Good Grief

Mary, Lazarus, and Jesus had a long history of friendship. They were a friend group. And Mary's first words to Jesus were, if You had been here, my brother would not have died.

Pastor Brady said the first thing the enemy will do when you have a loss is get you to blame God for it. In 30 years as a pastor, standing with people through children killed in car accidents, cancer, and other awful things, 90 percent of the time the first thing people say is, Where was God? That is the wrong question, he said, because God was there. We live in a very broken, sinful, ugly world that God is going to redeem and restore. The kingdom of heaven is breaking in even now, all around us, if we are looking for it.

And Jesus was not defensive about Mary's words.

When Jesus saw her weeping, He saw her tears. He sees yours. He cared about Callie's tears this week. Your tears are not insignificant to the Lord. He is not a God in heaven so detached from the human race that your tears do not matter. Your tears matter. Your sadness matters to Him.

Then comes the verse most of us memorized first, the shortest one in the Bible: Jesus wept.

Jesus was about to go to the tomb and raise Lazarus from the dead. He could have told everyone to settle down and cut out the crying. He did not. Knowing full well that in a few minutes the grave clothes would come off and Lazarus would walk out, He still did not skip over the important process of grieving. He entered into their grieving with them. When you were grieving, Jesus was with you, participating in the grief alongside you.

Most people are not good at expressing grief. It is not built into American culture. Pastor Brady told the story of a friend who owns a funeral home in a small East Texas town, the buckle of the Bible Belt, with a church every half mile and nearly everyone saying they are born again. His friend has 35 bags of human remains that families will not claim. Grandma goes to the nursing home, grandma dies, the family pays 700 dollars to cremate her body, and they never come to get her.

Those were lives lived 80 and 90 years, with nobody there to celebrate them. There should be funerals and memorial services for those people. "We have forgotten how to honor life and we have forgotten how to weep."

When a man told him he does not like going to funerals, Pastor Brady answered, "They're not meant for your entertainment." He does not like going to them either. But going to grieve, to mourn, and to remember a life that was well lived is an important part of your human development and of the Christian experience.

Pastor Brady said two-thirds of the Psalms are laments: real people expressing real emotion about real things that really happened. Some are imprecatory psalms, where the writer is angry at God and at his enemies and asks God to strike them down. Read them. They are raw.

And God is not mad about any of that. He says, tell me more. Tell me how you feel. God is not offended at your human emotions. What He wants you to do at some point, though, is leave it with Him.

You can ignore your pain, but that is bad. If you ignore your pain, you will explode somewhere else. That goes for the tough guys in the room, and for anyone who says it hurts too much to talk about. That is exactly why you have to talk about it. Find someone you can explode on so you do not explode on the people you really love: a good counselor, a good therapist, a good pastor.

Pastor Brady asked the church to write this one down: "The Hebrew writers knew that the path of praise often went through the valley of mourning." When you walk through the valley of the shadow of death and get to the other side, the songs and worship moments you used to ignore suddenly mean something. Your worship changes. The way you love other people changes.

What happens when we grieve and mourn properly? Two things. Number one: our pain is confronted. At some point you have to say, that was not good.

Pastor Brady was clear this is not a philosophical sermon. He and Pam have had to do this work. He did it for 12 months, and he said he would not be up there preaching if he had not. When you have experienced something painful and you do not confront it, you are no good to anyone.

You cannot fake it very long. Stop putting on a facade where everything is great and everything is awesome. Pastor Brady said it bluntly, on purpose: "No, it sucks. It's okay. I'm sorry to say that word in church, but that's the point I'm making. Stop being so polite." He said he does not use bad language and was not trying to be crass. "I'm just saying sometimes you need to say it." Everything is not awesome, and it is okay to say that.

"Grief is a protest." When you grieve, you are saying: that should not have happened to me. That was wrong. That was a violation. That was unjust. Some of us need to protest a little more. We do not want what happened to be true, but it is true. So tonight, before you go to bed, say out loud what happened to you. Something will happen in your heart.

Grief is something we must enter voluntarily. Pastor Brady said he was not forcing anyone into it. He was inviting them. "But there's pain from avoiding pain."

You are going to have to look it in the eye and kill your Goliath at some point. "He will keep taunting you until you put a rock in his forehead." You can be taunted for the rest of your life and hide in a cave, or you can walk out there with your slingshot full of God's power, do the work, and confront the spiritual bully that is taunting you.

Sorrow is better than just faking it. If you are sorrowful, be sorrowful.

The second thing that happens when you mourn properly is beautiful: you become available again. Pastor Brady said that is why he is here today.

In the first six or seven months after everything happened with him and Pam, he knew not to rush. Very wise people told him, "Brady, do not rush back into something." Others were clamoring for him to start a church tomorrow. He said that would have been the worst thing he could do. He waited until the Lord gave him a thumbs up. Without doing the hard work, he would not have been available. He would have been angry, aggravated, disconnected, and sad. Then the Lord said he was available again, and 35 of his closest friends confirmed it: you are ready, you have done the work.

"You can't comfort all who mourn if you have not mourned." You have to do the work before you are available to help anybody else.

