Grief & Suffering gathers Christian Standard articles that offer comfort, perspective, and practical help for seasons of loss and pain. Here you’ll find biblical encouragement for mourning, guidance for walking through hardship, and resources for supporting others with compassion—grounded in the hope of Christ’s presence, resurrection, and final restoration. These articles aim to help readers lament honestly, endure faithfully, and cling to God’s promises when life hurts.
January 26, 2022
Rusty Russell thought his son, Charlie, would recover quickly when his boy was hospitalized with COVID-19 in August. That wasn't the case. Rusty, who preaches in Florida, traveled back and forth to Tennessee weekly to help during Charlie's long ordeal.
March 3, 2020
By Stuart Powell Is the fruit of suffering bitter or sweet? How should we approach the anguish we encounter in life? Many times suffering is the exclamation point of wrong decisions. We suffer a broken bone because of our lack of judgment. We suffer from a broken heart because we trusted someone others considered unworthy. But sometimes suffering arrives uninvited. We make one wrong move and pinch a nerve. We undergo a routine physical and soon begin painful treatment for a heretofore unknown physical malady. A cultural shift places our faith squarely in the crosshairs of extremists. In A Place
November 22, 2019
By Michael C. Mack Several years ago as the Thanksgiving holiday approached, I decided to dig a little deeper into how the Bible uses that word, thanksgiving, and I’m very thankful that I did! I discovered three perspectives I had never really considered before. Perhaps they will help you better understand and live with thanksgiving . . . all year long. _ _ _ 1. Thanksgiving Is an Attitude, Not Just a Day Look at the following Bible verses, especially the context for thanksgiving: Rejoice in the Lord always. I will say it again: Rejoice! Let your gentleness be evident
July 24, 2019
By Chris Moon Antioch Christian Church in Marion, Iowa, has spent the past month doing what few churches ever have had to do—grieve the sudden death of its longtime pastor. John Seitz Sr. had served at Antioch for nearly two decades when he began to suffer from poor health following an overseas trip in January 2018. Seitz had been battling an infection, and doctors were looking for a cause. The pastor had not preached a lot this year after his church elders granted him an extended break to rest and heal. But his health continued to deteriorate. He passed away
June 11, 2019
By Doug Redford Jane Alden Stevens was a professor of fine arts at the University of Cincinnati. During a trip to France several years ago, she noticed a stone obelisk in a small French village that had inscribed on it the names of those who had died during World War I. She later decided to conduct a study of how people in various European countries remembered that war. The result was a book of black and white photos that she entitled Tears of Stone: World War I Remembered. At Brookwood Military Cemetery in England, Stevens photographed a grave with this
April 9, 2019
By Stuart Powell Is there anything more difficult than hearing someone you love say goodbye? We typically react with sadness. That feeling is amplified when the goodbye comes at the threshold of death. Jesus’ disciples experienced that situation on the night of his betrayal. Jesus warned his disciples what was about to happen: I tell you the solemn truth, you will weep and wail, but the world will rejoice; you will be sad, but your sadness will turn into joy. When a woman gives birth, she has distress because her time has come, but when her child is born, she
By Gene Shelburne The son born to Robert and Suzanne Massie was a normal baby in most respects. He had the correct number of fingers, toes, eyes, and ears. He was intelligent, probably a brighter-than-usual child. He cried, sucked, yowled, and wet his diaper just like other babies. Only one thing made Bobby Massie different. He was a hemophiliac. A bleeder. Little did Bobby’s parents suspect how crushingly cruel that difference would be—the abuse they would suffer from doctors, the fear that caused schools to refuse to educate Bobby and made the couple’s friends forbid their children to play with
March 1, 2017
By Jim Tune The book of Job is mystery to me. It”s the story of immense suffering, unhelpful friends, few answers, but a great God. The more I look at the book, the more I see. It”s a book that”s so relevant to our times, for both those suffering and their friends. That”s all of us. For those who are suffering, Job lets us know we”re not alone. “I used to think that the book of Job is in the Bible because this story of suffering is so extreme, so rare and improbable and unusual,” says pastor and scholar Ray
January 28, 2017
By Larry W. Timm When the sun rose on Thursday, October 29, 2015, my family hummed with anticipation over our quickly approaching family vacation to Florida. After the sun set that cold night, we were stunned and afraid and gathered together in a hospital room in Illinois. The terrifying journey from happiness to horror started that morning when my wife took our 14-year-old daughter, Jayne, to see a pediatrician. After struggling through a lingering cold, Jayne had noticed a lump on her neck; if she needed antibiotics, we wanted to get the prescription before beginning our trip. Her appointment led
December 2, 2016
By Daniel Schantz “A man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief” (Isaiah 53:3, King James Version). Sorrow does not take a holiday at Christmas. One of America”s most comforting Christmas anthems, “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day,” was composed by a man fluent in the language of grief. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was a popular professor and poet at Harvard in 1850, but he paid a price for his greatness. Although he loved students, he found teaching to be “a grinding mill.” He suffered from stomach distress, arthritis, vertigo, and depression. At one point he said, “I hate the sight
August 3, 2016
By Jim Tune In the early years of our church plant in Toronto, one of our staff members preached a message about mental illness and faith. He made himself vulnerable as he shared about a season of significant depression in his life. The story he told was courageous and honest. I remember it as a defining moment in our new church”s development. Mental illness was, and still is, a topic that rarely is discussed head-on in churches. In sharing his story, our speaker brought mental illness out from behind the curtain of shame and exposed it to a liberating light.
