Reading Time: 7 minutesQuestion 11158. Every grieving friend situation trips up even well meaning Christians, because our instinct is to fix pain, and grief cannot be fixed, only carried alongside someone. Paul’s instruction is very simple, “weep with those who weep” (Romans 12:15), not solve, not explain, weep. That single word reframes the whole task away from problem…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11156. Biblical lament is a category many Christians have quietly lost, replaced by an unspoken expectation that a good testimony always sounds cheerful, that real faith does not raise its voice against God in protest, or ask Him hard, unresolved questions. Roughly a third of the Psalms are laments, and that proportion alone should…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 60112. Those who suffer are usually surrounded, at least at first, by people who want to help and have no idea how. I have watched kind Christians make a bereavement worse with a sentence, and I have said things at gravesides in my twenties that I would give a good deal to take back….
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 11043. Praying for the dead is a practice most evangelicals have never considered and many bereaved believers have quietly done anyway, usually in the first raw weeks after a funeral when the instinct to keep speaking to God about someone is overwhelming. So this deserves a gentle answer as well as a clear one….
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 07022. Where do those who commit suicide go? I have been asked this question across a kitchen table more often than from a pulpit, usually by someone whose face tells me the answer matters more than any other thing in the world just now. So I want to answer it plainly and gently, and…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10167. Can those in heaven see what is happening down here? It is one of the most frequently asked questions in any pastoral ministry, and it is almost never asked out of curiosity. It is asked by a widow, or by parents at a graveside, and behind it lies a longing to know whether…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 10128. How there can be joy in heaven while someone we loved is not there is, to my mind, the hardest question in the whole field of last things, and I have never once been asked it as an abstract puzzle. It comes from people with a name and a face in mind. So…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 5013. The question of babies who die is not an academic one, and I refuse to treat it academically. It is asked at gravesides small enough to break your heart, in hospital rooms after machines fall silent, and quietly, years later, by parents who have never stopped counting birthdays that were never celebrated. If…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 3074. “Jesus wept” is the shortest verse in our English Bibles, and it may be the most surprising, because the One shedding tears at the tomb of Lazarus knew perfectly well that within minutes He would call the dead man out alive. Why cry at a funeral you are about to overturn? If you…
Reading Time: 9 minutesQuestion 2080. David’s child died on the seventh day of his illness, the son born to David and Bathsheba after their affair and the arranged death of her husband Uriah, and the story in 2 Samuel 12 remains one of the most emotionally difficult passages many parents ever read. Why would God take the life…