Meeting God in Grief

“Hey is everything okay at Abundant Life?! My dad just told me there was an active shooter...”

That was the first text I saw when I went on my lunch break on December 16, 2024, and it was followed by many others. People I hadn’t talked to in months, even years, bombarded me with questions. Many of them were the same: Were my siblings okay? The worst part was that I didn’t know. 

It didn’t feel real until the customers at my retail job started talking about it. Every word was a knife to the heart. I forced myself to stay calm and do my job, but on the inside, I was screaming. Screaming that I graduated from that school. That I knew those teachers, those students. Abundant Life Christian School was my home... How could I keep scanning items when those carpets I used to walk on were now stained with blood?

And my siblings, Averi and Gannon... Even if they were unharmed, something must have died in them that day. Surely, they saw the blood. Surely, they heard the gunshots that had ended lives.

When I couldn’t take it anymore, my manager told me to go home. Hours later, as I finally held my brother and sister in my arms again, I cried and realized death had never felt so close before. It was in their eyes. Averi told us that the daughter of a close family friend was gone, and my mom burst into tears. Averi’s best friend’s brother was in critical condition. So was her classmate. There was no guarantee that either of them would survive.

It’s easy to forget that there is darkness in this world when it seems so far away. But what do you do when it’s at your doorstep? How do you forgive God when he lets these things happen?

Darkness’ Doorstep

Mary couldn’t. When Jesus chose to linger where he was for two more days while Lazarus sickened, no one understood what he was doing, Mary least of all. As Jesus finally entered Judea, she didn’t even go to meet him. Instead, her sister Martha was the one who fell at his feet.

“’Lord,’ Martha said to Jesus, ‘if you had been here, my brother would not have died. But I know that even now God will give you whatever you ask.’” - John 11:21-22

Why would Martha come to him and say such things? She had hope. And in response, Jesus fed that hope. Though she didn’t understand, he told her that Lazarus would live.

When Mary finally made her way to Jesus, she did something very similar to Martha: she fell at his feet and told him he could have saved her brother. But her statement ended there. For her, it was too late for Lazarus. There was no hope.

What did Jesus do in response? Did he rebuke her for having little faith? Did he question why it took her this long to come to him? Did he tell her that he had a plan all along, that he would raise Lazarus up from the dead, rendering this whole exchange a waste of time anyways?

No. He wept.

“When Jesus saw her weeping, and the Jews who had come along with her also weeping, he was deeply moved in spirit and troubled. ‘Where have you laid him?’ he asked.

“‘Come and see, Lord,’ they replied. Jesus wept” (v. 33-35).

When Martha chose hope, Jesus joined her in that hope. And when Mary was hopeless in her grief, Jesus grieved with her. Mary invited him to come and see her pain, so he lowered himself to lay beside her at darkness’ very doorstep.

The Root of Grief

The shooting wasn’t the only thing I grieved this year. In May, I had to say goodbye to my InterVarsity community.

Graduation didn’t seem like something worth celebrating to me. How could I look forward to the death of the most transformational chapter of my life? After the countless hours I spent serving with my community, worshipping with them, loving them, growing with them... it felt like a cruel injustice that I had to let them go.

Sometimes the grief hurt so much that I wasn’t able to enjoy my last moments with them as much as I wanted to. I felt a lot of anger in those times. Why couldn't I just be fine? Why did it have to hurt so much?

When my campus staff minister, Luke, pointed me yet again to John 11, I sighed inwardly, exasperated. I had tried the grieving with God thing. I prayed every time I cried. I called out to him, begged him for help, even tried imagining him in the room with me holding my hand. It never made the pain go away.

One night, I was sharing my frustrations with my boyfriend when he told me something that changed my perspective:

“Grief comes out of good things, you know. You don’t grieve something you’re willing to lose. If it brings you this much pain, it means your time here was truly beautiful. It means you have been blessed.”

“Well, I wish it didn’t hurt this much,” I lamented.

“It’s good that it hurts,” he reminded me once again. “God isn’t going to take that away.”

That gave me pause. I went to God with my grief because I was hoping he would take it away. Why else would I go to him?

Come and See

I brought this question to Luke, who told me that in our pain, we have a unique opportunity to invite God into our lives. We can invite him to come and see our pain, knowing that no matter what he knows, what purpose he has in it, he feels the hurt too. He is weeping and taking us deeper.

The Abundant Life community went deeper in the aftermath of the shooting. There was a prayer and worship service hosted the day after, and the sanctuary was so full that they ran out of seats. The presence of God was tangible in the room as we lifted our arms and sang of his goodness and love, as we wept and invited God to come and see the grief in our hearts, to join us in it. It didn’t bring our sister back. But our community was the strongest I had ever seen. We were united in our pain and love for each other, and with God at the head of it all, he felt closer than ever before.

I know the question still lingers: Why do these terrible things happen? Why do we have to say goodbye to good things? Why do we lose people we love? Why, when he heard that his close friend Lazarus was dying, did Jesus choose to wait?

I can’t answer the question in full here, but I can say this. Jesus could have saved Lazarus before he died, but when Jesus fell to his knees beside Mary and wept over the brother they both loved, she rose with something she wouldn’t have gotten any other way.