the people in attendance gathered around me (my wife was unable to attend) and prayed for her healing and for my encouragement. We received many calls, cards, and emails of encouragement, assuring us of people's prayers. On the day of the surgery, a couple from the congregation drove the hour-plus to the hospital to be with my daughter, mother-in-law, and me; they stayed all day. Someone sent us a gift card to a local restaurant. Several have brought or offered to bring meals. Some have offered to take my wife to where she needs to be, since she can't drive right now. These are the kinds of things, I believe, that Paul has in mind when he tells Christians to "bear one another's burdens." The love of Christ is seen and experienced in these acts and gestures of love, the power of Christ is demonstrated when we pray for one another.

I also have a friend who lives miles away who is wonderful about praying for people whose needs are brought to her attention. In addition, this friend is compassionate, generous, and forgiving of others, whatever their needs. All of these traits too, demonstrate the Christian bearing others' burdens.

But then we come to Galatians 6:5:

For all must carry their own loads.

I'll never forget eating lunch, more than thirty years ago, with a seminary classmate at a fast food restaurant in Columbus. We were working on a project together and we both had our Bibles open, discussing the project. A middle aged man approached us, who, it became clear, had a bee in his bonnet.

"You know," he said, "if everyone studied the Bible the way you two are, we wouldn't need welfare or charity programs for the poor. There wouldn't be any poor."

My classmate asked the guy how he'd arrived at that conclusion. He pointed to Galatians 6:5 and said, if everybody carried their own loads, everyone would be working.

I'd half-forgotten that encounter until I read this passage again this morning.

Of course, even thirty years ago, I realized that the man at the fast food restaurant was taking one passage of Scripture out of context with no regard for the total witness of Scripture on what the believer's stance toward the poor should be.

For example, throughout the Old Testament moral law, God's people were told to make provisions for the poor, the orphaned, foreigners, and the widowed. Farmers weren't to harvest their crops to the edges of their fields and if, after harvesting, they realized that parts of their fields were unharvested, they weren't to go back to harvest the rest of their crops. All of these leavings were to remain for the benefit of the poor who could glean them.

Jesus and the New Testament commends a similar concern for the poor.

Whether any of this bears relevance to government relief programs is one question. But there can be no question that what the man called "charity" programs, at least those in which Christians who have give to others who have not, is both commended and commanded by God.

So, is Paul contradicting himself in Galatians 6:2 and 6:5?

I dug a little deeper today.

In Galatians 6:2, the word translated as burdens that Paul uses in the Greek in which his letter was originally composed is baros. The word he uses in Galatians 6:5 translated as loads is phortion.

While these words can have similar meanings, there are subtle shades of difference between the two.

According to one New Testament Greek-English lexicon, baros, carries the meanings of "heaviness, weight, burden, trouble." In the context of Galatians 6, the burdens referred to are clearly those experiences in life that weigh us down, things like physical illness, relational discord, financial troubles, worry over loved ones, poverty, grief, heartbreaks, depression. The call in Galatians 6:2 is for Christians to lighten the burdens of fellow believers when they encounter these weights of life.

That same lexicon says that phortion can mean burden or load, with particular reference to the cargo being carried by a ship. It can also reference burdensome religious duties or "faults of the conscience that burden the soul."

In the context of 6:5, a different meaning emerges: the obligations we have to respond to the free gifts of God's forgiveness and new life that comes to all who believe in Christ. This "load," to be borne by every Christian is what Paul calls in Romans 12:1 our "true and proper worship" or, in other translations, "spiritual worship" or "reasonable service."

In other words, concern and care for the poor and all who are in need are among the good fruits that will spring from the life a person made new by the forgiveness and grace of Jesus Christ.

In fact, Galatians 6:5 appears to have no direct reference to work for an income, but the work of every believer as a priest and minister of the gospel. 

As with Jesus in His parable of the final judgement in Matthew 25:31-46, Paul isn't saying that we are saved by our good works, by shouldering some odious burdens, but that, touched and transformed by Christ, we will, almost as an involuntary Holy Spirit-created response to grace, do good works, including caring for the poor. (See Ephesians 2:8-10)

The "load" that Paul talks about in Galatians 6:5, is what Jesus also talks about when he tells those heavily laden either by the implacable demands of a dog-eat-dog world or by religious striving to be "good:

“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” (Matthew 11:28-30)

The light burden to which Christ refers, I think, is taking His loving lordship over our lives, believing in Him as our God and Savior.

When we do that, in Martin Luther's words, Christians become "the Holy Spirit's workshop." God goes to work on us, transforming us even without our conscious awareness. It's as though we fall into Christ's orbit and can't always see the ways in which He is changing us. The "load" is to keep living in daily repentance and renewal so that the Master Craftsman can continue to to make us over in the image of Christ.

In dispelling the seeming contradiction between Galatians 6:2 and 6:5, The Lutheran Study Bible says simply: "Those who are willing to accept personal accountability for their own actions before God (bearing their own "load"...phortion) are more willing to to bear others burdens (v.2, "burden"...baros)..."

So, Paul's message in a nutshell, seems to be: "Christians: Bear the burdens of others. Your willingness to do so is the measure of God's grace operating in your life; it's your 'load' as a believer."

Salvation is a free gift and each believer is responsible to God for how they use their salvation.

To not use the power of God living within us as Christians to help others is like being gifted with the power to make music and never singing a note or playing a tune.

Or like having the power to do medical research that might save lives, but staying away from the lab.

