If you were to ask me when my season of grief began, I would tell you it started in 2016. That was the year the floor gave way. Within three years, every male in my family was gone. My brother-in-law. My father. My little brother. They died from cancer, a stroke, and an unknown heart condition.

Then came my own diagnosis of thyroid cancer and, later, an extremely rare genetic disorder. There were miscarriages that never became nursery walls or baby toys. I stepped away from our nonprofit community theater only to reopen it four years later at The Lord’s prompting.

Friends quietly disappeared.
The economy shifted beneath our feet.
The cost of living has climbed to the point where even breathing feels expensive.

And perhaps most disorienting of all, the institutions I had trusted to hold the world together began to fracture. Church. Government. Medicine. Education. Media. Even my assumptions about marriage and family. It was as though someone had pulled back the curtain and revealed that much of what I thought was solid was simply a mirage.

There were beautiful moments, too.
I find that grace & beauty have a way of showing up even in the ruins.

But underneath it all, there was a heaviness I could never quite shake.
Being the person I am, I tried to fix it.

I took the medications. For me, they didn’t help.
I prayed.
I wrote Scripture.
I studied Scripture.

Still, the sadness remained and settled over my life like a grey fog that wouldn’t lift.
Some called it depression. Others suggested anxiety or a midlife crisis.

But after nearly ten years, I began to wonder if I had been naming this “grey” incorrectly.

Maybe I wasn’t broken.
Maybe I was grieving.

Not just grieving the family I had buried, but grieving the version of the world I thought existed.

We tend to think of grief as something reserved for funerals, but grief is simply the cost of losing something that mattered. A person. A dream. A marriage. A calling. Your health. Your sense of safety. Even your assumptions about how life works.

In America, we aren’t wired for grief. We are told to pick ourselves up by the bootstraps and move on. Grief is uncomfortable. In fact, I never learned how to grieve. Our whole country is built on the premise of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Grief does not fit neatly into that.

When I finally realized I was grieving, I did what so many of us do: I turned to Elisabeth Kübler-Ross's Five Stages of Grief. I wanted a map. I wanted to know where I was and how long it would take to move through denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and finally acceptance.

The problem was, grief refused to cooperate.

The Five Stages of Grief.

It’s worth saying that this wasn’t Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s fault.

The Five Stages of Grief, developed in the 1960s, was based on her clinical work and interviews with terminally ill patients. They were never intended to be a rigid formula or a spiritual roadmap. In fact, she never intended them for those grieving, but for those who were dying.

At that time, many doctors refrained from informing patients of their impending deaths. Kübler-Ross aimed to humanize the process by discussing these difficult conversations with patients and observing their emotional responses.

Later, culture and the medical profession broadly adopted her observations as a model for anyone experiencing any form of loss or grief (bereavement, divorce, life-altering change).

Somewhere along the way, many of us, including me, began treating them like a map.

If I could just figure out which stage I was in, maybe I could work hard enough to reach the next one. Maybe one day I would wake up to find that grief had finally disappeared and the gray fog I was living under would be burned away by the sunshine of acceptance.

Instead, I found myself circling through sorrow, anger, gratitude, relief, confusion, hope, fear, and longing. The longer I lived with grief, and the longer I sat with Jesus and Scripture, the more I realized that the Bible paints a very different picture.

The Bible’s Picture of Grief.

The Bible does not paint grief in five neat stages. Instead, it models people who lament, question, remember, worship, doubt, hope, and trust, often all in the same prayer.

Job doesn’t move smoothly from denial to acceptance. One moment, he curses the day he was born; another, he declares his confidence in God. (Job 3:1 & Job 13:15)
David’s psalms swing from despair to praise and back again, refusing to stay in a single emotional stage. (Psalm 6)
Jeremiah writes an entire book called Lamentations, yet in the middle of it, he remembers that the steadfast love of the Lord never ceases (Lamentations 3:22-23).
And Jesus Himself stands before Lazarus’s tomb, fully aware that resurrection is only moments away, and still He weeps. (John 11)

The Bible doesn’t present grief as a staircase to climb.
It presents grief as a relationship to inhabit, and that realization changed everything for me.

Scripture doesn’t rush people toward acceptance. It invites them into lament.

Over the past ten years, I have been addressing the symptoms of grief (denial, bargaining, acceptance, etc.) and not the soul of grief, which is deeper. The soul of grief is lament.

Lament

Lament is one of the most overlooked spiritual practices in the modern Church. It is not complaining. It is not unbelief. It is not a lack of faith. Lament is the language of people who refuse to let go of God even when they cannot make sense of their pain.

It is grief spoken in the presence of God.

Perhaps that’s why so much of the Psalms is filled with cries of “How long, O Lord?” or “Why are you so downcast, O my soul?” The writers aren’t trying to move beyond grief. They are learning to carry it honestly before the One who can bear its weight.

For years, I thought healing meant getting over the losses of the last ten years. Now I wonder if healing looks more like learning to carry them with me. Now I wonder if healing looks more like accepting who I have become because of grief instead of trying to get back to who I was before.

Maybe the goal isn’t to stop grieving.

Maybe the goal is to discover that God is already present there and is working it all out for my good and His glory. (Romans 8:28)

Because biblical grief is not linear. It is the slow, sacred work of refusing to hide our sorrow from the God who has never hidden Himself from us.

The Bible doesn’t give us five stages of grief.
It gives us a vocabulary.
A practice.
A way of bringing our shattered hearts into the presence of God.

It gives us lament.

If you are finally naming your grief, you aren’t alone. Grief can be lonely and isolating. We all grieve differently, at different times, over different people, places, and events. But one thing is sure: we aren’t alone. “The LORD is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit.” (Psalm 34:18)

Over the next few posts, we are going to dive into the topic of grief exploring: