Permission to Grieve

Kay >> Hi I’m Kay Daigle of Beyond Ordinary Women Ministries. Welcome to this episode of our podcast. We are delighted today to welcome Rebecca Carrell back. Rebecca, we’re so glad that you’re here with us.

Rebecca >> Thank you for having me. It’s always such a pleasure to join you.

Kay >> Oh, we love it when you come. And I’m very excited about this topic that we’re going to talk about. But let me tell everybody just a little bit about you. And they can find the rest on our website if they want more information. She does have a Bachelor of Arts degree in Christian Education from Dallas Seminary, just like I do, and she is working there presently on her doctorate in education.

And she is also mentoring and teaching at the seminary in Media Arts and Worship Department, as well as educational ministries and leadership department as well. You’ve got to be a busy person.

Rebecca >> They like to keep me busy. Yeah. I’m really looking forward to post-doctoral life.

Kay >> Yeah. And when will that be? When do you expect that to happen?

Rebecca >> Oh, not anytime soon. I think about two years. I’m really hoping for two years.

Kay >> Yeah, well, that sounds reasonable.

Rebecca >> Yeah, yeah.

Kay >> Well, today our topic is about grief. We are going to talk about “You have permission to grieve.” And when Rebecca suggested this is a topic, I was very excited because I believe that the way we deal with grief in today’s church is not healthy for the most part, and it’s widespread in our society. But it shouldn’t happen in the church, is the way I feel about it.

So, Rebecca, describe how we in today’s Western culture deal with grief.

Rebecca >> Well, Kay, about 10 or 12 years ago, probably maybe even 12 or 13 years ago, I attended a funeral. A friend of mine lost her brother and he had been in his early 40s, left behind two young children, a wife. And it was a tragedy, the way death is always a tragedy. But the circumstances surrounding his death were particularly heartbreaking.

It was a drug overdose. He had struggled throughout his life and OD’d on drugs. I was at the funeral, snuck in just a little bit late, came straight from work, and as I sat down, the pastor crossed the stage, took to the podium and thundered in this loud voice that just filled up the room. He said, “We are not grieving. We are celebrating. Today we are celebrating because we know where he is.”

And I knew what he was trying to do, and I knew that he was trying to encourage us, that because someone is in Christ, we don’t grieve as though we have no hope but to take away the one place left in society where it’s okay to actually come together as a community and express sorrow and lament is so destructive.

And it highlights a pattern that I’ve seen. Oh, probably, probably started when I was a teenager, maybe in the early 80s, and it might predate that. But this, this move away from funerals to celebration of life, instead of taking advantage of an opportunity to really share the gospel and hammer into the room what Christ did for us, it has come more about making people laugh and telling stories.

And I think that in our eagerness to grieve as those who have hope, we have forgotten that grief and hope can co-exist. And we have entered into this kind of attitude of triumphalism and what the medical sciences would tell us and the psychological sciences would tell us, is that to not grieve actually is very, very destructive, not just for the soul, for the spirit, but also for the body.

Kay >> Yeah. Well, you know, when my father died. I was 33 at the time.

Rebecca >> I’m sorry.

Kay >> Yeah.

Anyway, I felt like I wasn’t supposed to grieve. I mean, I had that sense from, you know, the verse that says we don’t grieve like the others do, that you were just talking about. We have hope and those things. But I had the sense that everybody was saying, “He’s in heaven, he’s happier. You just have to let go of the grief and celebrate the fact that he is there and he’s well now.”

And so I kind of stuffed it for a long time. And it was it was not healthy at all.

Rebecca >> No it’s not. And not only is it not healthy, but it’s not biblical. And that’s where I think the church has gotten a little bit out of alignment in the sense of victory in Christ, which is true, which really cannot be overemphasized. But in this leap toward the victory piece, we forget that we still have to pass through the valley of the shadow of death.

We forget that the Bible, if it is anything, it is a witness of people crying out with raw, real emotions to God and God meeting them where they are, allowing space for grief and lament. And we find that the healing comes through the process and not by avoiding it. So I think your story is so common.

And the more I have this conversation with people, the more I hear the same story is this feeling that it’s almost like it’s a diminished witness if we express our grief.

Kay >> That’s a thought I hadn’t thought of, but I totally agree with that. It does diminish our witness.

And it really made it hard for me to talk about my dad. So I certainly couldn’t really talk to other people about it because I felt like I just might start crying.

Rebecca >> Right. And that’s another thing for some weird reason. And I just need someone to explain this to me. We have gotten or embraced this idea that somehow tears are bad.

