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Either Way, We’ll Be All Right: An Honest Exploration of God in Our Grief
Does God have a hope to offer us in times of pain? Can God meet and sustain us even if our circumstances don’t improve?
One of the few guarantees in life is that we will suffer. Everything around us is broken. Each of us has an expiration date. A few years ago, Eric and his wife, Elizabeth, together with their young children, were confronted with this unavoidable reality when she was faced with a terminal cancer diagnosis.
Shattered by grief, they began to wrestle with what it means to follow Jesus when everything around them seemed to be giving way. What this pastor and his wife discovered were a set of truths about God from Scripture that provided the resources they needed to survive―truths too often neglected by the modern world. God meets us in our grief, but not always in ways we expect or even want.
Coming from that jumbled place of agony and assurance, Either Way, We’ll Be All Right is a journey through the darkness in hopes of discovering light on the other side.
One of the few guarantees in life is that we will suffer. Everything around us is broken. Each of us has an expiration date. A few years ago, Eric and his wife, Elizabeth, together with their young children, were confronted with this unavoidable reality when she was faced with a terminal cancer diagnosis.
Shattered by grief, they began to wrestle with what it means to follow Jesus when everything around them seemed to be giving way. What this pastor and his wife discovered were a set of truths about God from Scripture that provided the resources they needed to survive―truths too often neglected by the modern world. God meets us in our grief, but not always in ways we expect or even want.
Coming from that jumbled place of agony and assurance, Either Way, We’ll Be All Right is a journey through the darkness in hopes of discovering light on the other side.
224 pages, Paperback
Published June 8, 2021
2 people are currently reading
65 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
November 29, 2022
I am not surprised that this book, though a book on grief and suffering, led me to worship and hopeful tears. To know Eric and Elizabeth is know their loving Savior, and having witnessed their hope and faith in Him while walking through Elizabeth’s cancer diagnosis is something that has forever changed me.
Eric’s vulnerable and wise reflections here would be a blessing to anyone walking with grief, and would be a tremendous resource to anyone who wants to understand and walk alongside others in grief. It is also chock-full of theology, scripture, and a very clear message of the gospel. Highly recommend.
Eric’s vulnerable and wise reflections here would be a blessing to anyone walking with grief, and would be a tremendous resource to anyone who wants to understand and walk alongside others in grief. It is also chock-full of theology, scripture, and a very clear message of the gospel. Highly recommend.
June 13, 2021
I started this book tonight and just ended up reading the whole thing all at once. This book offers a helpful corrective to a Christianity that glosses over grief and tries to skip suffering. Eric Tonjes shows us, rather than tells us what that looks like by retelling the story of the gospel and exploring how grief and suffering fit into that story, all the while sharing his experience of God with him in his grief. It's a beautifully written, honest, and deeply hopeful book. One I'll certainly read again.
June 16, 2021
I've long known Eric Tonjes to be a wordsmith, and this book reveals that beautifully. Read it to be reminded of who God is and how we're created to reflect him, both in our glorious moments and in our sufferings. I'd advise reading with a pencil in hand as there are loads of truths you'll want to underline. I also needed a tissue from time to time.
June 14, 2021
I'll start by saying I've read a number of grief books over the years in preparation for ministry, and I hate most of them. The Gospel seems secondary in a lot of those books where, in our grief, it should especially be at the forefront of our thoughts and shapes our experiences. With that said, "Either Way, We’ll Be All Right" by Eric Tonjes succeeds where those books fail. Tonjes’ writes on how to think about grief, specifically on what to make of God during grief. It isn’t so much an apologetical look at the problem of evil, but more so a systematic theology of God and grief. He writes this in the midst of his wife slowly dying of colon cancer, offering a unique perspective from someone in the trenches, facing a horrific reality.
He does this by breaking up the topic into 7 parts: the reality of suffering, the sovereignty of God, the presence of God, union with Christ, the victory of the cross and resurrection, practical questions, and God’s gift of perseverance and sustenance to us. The focus throughout is not himself and his situation, nor is he seeking your pity. Instead, there is a sense this book was written precisely because people pity him and his family, and in their pity, reveal their flawed understanding of God and suffering. To that end, Tonjes seeks to give a fuller picture of God, which in turn allows us to fully grieve and appreciate our loss, while still living with purpose. There are various warnings against other people/ideas that try to remove Christ from the suffering, or that try to remove the hardness of grief, and it is refreshing to see in print those things named and rebuked.
This is what makes it unique, because Tonjes, in my opinion, properly understands that it is only a robust sense of God that can truly offer us comfort in our times of darkness. People tend to say one of two things: the loss isn’t really a loss because Heaven. But the author corrects this, writing “Heaven, while a sweet hope when properly understood, is not the purpose of the Christian life. It is a good thing to live in light of but an insufficient thing to be living for…What do we exist for? What is the point of it all?”(59) Loss is loss, creation was good, and the death and destruction sin brought to the world is real, heavy, and tragic. “The fact that he is coming to renew creation honors our deep sense that it needs renewal. He acknowledges the goodness of that which, when we lose it, leads us to grief” he says. (159)
The other thing people tend to do is to see the loss as irredeemable. In one sense, this is true. There is nothing that will bring back our deceased loved ones to us, here and now. And yet, the Christian hope is a hope in the resurrection, that all things will be made new, now incorruptible by the effects of sin.
And yet Tonjes provides further balance to these understandings, arguing that our hope in the resurrection is not simply of what it does for us. “The Bible talks about the death and resurrection of Jesus in ways we aren’t accustomed to. We focus on their products—what they do for us. The Bible, while it celebrates what we receive from resurrection, also speaks of participation. We are a part of Christ’s suffering; we are part of his new life. His suffering and resurrection are not just something done for us; they are also something we are invited into.” (95)
This book is truly the best book I’ve read on the subject. It is challenging, yet the struggle is worth it because Jesus shines all the brighter because of it. While it serves as a strong theological work, it is also brutally visceral and real. This was written in the midst of the turmoil suffering brings, and he does not hide those real emotions as he grapples with the theological aspects of grief. It’s raw, but beautifully so. This is a work where theology meets art, but the theology isn’t watered down to elevate the art. Instead, the deep theology present magnifies the art, and vice versa. But its greatest strength is its encouraging and uplifting tone throughout. Jesus is great, your grief is real and valid, and there is grace even as you wrestle through it.
There aren’t many negatives, but two stand out. The biggest is that his story is more alluded to throughout the book. The examples he gives are moving, and it leaves the reader wanting more. The second is minor, but I felt that there were too many parts to be meaningful, and several easily could have been joined together. This doesn’t detract in any way from the reading of the book, but when trying to talk about it, it makes it a little harder to outline it.
All in all, I highly recommend this book. I think any Christian experiencing grief will be helped by it, but especially those who don’t know what to do with grief, for those maybe afraid to even say the word “dead”. I could also see this being immensely helpful in seminary counseling programs, where a solid theology will better enable students to minister to those struggling through losses.
He does this by breaking up the topic into 7 parts: the reality of suffering, the sovereignty of God, the presence of God, union with Christ, the victory of the cross and resurrection, practical questions, and God’s gift of perseverance and sustenance to us. The focus throughout is not himself and his situation, nor is he seeking your pity. Instead, there is a sense this book was written precisely because people pity him and his family, and in their pity, reveal their flawed understanding of God and suffering. To that end, Tonjes seeks to give a fuller picture of God, which in turn allows us to fully grieve and appreciate our loss, while still living with purpose. There are various warnings against other people/ideas that try to remove Christ from the suffering, or that try to remove the hardness of grief, and it is refreshing to see in print those things named and rebuked.
This is what makes it unique, because Tonjes, in my opinion, properly understands that it is only a robust sense of God that can truly offer us comfort in our times of darkness. People tend to say one of two things: the loss isn’t really a loss because Heaven. But the author corrects this, writing “Heaven, while a sweet hope when properly understood, is not the purpose of the Christian life. It is a good thing to live in light of but an insufficient thing to be living for…What do we exist for? What is the point of it all?”(59) Loss is loss, creation was good, and the death and destruction sin brought to the world is real, heavy, and tragic. “The fact that he is coming to renew creation honors our deep sense that it needs renewal. He acknowledges the goodness of that which, when we lose it, leads us to grief” he says. (159)
The other thing people tend to do is to see the loss as irredeemable. In one sense, this is true. There is nothing that will bring back our deceased loved ones to us, here and now. And yet, the Christian hope is a hope in the resurrection, that all things will be made new, now incorruptible by the effects of sin.
And yet Tonjes provides further balance to these understandings, arguing that our hope in the resurrection is not simply of what it does for us. “The Bible talks about the death and resurrection of Jesus in ways we aren’t accustomed to. We focus on their products—what they do for us. The Bible, while it celebrates what we receive from resurrection, also speaks of participation. We are a part of Christ’s suffering; we are part of his new life. His suffering and resurrection are not just something done for us; they are also something we are invited into.” (95)
This book is truly the best book I’ve read on the subject. It is challenging, yet the struggle is worth it because Jesus shines all the brighter because of it. While it serves as a strong theological work, it is also brutally visceral and real. This was written in the midst of the turmoil suffering brings, and he does not hide those real emotions as he grapples with the theological aspects of grief. It’s raw, but beautifully so. This is a work where theology meets art, but the theology isn’t watered down to elevate the art. Instead, the deep theology present magnifies the art, and vice versa. But its greatest strength is its encouraging and uplifting tone throughout. Jesus is great, your grief is real and valid, and there is grace even as you wrestle through it.
There aren’t many negatives, but two stand out. The biggest is that his story is more alluded to throughout the book. The examples he gives are moving, and it leaves the reader wanting more. The second is minor, but I felt that there were too many parts to be meaningful, and several easily could have been joined together. This doesn’t detract in any way from the reading of the book, but when trying to talk about it, it makes it a little harder to outline it.
All in all, I highly recommend this book. I think any Christian experiencing grief will be helped by it, but especially those who don’t know what to do with grief, for those maybe afraid to even say the word “dead”. I could also see this being immensely helpful in seminary counseling programs, where a solid theology will better enable students to minister to those struggling through losses.
February 24, 2025
"Either Way, We'll Be All Right" was a book that was given to me by a dear friend following a significant loss in my life and the life of my family. It was not the first book that I read during my journey of grief and sorrow, but I found it to be an excellent supplement to the book "Dark Clouds, Deep Mercy" by Mark Vroegop. These books were both a blessing to me during this sorrowful time.
During my reading, I was reminded that my journey of grief will not end during my days on this earth and even with that truth, it will be okay. The struggles of loss will continue, but the comforting truth is that my God will be there and will never leave me nor forsake me. I have also grasped on to the truth that although eternity is wonderful for the followers of Christ, there are also still those things that God has for me to do even though times of grief, sorrow, and struggle remain. As a result, I am determined, with God's help, to press forward in serving the Lord while being willing to acknowledge the times of continuing grief and sorrow. May God enable me to rejoice in the truths of Scripture and may He continue to remind me that He does all things well.
I suppose that there are numerous things that I was reminded of as a result of reading this book, as well as some things that I had not considered. Overall, I found this book to be a benefit to me at this point in my grieving process. For sure, I found a connection with the author due to the reality of his own struggles with his wife's terminal diagnosis. The fact that he wrote this book in the midst of his own grief journey was significant and meaningful. This truth added much value to the message and was personally very helpful for me. For those who choose to read this book, may the Lord use it for your good and His glory.
During my reading, I was reminded that my journey of grief will not end during my days on this earth and even with that truth, it will be okay. The struggles of loss will continue, but the comforting truth is that my God will be there and will never leave me nor forsake me. I have also grasped on to the truth that although eternity is wonderful for the followers of Christ, there are also still those things that God has for me to do even though times of grief, sorrow, and struggle remain. As a result, I am determined, with God's help, to press forward in serving the Lord while being willing to acknowledge the times of continuing grief and sorrow. May God enable me to rejoice in the truths of Scripture and may He continue to remind me that He does all things well.
I suppose that there are numerous things that I was reminded of as a result of reading this book, as well as some things that I had not considered. Overall, I found this book to be a benefit to me at this point in my grieving process. For sure, I found a connection with the author due to the reality of his own struggles with his wife's terminal diagnosis. The fact that he wrote this book in the midst of his own grief journey was significant and meaningful. This truth added much value to the message and was personally very helpful for me. For those who choose to read this book, may the Lord use it for your good and His glory.
December 20, 2024
“The stained glass was splattered with mud and missing pieces. The floor was warped, and patches of earth peeked through. It was a touching and tragic scene.” This book is filled with rich literary symbolism, shadows and light, joy and pain. I confess that at first I struggled to read on because I didn’t want to face the hurt or feel the deep wound. Yet even my guardedness was met with the desire to keep listening to the song.
December 21, 2021
This book is about a man facing the death of his wife to cancer and wrestling with who God is, holding in tension four main characteristics of God as all true: God above us, God beside us, God within us, God victorious. The author is both personal and theological, exploring scripture and his life as as journey through this thought process.
11: CS Lewis comments - in The Four Loves-on the dilemma I faced: "To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one...Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket-safe, dark, motionless, airless-it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable."
13: In the past, grief was a public process. The bereaved would wear black clothes and veil their faces. They would weep in the streets. Torn clothes, sackcloths, and asked....We have banished such public grieving. ...As a result, sorrow ends up hidden. It festers in our hearts, but we suppose we must be abnormal in how we experience it because we do not see it in others.
16: What we almost never seay is what should be our starting place: "Death is terrible. I am sorry. This is not how it should be."
19: [Psalms, particularly 22, 88] this movement of grief to praise is meant to be repeated over and over. The Psalms are not transcriptions of a counseling session or a self-help talk, offering a method to solve our problems; they are the daily cries of God's people. They are a hymnbook. Over and over, week after week, those singing them would confront the darkness and remind themselves of their hope.
22: In the middle of the river, Pilgrim is overwhelmed by doubt and despair. He is convinced that he will drown. Hopeful, though, finds sure footing and helps his friend. What makes the difference is that Hopeful is sustained by a set of truths deep in his heart-truths of Scripture that he cries to his sinking friend-and by a vision of their destination. "Brother," he says, "I see the gate and men standing by it to receive us." If we fix our eyes on the hope of life on the fear shore and walk forward with God's promises in our hearts, the water ceases to be a barrier and becomes instead the road to life.
33: Almost all biblical teachings can be understood in terms of tension. A tension is not a contradiction-Scripture is not at odds with itself. Neither is it nonsense. A tension rests between two teachings that make sense in themselves but that pull against each other in our hearts and minds.
We live in a world that is very good and very broken. These truths are in tension not because they contradict each other but because we struggle to hold them in balance. ...When we are burdened by brokenness, we must cling to the beauty. When we relish the goodness, we must remain mindful of the mess.
35: I do believe that the key to walking through grief in a way that doesn't destroy us lies in how we think about and live before the Lord. Every defective way we deal with sadness rests on a defective understanding of God and his promises. Seeing God in his glory and compassion and complexity is central to finding healing for these defects and moving toward wholeness.
Scripture helps us see this complexity, offering four different pictures of God in our grief. Our iss e is not so much that we don't believe any of them but that we usually hold only one or two. Without all four together, we end up with a warped view of God and of ourselves.
God above us - He sits enthroned:
43: If we are to follow the example of Isaiah, we need to make things harder before we make them easier. We need to complicate the way many of us view God, to make him someone we in a sense fear before he can comfort us. This might seem like a strange place to begin, and I want to acknowledge it might be hard for some of us. Yet it is also necessary. We must behold the majesty of God. If we do not appreciate his greatness, his goodness will prove a paltry thing.
44: the Bible explicitly ties God's sovereignty to the things that make us uncomfortable. God is in control of terrible things that happen in the world, including disasters and human sickness (Job 2:10; Isaiah 45:7; Lamentations 3:37-38; Amos 3:6). God is in control of the plans and choices of human beings, including plans to do evil (Proverbs 19:21; 20:24; 21:1; Romans 9:17-18; James 4:13-15). God is in control of our deaths, including when and how they come (Deut 32:39); 1 Sam 12:6; Job 14:5; Ps 139:16). If this is a new idea, I would encourage you to pause and read through that list of texts to appreciate the picture Scripture gives.
47: The fatal flaw in Job's arguments is the notion that God is the sort of being we can argue with in the first place. To have a debate, we need to have common ground.
48: Some of us have this idea that the reason God doesn't explain his actions is that he wants us to take them on faith. That someday it will all make sense-he'll sit us down in heaven and talk it through, and we'll nod and say, "Yes I approve." That is not the Bible's understanding of God's will. God's mysteriousness is not an affectation or a test but a necessity. If God chose to explain himself, our tiny skulls would explode. A single thought in the mid of God is infinite, and all the brains of all humanity working together could not being to contain it. He knows all things at once, future and past and present.
49: Here we must pause to talk about a question almost everyone asks at some point in grief. What about the "problem of evil"? If God is good and all powerful, how can evil and suffering exist? At times this is an emotional question, wrought by agony. God where are you? Are you even there? In this sense the problem of evil represents a normal, human struggle. Scripture is full of such cries of doubt. This book is about wrestling with these feelings. If you are there, what we're about to discusses isn't really aimed at you. We'll delve into those things later.
