Nearing Home by Billy Graham (best book club books for discussion txt) 📗

and God can use your experience to encourage and help them. Are there those in your church or neighborhood carrying a burden of grief right now? Ask God to help you be a friend to them. More than most people, you can understand what they are going through, and you can help relieve the weight of their burden by your concern. Sometimes all they need is someone who will listen. Remember that God is “the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God” (2 Corinthians 1:3–4). And when we reach out to others, we help not only them but also ourselves because we are distracted from our own grief.

Turning to God

The final step in dealing with our grief is also the most important. Take your burden of grief to God. God knows what you are going through, and He loves you and wants to help you. Remember that He knows what it is to grieve because He had to watch as His only Son was put to death. Jesus was “a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief” (Isaiah 53:3 KJV). But Jesus said, “Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted” (Matthew 5:4).

How does God help us cope with grief? First, He assures us of His presence. We are never alone if we know Christ; He lives within us by His Spirit. Even when you don’t feel His presence, it doesn’t change the fact that He is with you every moment of the day. God’s promise is for you:

So do not fear, for I am with you;

do not be dismayed, for I am your God.

I will strengthen you and help you;

I will uphold you with my righteous right hand. (Isaiah 41:10)

He also assures us of His promises. God cannot lie—and from one end of the Bible to the other, He has given us “his very great and precious promises” (2 Peter 1:4). Read them, learn them, memorize them, trust them, and let them grow and bear fruit in your soul.

Shortly after Ruth’s death I leafed through one of her old Bibles. She had underlined hundreds of verses, often adding a brief comment of her own in the margin. She especially had underlined passages in the Psalms that spoke of God’s promise to be with us in times of hardship or sorrow or loneliness. In the midst of your grief, turn daily to God’s Word, and let its promises encourage and sustain you. Remember to:

cast your cares on the LORD

and he will sustain you;

he will never let the righteous fall. (Psalm 55:22)

Then God also helps us by assuring us of His goodness. When we lose a loved one, usually all we can think about is our own grief and how empty our lives are going to be. We even may be angry at God for taking our loved one from us. Instead we should remember God’s blessings and have a spirit of gratitude—gratitude for the life of our loved one, gratitude for all he or she meant to us, gratitude for the years God gave us together, and most of all gratitude that death ushers a saved soul into God’s presence forever. A daily “attitude of gratitude” will do much to move us beyond our sorrow.

REMEMBERING YOUR FRIENDS

You may not be dealing with the death of a loved one right now; you may even feel it’s a bit morbid to give much thought to it, at least until it happens. But even if you won’t be touched by grief yourself for some time to come, others around you will be—friends, coworkers, relatives, even casual acquaintances. How can you help them deal with their grief, even if it doesn’t touch you personally?

It is not always easy to help someone who is grieving; some people are proud or intensely private, and they may resent our efforts to help them. In general, however, I have found at least three ways we often can help people who are grieving.

Tell Them You Care

“I never realized how much a simple note or a sympathy card could mean until my father died,” a man said to me once, “but they meant more to me than I’d ever imagined. They let me know that people cared, and that was very encouraging.”

Caring can take many forms—from helping them make funeral arrangements to simply telling them how much their loved one meant to you. It may mean listening to them as they recount the events of the last few days or weeks. Over the years Ruth must have dispensed hundreds of gallons of homemade soup to families in our community who had gathered for a loved one’s funeral. Look for some way you can help, and then do it even if it is just washing the dishes or keeping a register of visitors. But be sensitive; some people are reluctant to accept help from people who are not close friends.

Keep in Touch

Often when someone dies, there is a flurry of activity at first— relatives gather, people call, flowers arrive, and people come by to express sympathy. But time passes, and so does our concern. “At first everyone called or stopped by,” one woman wrote me, “but it’s been six months since Jim died, and now no one calls to see how I’m doing. It’s as if I’ve been forgotten.”

But it shouldn’t be this way—especially among Christians. The Bible says, “Show mercy and compassion to one another” (Zechariah 7:9). One former accountant devotes his retirement years to helping those who have recently lost a spouse deal with insurance or legal papers they may not understand. I heard about another man who spends several days a week driving older people who recently lost a spouse to doctors’ appointments.

Pray for Them

Pray that they will experience God’s comfort, and pray, too, that they will turn to Christ