And when you think of like I did this as a young parent, my kids would come crying to me with something and instead of sitting down and entering into the sadness with them. And if I could go back and do it again, and I did course correct when they were, you know, later in elementary school, in middle school. But if I could go back and course correct, I would actually affirm their tears because I believe that God has given us tears as a way to process through our emotions.

And we can talk about this in a few minutes if you want. There are actually big differences between grief tears and tears of laughter, tears of joy, onion tears, to where grief tears, or psychosomatic tears are chock full of adrenaline and stress hormones. And they’re thicker too. So when grief tears trickle down our face, they take longer. We are wired so that when we see tears, we tend to be moved with compassion. And so not only are we drawing people to us, to comfort us when we can openly express our grief, but we’re also purging our body of the toxins that can harm us through our tears. But for some reason, when we cry in front of people, we say, “Oh, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t be crying. I’m so sorry, I’m crying.”

And we try to stop. Instead of making space for each other to weep and to weep as loudly and for as long as we need to. And I think the biblical example is just that.

Kay >> That’s interesting, that it’s even a physical way that God has made us so that we can grieve.

Rebecca >> It’s beautiful, if you think about it. I mean, it’s just it’s the kindness of God that the healing comes through the grieving and the weeping.

Kay >> That’s really interesting. I had no idea there was some scientific basis for a different types of tears.

So what would you say that the Bible teaches us to do then?

Rebecca >> I think we have examples all throughout the scriptures. But when I when I teach this in lesson form, I tell the people in attendance that we can take three things from the Scripture, and the first is that we have permission to grieves. God gives us permission to grieve.

The second is he gives us prescribed words in the lament Psalms.

The third is that he gives us a pattern in the Psalms of lament. So to if we were to talk about permission, I would point you to John 11. And I think this is one of those examples in the Scripture that best illustrates the humanity of Jesus in such a tender and compassionate way. But if you’re not, I know you’re familiar, Kay.

If you’re not familiar with the story of Jesus and Lazarus, Jesus and his disciples are about two days away from a town called Bethany. Bethany is where some dear friends of Jesus live- Martha, Mary, and their brother Lazarus. Well, Lazarus becomes ill and the sisters are alarmed. So they send word to Jesus and they have the messenger tell them that the one he loves is ill.

Well, Jesus stays where he is for two more days and then makes the journey back to Bethany. Well, by the time he gets there, not only is Lazarus dead, but Lazarus has been in the tomb for four days. And that number four is significant because the Jews in the first century believed that the spirit sort of hovered around its body for a couple of days after death, and may or may not decide to reanimate the body.

And so once you passed that third day and entered into that fourth day, they believed that the spirit had gone on to its final resting place, and that the body was as dead as dead could be.

Well, the sisters hear that Jesus has come to the edge of the town, and Mary is collapsed on the floor weeping. But Martha races out to meet Jesus, and she says, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”

And then Jesus enters into a dialog with her, and they actually end up having this really beautiful theological conversation where they talk about the redemption and eternal life. And this is really interesting to me because Jesus, who knows all of us perfectly, knows the kind of linear thinker and verbal processor that Martha is.

She seems to be just maybe a little bit more cerebral than her sister. And so in her grief, what Martha needs is words. And so Jesus gives her words, and then Martha goes back to the house. If I’m remembering this correctly and sends Mary, she tells her sister, “The teacher has sent for you, or the teacher is calling for you.”

And Mary gets up, races to Jesus and when she gets there, starts to talk to him, but just collapses in tears. Mary is our feeler. She’s our emoter and Mary doesn’t need words. Mary needs Jesus to meet her in the emotion. And that’s exactly what Jesus does.

The text says that Jesus wept. We tend to stop there, and we laugh and we say, “If we’re going to memorize one Bible verse John 11:35, it’s the shortest one.”

It’s two words, Jesus wept. But if we stop there and we don’t read on to verse 36, we really miss something poignant. The text then says that the Jews who were around him and all the people surrounding him said, “See how he loved him.”

And so that tells us something else, though we read verse 35 and go immediately to verse 36. When this played out in real time, Jesus wept loudly, demonstrably, and with enough passion that the people around him felt compelled to comment and John felt compelled to record it.

So we can assume that Jesus didn’t just wipe away a tear, but that he actually entered into Mary’s very real sorrow and empathized with her. And so we have this picture of not only Jesus, the healer and the miracle worker who’s going to raise Lazarus from the dead, but we have a picture of Jesus with a very high EQ, a very high emotional intelligence, who knows exactly how to meet people, where they are in their grief, and who condescends to enter into that grief.

