Grief and God

April 16 2005

Question:

I used to believe in God but I don’t anymore.  Our 6-year old boy died of leukemia last year, and I can’t believe in a God who would do that to us.

Billy Graham’s answer:

My heart goes out to you, for I doubt if anything is more painful and heartrending to a parent than losing a child.  But the most important thing I can say to you is that God’s hear goes out to you.  God knows what you are going through, and He understands the emotions that have overwhelmed you. After all, God knows what it is like to lose a child, for his only son was nailed to a cross.  No, I don’t know why things like this happen.  But I do know this: God didn’t cause your son’s leukemia, nor did He take delight in His death.  We live in a world that is often hurtful.  I also know this.  It is far better to turn to God when tragedy strikes then to turn away from Him.  God loves you, and he wants to comfort and help you. 

Jen’s response:

Having lost a child myself, I sympathize with you entirely.  However, it doesn’t seem as if you don’t believe in God as much as you have decided that this God isn’t worth worshipping anymore, so you are going to ignore “him.”  This is a perfectly fine course of action by the way.

I don’t know that it is important for people to turn to God during times of crisis as Graham says.  My biggest complaint about organized religion is that it is a business.  And their stock and trade is human suffering.  They claim to offer a way out of the pain, but it is a lie.  No one can help you overcome your grief.  It is just something you have no choice but to experience.  And, from having experienced the loss of a child, I have come to believe that belief actually makes the grieving process harder, not easier.

 When I lost my daughter, I was heartbroken.  My husband and I grieved and still do.  However, as we went through our grief and joined support groups, we noticed that we seemed to be the only ones who were just experiencing grief.  We didn’t have any baggage on top of our grief to deal with.  At no point did we ask “why us?”  We did not have to wrestle with our beliefs or question the very nature of “god.”  We just grieved, and knew from experience and from our readings on the subject that our pain would ease over time, which it did. 

 It is amazing to me how many people put pressure on themselves during their grief, and how many refuse to allow the pain to subside.  Further, I really think that not having to wrestle with the question of “why us” during our grief was a great relief.  The only people who do this, seems to be people that believe they have a personal relationship with God.  These people have their world turned upside down when something bad happens, because they have come to believe, out of the entire 6 billion plus humans on the planet they are special and will be spared the pain.  This is of course a false belief that is spread by the business of organized religion.  But, for my husband and me, knowing that there wasn’t anything special about us was actually comforting.  Our acceptance of science told us that there was a chance of loosing our child despite all the advancement of medicine.  And while it s*cks to be a statistic, we know that there is nothing about us that would have spared us from this experience.  That is just the luck of the draw.  Sometimes, things just happen. We just happened to lose our daughter, as many others have before us. 

 I am now firmly convinced that our non-belief made our grief easier to handle.  We saw what people of faith were going through and it seemed to be unnecessarily more painful then it needed to be simply because they weren’t just grieving the loss of their child.  They were also dealing with a world turned upside down, and personal demons arising from their presumed relationship with “god.” All of that is unnecessary and makes grief harder, not easier to deal with.