Bible Verses About Grief: Creating Room to Grieve Loss

There are experiences and circumstances in life when we instinctively lean in, and others where our natural inclination might be to pull away. Our intuition is usually to lean into the things that are pleasant and life-giving while avoiding difficult and painful things. This can mean, for instance, that we enjoy things such as friendship, love, good food, or travel, but we often steer clear of hardship, heartbreak, illness, or death.

One of the realities we all face is that we, our loved ones, and the things that make up our lives are all quite fragile. Perhaps that’s one reason we stay clear of reminders of loss; because they bring that fragility to mind. However, avoiding loss doesn’t do us any good. This includes the impulse we might have to cut mourning short and want to “move past” grief instead of working through it.

The Bible presents us with a different perspective, one in which we’re encouraged to face hardship head-on, with hope and joy. When it comes to grief and mourning, many stories in Scripture can help us when we’re going through a difficult time of loss. By engaging our grief instead of turning from it, we can find true healing and uncover fresh meaning, not only for our own lives but for those we’ve lost as well. Irvine Christian Counseling can walk alongside you in this journey, offering faith-based support and guidance.

Is grieving loss important?

In the United States, on average, a person is given around five days of paid leave so that they can grieve an immediate family member, and around a day for someone like a close friend. This number, of course, will vary from company to company and state to state, with some giving days or weeks off for people to mourn their loved ones. There is no federal bereavement leave policy, and thus no guarantee of time off to mourn.

The value of getting time to mourn is that it provides you with room to begin adjusting to life without your loved one. Grieving is the process where you come to terms with and begin working through the many emotions that loss brings up. These feelings can be complex, often reflecting the relationship you had with the person. They include feelings such as sadness, guilt, shame, relief, anger, confusion, or fear, to name a few.

When you lose a loved one, those various emotions, as well as thoughts and memories, push through demanding your attention. They can be powerful, and they can also make it hard to perform daily tasks like before. Grieving is important to allow you the room to process this loss, and also to begin taking steps toward adjusting to life without your loved one.

There are also a few things that highlight why grieving is important. When a person doesn’t grieve their loss or they push aside the feelings that loss presents, that can negatively affect their well-being. Not grieving can intensify those feelings, and it can also lead to other issues like anxiety, depression, turning to substance abuse to cope, physical health issues like digestive problems, poor work performance, and strained relationships.

Learning to Grieve Loss

All the above indicates that grieving is important, and while it may be unpleasant, it’s necessary to grieve loss. The difficulty for us is that we live in a culture that often wants to avoid grieving and loss.

We don’t often talk about death in realistic terms, and when we do in public discourse, it’s quickly dismissed as morbid, and we move on to other, happier topics. It also doesn’t help that when death happens, we’re back at work and daily life soon afterward.

Most of us are unprepared to deal properly with the loss of loved ones. We don’t know how to, nor do we desire to linger in loss, and we’re often forced to deal with the loss privately. Even though it is deeply painful, grief is one of the ways we honor our loved ones and their memory, and it is, as Queen Elizabeth II remarked after the September 11 attacks, “the price of love”.

Grieving allows us to process the emotions that accompany loss. It’s how we begin to confront the loss and start to adjust to life without our loved one. With time, it’s possible to make that loss a part of your life and learn how to move forward. Grief doesn’t look the same from person to person, and from culture to culture. Some people and cultures create room for open displays of emotion, while others are more reserved.

One of the steps toward learning to grieve loss is to confront the discomfort many of us have with death and our mortality. Instead of sanitizing, minimizing, or distancing ourselves from the reality of death, it’s important to face it head-on and to see it for the unnatural enemy that it is. This may mean not downplaying the finality and sadness of death and taking time to reflect on the meaning of a loved one’s death.

There’s a passage in the Bible that encourages us to reflect on these realities we typically want to avoid –

“It is better to go to a house of mourning than to go to a house of feasting, for death is the destiny of everyone; the living should take this to heart” – Ecclesiastes 7:2, NIV

Learning to grieve loss means learning to stop avoiding it or minimizing it and its significance.

Bible Verses About Grief

In a collection of books, letters, stories, and wisdom as wide-ranging as the Bible, there are many stories and reflections on death. We can see how biblical characters, real people like us, responded to loss in their lives. One such story is the story of Joseph and his father Jacob, found in the first book, Genesis.

Joseph, who was his father’s favorite, was sold by his brothers into slavery, and he wound up in Egypt. The brothers faked his death, telling their father Jacob that Joseph had been killed by wild animals.

Jacob mourned his son, not knowing that Joseph was in Egypt and that he became, through various ups and downs, one of the most powerful men in Egypt. The family came in contact with Joseph when they needed to buy grain.

Once the family had more or less been reconciled, it was some years until Jacob died. We read this:

Joseph threw himself on his father and wept over him and kissed him. Then Joseph directed the physicians in his service to embalm his father Israel. So the physicians embalmed him, taking a full forty days, for that was the time required for embalming. And the Egyptians mourned for him seventy days – Genesis 50:1-3, NIV

This tells us of their practices regarding death, and we learn that it took a long time for them to mourn. Joseph weeps openly over his father. It doesn’t end there. Jacob, who had moved to Egypt, wanted to be buried back home in Canaan. Joseph got permission from the ruler, Pharoah, to take his father home to bury him.

When they reached the threshing floor of Atad, near the Jordan, they lamented loudly and bitterly; and there Joseph observed a seven-day period of mourning for his father” – Genesis 50:10, NIV

In addition to all the mourning that had happened in Egypt, they continued mourning when they got to Canaan. Then Joseph and his brothers buried Jacob and went back to Egypt.

A few things emerge here. These include the following:

Have time to mourn Instead of rushing through the process, they created time and space, and made use of rituals to mourn. You may not have seventy days off work, but having some time set aside to mourn matters.

Feel what you feel For Joseph, he wept and kissed his father, openly expressing his emotions. Grief brings up all sorts of things, not only sadness. Allow yourself to feel what you feel and express it in ways that feel appropriate to you. Don’t suppress those emotions. Even though Jesus knew He would raise His friend Lazarus from death, He still felt the enormity of the loss and He wept (John 11:35).

Share connection in grief The Bible also says, “Rejoice with those who rejoice; mourn with those who mourn” (Romans 12:15, NIV). We also read about Job, “Then they sat on the ground with him for seven days and seven nights. No one said a word to him, because they saw how great his suffering was” (Job 2:13, NIV). We aren’t meant to mourn alone, but in community with others.

Grief can be a challenging experience. If you find yourself struggling to grieve or feeling overwhelmed by the emotions that loss let loose in your life, you don’t have to walk through it alone. You can reach out to other loved ones and share what you’re going through.

If you’re looking for additional support beyond these Bible verses about grief, you can also reach out to a professional grief counselor in Irvine, California. At Irvine Christian Counseling, we can help you process your grief as well as provide you with tools to cope effectively with your loss. If you would like to learn more about how a grief counselor in Irvine can help, contact our office today in California.