And it’s because he loved Lazarus. He loved Martha, he loved Mary, and he grieved death. He grieved death even though he was about to reverse it, he still grieved death. And so for us to gloss over something that Jesus wept over and that Jesus came to defeat is to diminish it.

And even in modern society, Kay, we say things like, “Sometimes death is better. Death is a friend.” You know, sometimes death is, you know, a release.

Well, theologically, that’s very antithetical to the gospel. We’re never to make friends with the enemy that Jesus died to defeat. And so I think that the church is doing all of us a disservice. And not all churches do this, and not all pastors do this. But as a society, by and large, to sequester the grievous and to not create a space for people to come together and really lament as a community and weep and grieve is to it’s not to short circuit the process. It’s actually to delay healing. And I think that we miss a real opportunity to grow in Christ likeness and to grow in empathy when we try and short circuit grief, short circuit grief.

Kay >> Yeah, I love that. I love, I love that story. I’ve always been so glad that Jesus wept and grieved Lazarus for everybody to understand that he felt their sorrow. I loved that too. And you know what you were just talking about so often? You know, I hear reports of somebody who is grieving. They’ve lost someone. Christians just say the wrong thing far too often because they’re trying to make the person feel better, and it doesn’t help.

Even Paul tells us to weep with those who weep. And I think that’s the problem. We’re trying to fix it. We don’t want to see and hear other people who are hurting.

Rebecca >> Yeah, I totally agree. And it’s because we’re uncomfortable with grief. You know, it. It makes us feel uncomfortable. So we try to slap a Bible verse on it or we try to distract them. I have found though, (and the Lord has blessed me with numerous occasions to grieve and grieve deeply), and what I’ve found is that when someone tries to make me feel better, I may be distracted for a little while, but I ultimately feel worse and unseen and unvalidated.

When my husband and I were going through a really, really heavy season that lasted over a year, a girlfriend of mine took me to her house in Colorado, and we just spent time in nature. We were there for a week and she said, “Your job this week is to cry, and I’m not going to try and make you cry, but I’m going to hold space for you to cry. I’m going to sit here while you cry, and I’m not going to try and stop you from crying. And you’re going to promise to never apologize for crying.”

And every morning I would get up and do my Bible study and she would come and sit down. And it was like just her compassionate presence would trigger the tears. And I would cry for about 30 minutes, sometimes 45 and maybe by the end of the trip—not quite that long—but I found that once I had worked through that emotion that I actually legitimately felt better all day long, I felt like my loss mattered. I felt like someone else was giving weight to the heaviness of the loss and validating it.

And I felt. I just felt so seen. And I just imagined that that was part of the magic of what Jesus did with Mary and Martha. Is he just saw them and he just held space for them to dump all of their emotions on him, to yell at him a little bit. I mean, I don’t think we should try and sterilize Martha saying, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”

She’s saying, “Where were you? You could have stopped this and you didn’t.” And that’s something we all have to wrestle with when we go through a loss of any kind. “Where were you, Lord? You could have stopped this.” And you didn’t.

And so I think one of the changes that needs to happen in order for the church to get better at helping people grieve, is for us to understand that there’s actually this beautiful healing process within the grief itself.

The grief isn’t bad. The grief is the path to feeling better, not trying to make someone laugh, not trying to distract them, not drinking alcohol or binging on Netflix. It’s processing those emotions. But even more than processing the emotions, stealing, feeling seen within them. Because the other thing, and I would love to hear your thoughts on this, Kay.

The other thing I hear from grievers over and over and over again is the same thing that my husband and I felt when we were in our long season of grief. And that is where has everybody gone? You know, I mean, it’s people who used to call and we just used to do life with on a daily basis just disappeared.

And the only thing worse than a good, hard season of grief is going through it alone.

Kay >> Oh, yeah. I’m so sorry that happened. That is. Yeah, but I think it’s back to the idea that because our society just is not comfortable with pain and grief, they just don’t know what to do. So they avoid people who are going through that kind of pain.

Rebecca >> And that’s what it is.

Kay >> Yeah. It really, really, really makes that hard on the person who’s already going through grief when they don’t have anybody who is commiserating with them.

Rebecca >> Yeah, yeah. And it’s so symptomatic of our culture. I mean, if you think about the air we breathe. I mean, we really do live in a world that says, “If you want it, you can have it. Your highest ideal is to be happy.” And anything that threatens that is something that should be cut away.

The biblical authors would actually tell us there is great value in our suffering and in our trials. James said, “Consider it all joy, my brothers and sisters, when you face many trials of many kinds.”