50+: However, for other people, the problem of evil becomes a philosophical issue. It is not a groaning of the heart but a question for our minds. This doesn't mean we should ignore it. We can get hung up on such doubts if we don't take the time to work through them.
At its simplest, that question boils down to a single set of premises and a conclusion: a)God is good; b God is all-powerful; c) a good God would not allow evil and suffering in the world; d)an all powerful God could prevent it; e)evil and suffering exist; therefore, such a God cannot. While that sounds persuasive, it is rarely stated so simply because a bit of reflection makes us realize there are significant issues with c and d. There are any number of reasons why a good God might allow some amount of suffering. Free will, opportunities to learn and overcome adversity, the shaping and maturing affect that pain can have in our lives, and just responses to human sin-these things do not remove the evilness of evil, but they create space for us to understand why God might allow it. The more persuasive form of the argument deals not with evil as a general idea but either right the amount of it or with specific examples of it. Surely, it says while some suffering might be understandable, this much of it cannot make sense. My heart resonates with that case; we should weep at the extent to which the world is broken. It is right and human to wrestle with the depths of what is wrong with the world. However, this argument runs into problems because of what we just said about God's incomprehensibility. To pass judgments on his decisions, God must be a being we can understand. He isn't. All we have really proven is that a God we can comprehend doesn't exist, and that is something to which Scripture would say, "Amen." So why does the argument still feels so persuasive? On of the hardest things about Christianity is that it forces us into a posture of humility. For centuries, humans have assumed that our minds are the greatest forces in the universe. There is no puzzle they cannot solve, no paradox they cannot unravel. We have demanded that God be rational and deferential and quick to explain himself. When he isn't, we assuming he must be the one in the wrong. But before the Living God, our assumptions are revealed as self-delusions. We are Adam and Eve in the garden all over again, thinking that by eating the fruit of knowledge, we can become as gods. In truth, when compared to the Almighty, we are unbelievably small. We have less grasp of the Lord than I have of the depth and breadth of the Atlantic. We cannot contain him, cannot move him, and will never fully know him.
53+: While our dreams for the future had collapsed, his plans for the world and for our lives had not changed a bit. The Lord was still the Lord, and because of that fact, my fear lost some of its power.
...Scripture often contrasts the fear of things in the world with the fear of God. Somehow, part of what delivers us from our terror over life circumstances or human evil or our broken world is the deeper terror we feel when confronted by God's vastness. That is what I experienced in that chapel. I could not, knowing my wife was being cut open and her guts pulled out, make sense of the truth that God loved me. Not in that moment. God's love was important , but it came later. The place I had to start was the more basic reality that God was God. The powers of cancer and death were nothing before him. That is where we must begin in our sorrow. God is greater than our grief and pain. He is greater than us.
58+: Our tendency is to think that Christianity's answer to the question of purpose in the face of death is heaven. Too often, both secular people (dismissively) and religious people (piously) pretend like the solution to loss rests purely in a future escape from this world. Mortality is just a probationary period before our true lives begin. While there is an important place for the afterlife, this approach is destructive. The idea of heaven can make me feel better about the end of suffering, but it cannot help me live beneath its weight.
...what do we exist for? What is the point of it all? (then discussion on Isaiah 43-48)
63: God is glorious by his very nature. Why does he then call us to glorify him? Is God's grip on glory so tenuous that our failure to adequately notice somehow robs him of significance? We imagine him behaving like the insecure teenager who constantly demands that people validate their smallest achievements. Again the problem is thinking of God as an oversized human being. GOd does not need our praise (Ps 50:8-15; Acts 17:25). It is not that we must give him glory in order to add something to him; rather, he calls us to seek his glory because it is what is best for us. We are a part of that chorus of creation, designed to gorgeously resonate with his praise. Perhaps a different picture is necessary. Stop imagining God in terms of a human being. Instead, when we speak about God's glory, we are speaking of something more like the radiant light of the sun. Creativity and power and righteousness and wisdom unavoidably shine forth from him, simply because he is God. There is no need for arm-waving or attention-seeking. At the same time, our call to glorify him is nothing more than a calling to live in that life-giving light. Our job is one of reflection; the problems is not the God lacks light in himself but that when we refuse to be his mirrors, shadows enter the world and darkness increases.
