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Grace in grief

Terrie Todd

It was February 1991, and I was mad at God.

Funny, I hadn’t felt angry at God five years earlier when I’d watched my father die a slow death from cancer. My sister and I actually sang at his funeral. Certainly I was sad, but never angry. People lose their parents, after all . . . it’s sort of the expected thing. Now, however, watching my mother grieving again for a second husband – a wonderful man so graciously given and then so quickly snatched away – I was angry, not sad. They sang “God is So Good” at the funeral, but I couldn’t bring myself to sing along. God is not good, I thought. How could He do this to Mom? I’m not sad for myself – I hardly had time to get to know Peter – but to see Mom going through this again . . . it’s just too much.

I stood nearby while my new stepsiblings laid their dad’s body to rest beside their mother’s, and watched as they embraced my mom and grieved together. How dare you, God? I thought.

One thing I inherently knew was that God was big enough to handle my anger and would not strike me dead for expressing honest thoughts. That night, emotionally exhausted and unable to sleep, I recalled the words of our pastor at the funeral: “When the grief gets unbearable and all you can do is wonder why, ask God to give you a fresh picture of Jesus.” A fresh picture of Jesus. For some reason, those words had stuck in my mind. I prayed: “God, Pastor Ken told us to ask for a fresh picture of Jesus. I don ‘t know what that means, but I’m asking. Please give me a fresh picture of Jesus. But don’t think I’m not still ticked.”

I fell asleep and pretty much forgot about my prayer until a couple of days later. Still feeling distant from God, I was standing at my kitchen sink washing dishes and thinking about how much Mom must be hurting. Then two things occurred to me that I’d never thought of before. The first was that Jesus had a stepfather, too. Joseph would have been just like a biological father to Him, and we can surmise from Scripture that at some point during Jesus’ life, Joseph died. Mary, Jesus and the whole family would have experienced the grief of that loss. I wondered why Jesus raised others from the dead, yet allowed His own dad to die.

My second realization was that, as Jesus hung on the cross, He witnessed His mother’s unimaginable grief as she watched her firstborn die the cruelest of deaths. Furthermore, while I had stood by helplessly watching my mother grieve, Jesus had the power to end His mother’s grief. He could have simply spoken the word and 10,000 angels would have been at His side to rescue Him. But He chose to die. He allowed His mother, His family and His many friends to experience this grief because He knew it was in their best interest – and mine.

I felt my anger melt away as I humbly realized that I’d just been granted a fresh picture of Jesus, a Jesus who understood exactly how I felt because He, too, had watched his mother hurt. He, too, had lost loved ones. The difference was that He had authority over death but chose not to usurp it out of His great love for me. I no longer needed to understand why. Instead, I was beginning to understand grace.

Terrie Todd is a writer from Portage la Prairie, Man.

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Last modified January 14, 2002.

© 2002 Mennonite Brethren Herald.
Published by the Canadian Conference of MB Churches.
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