I mean, so we have kind of—and this is something I need to tease out a little bit more my own mind before I really feel prepared to talk about it. But I think that one of the issues we see today, certainly in society, but also in the church and I think more in evangelical spaces, is this emaciated theology of suffering where suffering somehow, instead of being viewed as sanctifying, is viewed as getting in the way and something we need deliverance from right away.

And we need a miracle and we need a breakthrough, and we need to be through the trials as fast as we possibly can, because that’s what Christian triumphalism tells us. But the biblical authors would imply that without suffering, there’s no sanctifying.

Kay >> Yeah, and suffering is really when we grow the most in the way.

Rebecca >> I wish it weren’t true, but it’s true.

Kay >> Yes, yes, it really is. It really is. So what is the scriptural pattern for going through a time of grief?

Rebecca >> So the lament Psalms are a fascinating study, and one of the reasons we’re not terribly familiar with them is because we don’t like them.

We, like the Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want. We don’t like create in me a clean heart. Oh, God, renew a right spirit within me.

Kay >> Or we make it for somebody else. Create in them a clean heart. Oh, God. You know.

Rebecca >> Right? Right. Exactly. Yeah, but we really do naturally tend to gravitate toward the scriptures that make us feel better about us. And I’m as guilty as the next person. You know, I don’t think I’ve memorized a whole lot of the lament psalms. I have memorized Romans 8, which is more than conquerors, so guilty as charged. But one of the reasons that we are not as familiar with them as we should be is because we’re not spending time in them, and when we spend time in them, we’re not thinking deeply about them and putting ourselves in in the story that that it’s telling or applying it to our own lives.

But the majority of the Psalms and I don’t have an exact percentage. It’s higher than 60%, lower than 70%. But the majority of the songs in the Psalter are community laments, which tells us two things. Israel did not shy away from letting the Lord know that they were unhappy with things. They did not hold back when they were upset. They didn’t hold back when they were angry.

And it also tells us that they came together and lamented as a community.

And so I think that is a cue for us. Instead of having celebrations of life—and I get I get it, I do, and I’ve had my fair share of celebrations of life. But I think we should at least retain the funeral language and understand that we don’t have to have a party. We actually can come together and weep. We can come together and recognize the brokenness of the world.

I think we honor the Lord when we do that, when we recognize and acknowledge and affirm that things are not as they should be, I think we honor the person who has passed when we publicly grieve their loss, and then we move into hope.

We grieve as those who have hope. But that doesn’t mean we don’t grieve. It just means that we grieve while we hang on to hope. And that is something that can be done at the same time. And then when we when we don’t have the words, the beautiful things about the lament Psalms is that the Lord saw fit to preserve in the Psalter words penned for us when we can’t find our own.

And so when I am so weighed down that I just don’t know how to pray, I can go to Psalm 13 and I can say, “How long oh Lord,” you know “How long. Oh Lord, when will you see me? When will you hear me?” And then when we pray through these Psalms, and I think it’s a good idea to even practice writing our own.

But what tends to happen is that about halfway or two thirds of the way through, there’s this shift, and it’s as though, in crying out to the Lord and dumping all of our hurts and cares and concerns on him, the Spirit shifts our gaze. We start to remember who he is and what he’s done, and what he has promised to do and what he is still actively doing, and that is saving people and making all things right and speaking order into chaos. So that’s where the hope is. But I do feel like you have to pass through the grief to get to the hope.

Kay >> Yeah, yeah. Amen. Just yesterday. And we’re recording this for the audience in March of 2026, I read an article about a study that had been done about best practices for grieving, basically. And some yes. Some people had studied this, you know, and they’d done it with all the scientific stuff where they’ve got two groups, two and two different things and compared them.

And all of these people were grieving something, and they had a group who was going through a Bible study and reading more cheerful verses, encouraging verses in the Bible. They had another group who was—who were learning how to lament. And they were using the psalms of lament, and that they said that that group processed things the grief better than even the people who had the encouraging verses. Because the encouraging verses would help them for a little while, but then they kind of just go back into it and they, they didn’t know what else to do except just read more verses. You know what I’m saying, but lament really gave them something to do, something to take away. And it really made a difference. And I was just really interested when I read that yesterday, and I couldn’t believe I saw it yesterday when we were, we were going to have this. But you know, it’s kind of back to your there’s something physical about it, I think.

Rebecca >> Yeah. You know, that just doesn’t surprise me because I know the truth of the gospel and I know my eschatology, and I know Jesus is coming back, and I know we will have resurrected bodies and unexpired knees, and we’ll be able to do all the things and we’ll be rejoicing forever. And that does not help me when I am in the pit of grief.