64: How does God's glory meet our grief? We think that happiness is the goal of life, but happiness is a mediocre purpose. Those seeking it never accomplish much of worth. Given that life in clouds suffering and, ultimately, death, what we need is a purpose big enough to make that struggle worthwhile. We need something worth laboring for, and there is no worthier goal than God's glory embodied in our lives.
67: In practice, living in this seasons is not some grandiose sweep of glory and more a series of small, hard choices. I must choose to do the next thing, to go to work and invest in the people God has called me to care for, to be present with my children, and to not withdraw from my marriage into myself. ...Many days feel like moving through a at of molasses. What his glory provides, though, is a different perspective on what I am choosing in each of those moments.
God beside us
74: Sorrow shared is a powerful bond.
82: The God who is sovereign, Scripture says, is also the God who suffered. There is an unavoidable connection between the sovereignty and the suffering. Peter proclaims that Jesus was "delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God" (Acts 2:23). His betrayal and arrest were, as the apostles pray to God, what "your hand and your plan had predestined to take place" (Acts 4:28). In case we're tempted to read those passages and still try to make it only the Father's will, we are chastised by the words of Jesus himself: "No one takes [my life] from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have authority to lay it down, and I have the authority to take it up again" (John 10:18).
89: Perhaps the most dangerous of these half-truths is the promise that God will make things turn out for the best. That is how the Biblical idea is summarized by pop theologians; Scripture's words are a bit more complicated, and we'll return to them later. For now, the danger is this: that statement becomes destructive when the good is put forward as if it cancels out the evil. It conveys an economics of consolation. ...God is working good, but that doesn't make evil less evil. Death and pain and grief and sin are terrible. We should never speak in ways that deny their darkness.
90: What is the difference between true hope and false comfort? In the case of false comfort, the goal is to make sorrow smaller. The Christian hope instead it takes it all in and says, "Yes, but as horrific as everything is, there is also resurrection."
God Within Us
104: I have taken two lessons from those nights. One is the power of human presence, the need to simply sit with someone and bear witness to the darkness. ...The deeper lesson is that I need this same kind of presence from God. ...Christianity audaciously claims that the same God who rules over the universe and worked salvation on the cross has drawn near to us in this way, God is present with us in our grief.
117: Psychologists talk about the "stages of grief"...While this rubric has some value, those in the middle of grief often find it unhelpful. Not that the categories are wrong-they describe real emotions-but that they are too neat. The labels don't communicate the jumbled agony of the experience. Denial and anger and bargaining and sadness are ever-changing faces of one awful reality rather than events we can pry apart.
120: Instead, the Bible offers two pictures of what experiencing God's presence is like-a messy duality rather than a list to be mastered.
Wrestling (Jacob): the Bible is full of saints wrestling with God. Job complaining; the authors of the Psalms lamenting; the prophets arguing with the divine in the face of judgment; Paul weeping for the brokenness of the church; Jesus in the garden praying, sweating blood-all walk this road in Jacob's wake. Much to the surprise of some Christians, having doubts and fears and struggles in our hearts is not actually a problem. Faith is not an absence of wrestling; if it were, God would not have named his chosen people Israel. Faith is choosing to wrestle with God. (122-123)
124+ Resting: We are called to wrestle rather than withdraw. However, if that were our only image, our only experience of God's presence, we would be exhausted. Struggling with God takes strength, and strength is in short supply when sorrow saps the vigor from our bones. That is why God does not just leave us with wrestling with him as our only option. the Bible also calls us to rest in him.
Matthew 11 - Come - learn from me: What is this restful motion? First, it is a lowering of ourselves. The rest God offers stems from our humility. Consider Ps 131:1-2; 1 Peter 5:6-7: The quieting of ourselves in humility is the very thing that delivers us from our fears. These verses are all describing the same experience. When we are brought to the end of ourselves, we are forced to acknowledge our limitedness. ...God is near in two ways. One is in his strength. Circumstances that are beyond us are firmly under his control. ...At the same time, as we are brought to the end of ourselves, we are reassured that God is good.
God Victorious
134: The story we tell about our life determines how we experience it. We weave the varied moments of each day into a narrative, tracing certain threads while ignoring others. ...The power of story is an unavoidable psychological fact. Struggles with depression, fearfulness, or insecurity are in part a product of dysfunctional narratives. When we mess up, is that an obstacle to be overcome or another example of how we are doomed to always fail? When we are afraid, do we tell ourselves we'll get through tis or do we catastrophic, spinning out every uncertainty into the worst imaginable outcome? The biography of our life is written as much in our imaginations as in our circumstances.
