Words for When Someone I Love Has Died

Devotional

The chair is still there. They're just not in it.

That's one of the strangest parts. Everything in the house looks the same, and everything is completely different. You walk past their spot and something goes heavy in your chest and you can't really explain it.

That heavy feeling has a name. It's grief. And it's real, and it matters.

Some days it comes all at once like a wave. Other days it hides, and then a song comes on in the car and there it is again.

You might feel sad. You might feel mad. You might feel nothing at all for a while and then wonder if something's wrong with you.

Nothing's wrong with you. Grief is just what love does when the person it was holding onto is gone.

And here's something you need to know.

God does not stand far away from sad kids.

"The LORD is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit."

Near. Not across the room. He doesn't tell you to stop crying. He doesn't tell you it's been long enough now.

He comes close.

And here's something else. Jesus knows what this feels like.

His friend Lazarus died. And when Jesus got there, he cried. The Bible has a really short verse about it: "Jesus wept."

He wasn't pretending. He stood at his friend's grave and cried real tears, and he already knew what he was about to do.

Then he said something nobody else could say.

"I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live."

And then he proved it. He called Lazarus out of that tomb, and Lazarus walked out.

And later Jesus himself died. And on the third day he came out of his own grave.

Death couldn't hold him.

That's why death is real but it isn't the end. Isaiah said God "will swallow up death forever."

Swallow it up. Not push it back. Not slow it down. Gone.

And the very end of the Bible shows what's coming: "Death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore."

That's a day with no funerals. No goodbyes. No empty chairs.

So you don't have to hurry up and feel better. Grief takes as long as it takes, and nobody gets to rush you.

But you can be sad and still have hope at the same time. Both can be true.

So talk to God about it. Tell him who you miss. Tell him what hurts most, even the part you haven't said out loud to anybody.

He's near to the brokenhearted.

He can carry what you can't.