What helps me is knowing that the Lord knows that things are broken, that he has done everything there is to do to make things right. And what helps me is someone sitting with me in my brokenness, letting me process through it and then helping me out the other side. And there’s something inauthentic about slapping a Bible verse on something on a gaping wound, even if it’s true—and it is true. But ill-timed truth is not helpful.

And Jesus said John 16:33, “In this world you will have trouble.” You know, “I have told you these things to that you will have peace.” And then the very next thing he says, “In this world you will have trouble.”

How is that supposed to give me peace? I don’t know, but somehow it does.

Knowing that the Lord has acknowledged that this life is going to be hard, but that this life isn’t all there is, has a way of validating the difficult circumstances we go through. And I think that’s just what we want more than anything else when we’re in those spaces is for someone to say, “Yeah, you know what? This really rots. This is just awful, and I’m not going to try and fix it. I’m just going to sit with you in it.” And ironically, that’s what seems to fix it faster.”

Kay >> So what do you do when the person that is dying tells everybody not to grieve for him? Because I.

Rebecca >> Don’t you dare take away my right to grieve.

Kay >> Yeah, I have seen this happen that they said, “I don’t want you to grieve. I don’t want anybody unhappy at the funeral.” Of course, they don’t want their loved ones to be sad. That’s the thing–they’re trying to prevent them and protect them from those feelings, those emotions that they’re going to have to go through.

But what would you say to somebody who maybe had someone pass away who told them that? If you see that they’re struggling, what would you tell them?

Rebecca >> If I was talking to someone who was really struggling because let’s say their spouse had told them they didn’t want them to grieve, I would say, you know, “I recognize how much you want to honor what you feel like are their dying wishes. And that’s just not how this process works. And they don’t get to tell you how to feel, and they wouldn’t if they were still here.”

And to someone who was dying and, you know, let’s say had a terminal cancer prognosis and they said that to me, I would just really lovingly tell them, “I see what you’re trying to do, and I love you for it. And it’s just not helpful because your life has immense value, so much value that Christ died for you.

“And if you try to diminish that, for those of us who are left behind and love and love you, you will actually hinder our healing and not help it. And so instead of trying to make us feel a forced happiness when you’re gone. How about you just love us well, while you’re here and let’s just live life to the fullest while we have you. And then we will. We will mourn for you the way we need to when you’re with the Lord.”

Kay >> I think that’s really great. A lot of wisdom in that. Thanks, Rebecca.

Well, do you want to give us a closing thought as we close the podcast here?

Rebecca >> Yeah. You know, I would say that we live in a world that’s so addicted to happiness that this is just sort of the air we breathe. And it takes a little while to shift your mindset to one that actually embraces grief and looks at trials and hardships and suffering not as something to be delivered from as quickly as possible, but actually something that is ultimately going to make us more Christlike.

And I’ve found, as I have been doing this work on grief and walking with a precious friend who’s had just a terrible grief journey in losing her daughter, I found a deeper and richer relationship with the Lord. But I’ve also found that my joy feels more authentic. I think, in embracing the difficulties in life and the grief that I’ve walked through, I also have a keener appreciation for the good times and a stronger longing for the Lord.

And I think that that is something that the biblical authors would tell us is something to be desired, that we should long for the Lord’s presence. And I am less accepting of injustices when it’s something I think I might be able to help.

And so I think embracing a posture of open hands and open hearts toward not just your own grief, but toward others are grieving, too, is actually going to make you more of a holistically healthy human, and in the long run, more like Christ.

And I think that’s where our deepest joy is to be found.

Kay >> Okay, I love that. That’s very well put.

Well, thank you for joining us. And thank you, Rebecca, for being our guest.

If you are joining us and thinking about this topic, you can also go to our website, BeyondOrdinaryWomen.org. We have a couple of other podcasts on lament that Nika Spaulding did just two parts. One is “Understanding Lament” and the other is “Practicing Lament.” And she did that for us a couple of years ago. And so if you want more in depth about laments themselves, I think those podcasts would help you. And you can find those in the Godly Living section. If you go up to our main menu and go down to look at Resources under the Godly Living section, you will find those two.

And I am actually writing a study Learning to Lament. And so that should be out by the time this podcast drops. So if you would like a study to kind of go through yourself or with a group that will be out by the time you hear this.

So thank you again, Rebecca. We look forward to seeing you soon.

Rebecca >> Thank you for having me, Kay. And thank you, friend, for listening.