149: We cannot separate the Christian story from its ending. This world is not enough for us. Thanks to the overlapping ages in which we live, the present will always be a broken and painful place. But the age to come shouldn't disconnect us from this one. Far from making us so heavenly minded we cease to be any earthly good, Scriptures vision calls us to engage with this world as we await the one to come.
170: While Scripture insists that God can heal, it never promises that he will. ...An inappropriate hope in God's healing isn't just dangerous because it is untrue; it is also dangerous because it can prevent us from finding the real sources of hope that Scripture provides. ...Our hope rests in God himself.
174-175: Though the fig tree should not blossom, nor fruit be on the vines, the produce of the olive fail and the fields yield no food, the flock be cut off from the fold and there be no herd in the stalls, yet I will rejoice in the Lord; I will take joy in the God of my salvation. God, the Lord, is my strength; he makes my feet like the deer's; he makes me treats on my high places (Habakkuk 3:17-19)
11: CS Lewis comments - in The Four Loves-on the dilemma I faced: "To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one...Lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket-safe, dark, motionless, airless-it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable."
13: In the past, grief was a public process. The bereaved would wear black clothes and veil their faces. They would weep in the streets. Torn clothes, sackcloths, and asked....We have banished such public grieving. ...As a result, sorrow ends up hidden. It festers in our hearts, but we suppose we must be abnormal in how we experience it because we do not see it in others.
16: What we almost never seay is what should be our starting place: "Death is terrible. I am sorry. This is not how it should be."
19: [Psalms, particularly 22, 88] this movement of grief to praise is meant to be repeated over and over. The Psalms are not transcriptions of a counseling session or a self-help talk, offering a method to solve our problems; they are the daily cries of God's people. They are a hymnbook. Over and over, week after week, those singing them would confront the darkness and remind themselves of their hope.
22: In the middle of the river, Pilgrim is overwhelmed by doubt and despair. He is convinced that he will drown. Hopeful, though, finds sure footing and helps his friend. What makes the difference is that Hopeful is sustained by a set of truths deep in his heart-truths of Scripture that he cries to his sinking friend-and by a vision of their destination. "Brother," he says, "I see the gate and men standing by it to receive us." If we fix our eyes on the hope of life on the fear shore and walk forward with God's promises in our hearts, the water ceases to be a barrier and becomes instead the road to life.
33: Almost all biblical teachings can be understood in terms of tension. A tension is not a contradiction-Scripture is not at odds with itself. Neither is it nonsense. A tension rests between two teachings that make sense in themselves but that pull against each other in our hearts and minds.
We live in a world that is very good and very broken. These truths are in tension not because they contradict each other but because we struggle to hold them in balance. ...When we are burdened by brokenness, we must cling to the beauty. When we relish the goodness, we must remain mindful of the mess.
35: I do believe that the key to walking through grief in a way that doesn't destroy us lies in how we think about and live before the Lord. Every defective way we deal with sadness rests on a defective understanding of God and his promises. Seeing God in his glory and compassion and complexity is central to finding healing for these defects and moving toward wholeness.
Scripture helps us see this complexity, offering four different pictures of God in our grief. Our iss e is not so much that we don't believe any of them but that we usually hold only one or two. Without all four together, we end up with a warped view of God and of ourselves.
God above us - He sits enthroned:
43: If we are to follow the example of Isaiah, we need to make things harder before we make them easier. We need to complicate the way many of us view God, to make him someone we in a sense fear before he can comfort us. This might seem like a strange place to begin, and I want to acknowledge it might be hard for some of us. Yet it is also necessary. We must behold the majesty of God. If we do not appreciate his greatness, his goodness will prove a paltry thing.
44: the Bible explicitly ties God's sovereignty to the things that make us uncomfortable. God is in control of terrible things that happen in the world, including disasters and human sickness (Job 2:10; Isaiah 45:7; Lamentations 3:37-38; Amos 3:6). God is in control of the plans and choices of human beings, including plans to do evil (Proverbs 19:21; 20:24; 21:1; Romans 9:17-18; James 4:13-15). God is in control of our deaths, including when and how they come (Deut 32:39); 1 Sam 12:6; Job 14:5; Ps 139:16). If this is a new idea, I would encourage you to pause and read through that list of texts to appreciate the picture Scripture gives.