Or being a gifted athlete and never trying out for the team.

Just as God wants Christians to use their spiritual gifts for the mutual upbuilding of all in Christ's Church, He also wants us to use His grace to take on the ministry of caring for others.

5 Things to Do When You Get Bad News

Whether it's learning that someone at work has betrayed you, that you're being downsized out of a job, or that strange symptom you've been suffering has yielded a frightening diagnosis from the doctor, we all get bad news. What should you do when you get bad news? Here are five suggestions, gleaned from the Bible.

1. Talk it over with God. As a Christian, I believe that God became human in the person of Jesus Christ in order to take the punishment we deserve for our sins--death--and to rise again in order to open up eternity with God to all who turn from sin and turn to Jesus as their only hope. Jesus says: "Come to Me, all you that are weary and carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest" (Matthew 11:28).

Whenever we receive bad news, we can churn with frenzy, a sure recipe for making bad decisions. Instead, go to the God we know through Jesus. Tell Him what you're going through. Spend time with Him. The bad news won't go away. But God will give you the peace and power you need to face it.

Talking things over with God when we get bad news isn't just about dumping our woes on Him. Prayer isn't a monologue. To pray also means spending time reading God's Word, letting Him speak to us. In the New Testament we're told: "All scripture [which we now know as the Old and New Testaments] is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, so that everyone who belongs to God [that happens through faith in Christ] may be proficient, equipped for every good work" (2 Timothy 3:16-17).

2. Seek the advice of faithful Christian friends. Proverbs 15:22 says: "Without counsel, plans go wrong, but with many advisers they succeed."

God has especially granted to every member of the local church particular spiritual gifts. He does this, we're taught, "To each [Christian believer] is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good" (1 Corinthians 12:7). So, if you're a Christian, remember that in your local congregation, whatever its size, there's likely to be someone gifted by God to help your or advise you on how best to address your bad news.

But even when there are no ready strategies, God gives the fellowship of the Church to lighten our burdens. Referring to the second portion of Jesus' great command that we love others as we love ourselves, Paul tells Christians: "Bear one another's burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ" (Galatians 6:2).

When we share and bear each other's burdens, those burdens get easier to bear and we draw strength from one another. "Two are better than one...For if they fall, one will lift up the other; but woe to one who is alone and falls and does not have another to help...A threefold cord is not easily broken" (Ecclesiastes 4:9-12).

3. Make plans, but don't let your planning turn into worry about tomorrow. The Bible tells us that it's wise to make plans (Luke 14:31), but we should be ready for the curve balls that come at us in this imperfect world. We also need to be ready for God's vetoes of our plans.

James writes in the New Testament: "...you do not even know what tomorrow will bring...Instead, you ought to say, 'If the Lord wishes, we will live and do this or that'" (James 4:14-15).

Jesus says, "...do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today's trouble is enough for today" (Matthew 6:34).

Make plans, but take each day as it comes.

4. In the midst of troubles, let God love you. Jesus' death and resurrection were for you. The good news that Jesus wants to give you life with God, not just after you die and leave this world, but right now, trumps all bad news. You may feel powerless; but when you let God love you, bad news is powerless to destroy your hope, peace, or joy.

When you surrender your life, including all your troubles and your sins, to Jesus and let them be covered by His grace and goodness, you'll live each day in the assurance that nothing can separate you from the love God gives through Jesus Christ (Romans 8:31-39).

5. Remember that God won't let go of you; so, don't you let go of God! Millions of believers in Jesus Christ have endured all sorts of troubles, experiencing what the Bible calls "the peace that passes all understanding" (Philippians 4:7).

You can know that peace too. In Deuteronomy 31:6, God promised His people, and in Hebrews 13:5, He promised again to all people who believe in Him through Jesus Christ, that He will never leave or forsake us.

That promise is like a blank check from God written to be used you whenever you get hit by bad news. Cash it!

40-Days to Servanthood: Day 23

In your commitment to servanthood, be sure to include listening and sharing others’ burdens.

These two forms of service, often separated by others, seem intertwined to me. Each is rooted in an attentiveness to others.

Dale Carnegie, in his classic book How to Win Friends and Influence People, tells the true story of a mother who sat with her small son. “I know you love me very much,” the little guy told her. “Of course I do,” she replied, “but what makes you say that?” “Because,” he said, “you always listen to me.” Attentive listening is a form of love.

One of the most disturbing and inspiring books in the Bible is Job, found in the Old Testament. God allows the devil to attack a faithful man named Job. The result is the deaths of his children, the destruction of his property, the loss of his livestock, and a disease that covers Job with open scabs.

Learning of his affliction, three of Job’s friends show up to be with him. For seven days, they do the right thing: They listen to Job give voice to his agony and his questions about God and God’s goodness.

Then they make a mistake: They open their mouths, trying to explain the unexplainable.

They did more good when they simply listened. That had been a way of bearing Job’s burdens.

Of course, there comes a time when, out of their attentiveness to others, that servants take action. Our burden-sharing needn’t be an action that will get us the Nobel Peace Prize. Simple serving will do. A man in one of my former parishes died. While I visited his widow, several others visited. People from the church and the community were dropping off food to help the family during a period when nobody felt like preparing dinners. Between her tears, the widow dabbed her eyes, smiled at me, and said, “There’s a lot of love in that refrigerator.”

Servants are attentive to others; they listen and they bear others’ burdens.

Bible Passage to Ponder: “Bear one another’s burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ” (Galatians 6:2).