July 19, 2016
Mike Cope, director of outreach at Pepperdine University, talks with Editor Mark Taylor about how he has coped with profound loss in his life, and how we can, too. See this exclusive interview from the 2016 North American Christian Church here.
July 15, 2016
By Tim Spivey Greg came to live a better story even through the tragedy of losing an infant child just hours after birth. Greg and his wife (who was a Christian) suffered that unspeakable loss. After I preached the funeral for their dear child, Greg surprised me by asking to study the Bible, and I was thrilled to baptize him into Christ a couple of months later. He eventually became a drummer in our worship band, sporting a large, lifelike tattoo of his recently passed daughter on one arm. He and his wife conceived a second child but were told
June 29, 2016
By Jim Tune Paul Kalanithi, a nonsmoking neurosurgeon, was diagnosed with late-stage lung cancer at the age of 36. He chronicled his experiences in his memoir, When Breath Becomes Air. Kalanithi wrote: Death, so familiar to me in my work, was now paying a personal visit. . . . Standing at the crossroads where I should have been able to see and follow the footprints of countless patients I had treated over the years, I saw instead only a blank, a harsh, vacant, gleaming white desert, as if a sandstorm had erased all trace of familiarity. Death makes life seem
March 8, 2016
By Mark A. Taylor “I have visited and prayed with many sick people,” Professor Sherwood Smith told my class at The Cincinnati Bible Seminary more than 40 years ago. “But never did I pray like I did when the patient was my wife.” For some reason that insight has stuck with me all these years, and now it comes into sharper focus as I anticipate my own surgery Thursday this week. “Lord, heal him,” the elders prayed in December, not long after my diagnosis of prostate cancer. “Lord, keep him in the palm of your hand,” the men in my
February 3, 2016
By Jim Tune It was a gray, cold, miserable February day when my father died rather suddenly after a few days of hospitalization for respiratory problems. This month marks five years since his death on February 5, 2011. I miss him and still grieve his loss. It”s a different kind of grief now””not so raw or hard-edged. I miss him on holidays when we celebrated family traditions and rituals. And the February anniversary can still be difficult. It”s possible that the short, dark days of our Canadian winter contribute to my sense of melancholy. Nonetheless, arriving at the five-year mark
December 22, 2015
By Mark A. Taylor Death intrudes into thousands of lives every day. But to each individual losing someone close, death seems like a singular experience. I remember the comment of a good friend whose dad died decades ago. He returned to his job after several days grieving with his family and found everything there decidedly unchanged. “Everyone”s just doing what they usually do, working on their own tasks as if nothing has happened,” he said. Here he was, trying to cope with his life that had been upended. But everyone around him, it seemed, was getting along just fine. This
November 27, 2015
Two days in the life of  a volunteer hospital chaplain By Charlie Maloney One way I have served our community through the years is as a volunteer chaplain at our local hospital. When the hospital asked our ministerial association for volunteer help, I gladly accepted. I have the gift of compassion, and the hospital was only a mile from my church. Camarillo is a small, everyone-knows-everyone type of town. So this was a perfect way for me to contribute to the spiritual well-being of the place I have lived for 35 years. Stray Puppy One morning, as I was preparing
October 14, 2015
By Jim Tune In Tomas Tranströmer”s poem “The Blue House,” the narrator is a man standing in the woods near his house. When he looks at his house from this vantage point, he observes that it”s as if he”d just died and he now “saw the house from a new angle.” It”s a haunting image””that just-dead man among the trees””and it”s an instructive one too. Sometimes something has to die before we can see from a new angle. This is the posture Tranströmer”s narrator assumes, at once able to see his life for what it”s been while also acknowledging the
July 22, 2015
By Jim Tune One of my favorite books (and I like the movie, too) is the classic The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Czech writer Milan Kundera. In his book, the heroine, Teresa, struggles to be at peace with life when it”s not heavy, when it”s too much lightness, sunshine, and seemingly carefree””when it”s devoid of the anxieties that hint at darkness and mortality. She feels the constant need for gravitas, for some heaviness that says life is more than simply the present flourishing of health and comfort. For her, lightness equals superficiality. Most of us prefer sunshine over shadow,
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