Pastor Brady spoke to the strong people in the room who have gone through hard things, and to three or four parents he was looking at: God is about to use you. Your story is about to become a powerful witness to a watching world. That grief, that mourning, that sadness is not going to be wasted. Not one single second of it. The Lord is going to use you to come alongside people and comfort all who mourn.

That is what happens when you do the hard work, when you do the heavy lifting, when you do not ignore it, when you walk right in.

The American bison is one of the few animals that, when a blizzard comes, turns and walks into the storm, because the storm will not last as long that way. If you run from the storm, it follows you. If you walk into it, it shortens everything.

That is the picture of mourning Pastor Brady wants us to catch. Turn and walk into the storm, and you will get to the other side quicker than if you run from it.

So how do we grieve? Pastor Brady turned to Psalm 137, a very obscure psalm most people have never read and assume does not apply to them. It does apply to all of us.

Psalm 137 remembers the Babylonian exile. The Jewish people had been conquered. They were about to be displaced, about to become refugees, about to spend 70 years in Babylon. They were in chains, marched across the desert in a forced exile.

Pastor Brady wrote down what this psalm taught him after the shooting at New Life 19 years ago. He did not know how to grieve properly. He had never been trained or taught. An old pastor friend told him, read Psalm 137 and see if the Lord speaks to you. He did. It shows the path of grieving in three steps.

Life is not the same. Pastor Brady said he is preaching on a Sunday morning in a Marriott, not what he had been doing for the last 30 years, and not what he had on his bingo card five years ago. He is glad to be there. Sometimes you just have to admit this is different, but it is not bad. "It's just different."

Israel was not sitting by the Jordan River anymore. They were by a strange river in Babylon, a place they had never been. When you are grieving, admit it: it is never going to feel the same. That chair is always going to be empty. Your heart will always have scar tissue from what happened.

Many people want it to go back to the way it was. It is never going to be that, and hoping it will traps you in a circular, confusing place your whole life. When Israel returned 70 years later, Jerusalem was a mess, broken down and torn up, and Nehemiah had to rebuild it. They did not come back to the same homes, gardens, or jobs. Admitting that is the first critical step of grieving properly.

Do not get in a hurry. It may take years. It may take weeks. Grief is different for every single human being, because of what happened, how it happened, and when it happened. Do not put an artificial timeline on your grieving. Let the Lord do this.

They sat and wept. Some of us try to get through grief by staying busy, and that is not an option here. They sat, took their time, rested, and wept while they rested. They had conversations. They talked about it. Staying busy keeps us occupied, but it does not allow for mourning or grieving.

Some of us need to clear our schedules and have a chill Sunday. Stop filling every available hour with doom scrolling. Put the screen away. Go outside, get some sun, breathe in some mountain air, and have some time with Jesus. Do something nice for yourself. Don't drink cheap coffee.

They remembered the past. So talk about it. Pastor Brady had just done this with a family in the room, asking them for great stories, the times their loved one made them laugh, the stories they will still be telling and laughing about five years from now. That is healthy. Tell the stories and the good memories.

His own dad died in 2005, 20 years ago. Pastor Brady recently saw a photo of his dad at 59, his own age now, and said he looks just like him and has the same personality. He thinks about the hunting trips, the fishing trips, getting lost in the woods together, the food and barbecue his dad would make, and the laughter. "He was a good man."

Then reflect on the lessons. What have you learned in the past five years about the Lord, about yourself, about your marriage? Pastor Brady and Pam have been married 37 years, and their marriage was not harmed by what happened. It was strengthened. They looked each other in the eye right away and said, "We're on the same team. We're in this together." It bonded them, and they found out who their friends were.

There are things you are learning right now that you cannot learn anywhere else. The valley teaches lessons you cannot learn on the mountaintop. Pastor Brady said he hopes the journey is short and that you never have to go through it again. But you are a unique person now because of what you have walked through.

Pastor Brady closed in prayer, asking the Holy Spirit to bring healing over every person in the room: every mom and dad, every sibling, every grandparent, every child. He invited everyone to turn their palms toward the Lord.

When someone who loves you gives you a gift they have thought hard about, you receive it and say thank you. The Lord was there to give the gift of healing. No alcohol, no pill, no drug can bring the healing you are looking for. The Holy Spirit is the great healer. Welcome Him, receive it, and say thank you.

"There's not one thing you've experienced that Jesus did not experience on the cross." All of His friends abandoned Him. His body was beaten within an inch of His life. He bled and died, alone except for a handful of women, His mother, and maybe John nearby, with soldiers mocking Him. And yet He went there voluntarily. "They didn't take his life. He gave his life."

For 2,000 years the church has called this the holiest moment in the service, and for the first 100 years the table of the Lord was the reason they gathered. Holding up the bread, Pastor Brady invited the church to declare that healing is on its way, that brokenness will not always define them, and that healing is possible, happening, and coming. Holding up the cup, he thanked God for grace, for sins wiped away, and for permission to grieve, to groan, and even to gripe and complain, because God listens, is right there with us, and has forgiven us.