47: The fatal flaw in Job's arguments is the notion that God is the sort of being we can argue with in the first place. To have a debate, we need to have common ground.
48: Some of us have this idea that the reason God doesn't explain his actions is that he wants us to take them on faith. That someday it will all make sense-he'll sit us down in heaven and talk it through, and we'll nod and say, "Yes I approve." That is not the Bible's understanding of God's will. God's mysteriousness is not an affectation or a test but a necessity. If God chose to explain himself, our tiny skulls would explode. A single thought in the mid of God is infinite, and all the brains of all humanity working together could not being to contain it. He knows all things at once, future and past and present.
49: Here we must pause to talk about a question almost everyone asks at some point in grief. What about the "problem of evil"? If God is good and all powerful, how can evil and suffering exist? At times this is an emotional question, wrought by agony. God where are you? Are you even there? In this sense the problem of evil represents a normal, human struggle. Scripture is full of such cries of doubt. This book is about wrestling with these feelings. If you are there, what we're about to discusses isn't really aimed at you. We'll delve into those things later.
50+: However, for other people, the problem of evil becomes a philosophical issue. It is not a groaning of the heart but a question for our minds. This doesn't mean we should ignore it. We can get hung up on such doubts if we don't take the time to work through them.
At its simplest, that question boils down to a single set of premises and a conclusion: a)God is good; b God is all-powerful; c) a good God would not allow evil and suffering in the world; d)an all powerful God could prevent it; e)evil and suffering exist; therefore, such a God cannot. While that sounds persuasive, it is rarely stated so simply because a bit of reflection makes us realize there are significant issues with c and d. There are any number of reasons why a good God might allow some amount of suffering. Free will, opportunities to learn and overcome adversity, the shaping and maturing affect that pain can have in our lives, and just responses to human sin-these things do not remove the evilness of evil, but they create space for us to understand why God might allow it. The more persuasive form of the argument deals not with evil as a general idea but either right the amount of it or with specific examples of it. Surely, it says while some suffering might be understandable, this much of it cannot make sense. My heart resonates with that case; we should weep at the extent to which the world is broken. It is right and human to wrestle with the depths of what is wrong with the world. However, this argument runs into problems because of what we just said about God's incomprehensibility. To pass judgments on his decisions, God must be a being we can understand. He isn't. All we have really proven is that a God we can comprehend doesn't exist, and that is something to which Scripture would say, "Amen." So why does the argument still feels so persuasive? On of the hardest things about Christianity is that it forces us into a posture of humility. For centuries, humans have assumed that our minds are the greatest forces in the universe. There is no puzzle they cannot solve, no paradox they cannot unravel. We have demanded that God be rational and deferential and quick to explain himself. When he isn't, we assuming he must be the one in the wrong. But before the Living God, our assumptions are revealed as self-delusions. We are Adam and Eve in the garden all over again, thinking that by eating the fruit of knowledge, we can become as gods. In truth, when compared to the Almighty, we are unbelievably small. We have less grasp of the Lord than I have of the depth and breadth of the Atlantic. We cannot contain him, cannot move him, and will never fully know him.
53+: While our dreams for the future had collapsed, his plans for the world and for our lives had not changed a bit. The Lord was still the Lord, and because of that fact, my fear lost some of its power.
...Scripture often contrasts the fear of things in the world with the fear of God. Somehow, part of what delivers us from our terror over life circumstances or human evil or our broken world is the deeper terror we feel when confronted by God's vastness. That is what I experienced in that chapel. I could not, knowing my wife was being cut open and her guts pulled out, make sense of the truth that God loved me. Not in that moment. God's love was important , but it came later. The place I had to start was the more basic reality that God was God. The powers of cancer and death were nothing before him. That is where we must begin in our sorrow. God is greater than our grief and pain. He is greater than us.
58+: Our tendency is to think that Christianity's answer to the question of purpose in the face of death is heaven. Too often, both secular people (dismissively) and religious people (piously) pretend like the solution to loss rests purely in a future escape from this world. Mortality is just a probationary period before our true lives begin. While there is an important place for the afterlife, this approach is destructive. The idea of heaven can make me feel better about the end of suffering, but it cannot help me live beneath its weight.
...what do we exist for? What is the point of it all? (then discussion on Isaiah 43-48)
63: God is glorious by his very nature. Why does he then call us to glorify him? Is God's grip on glory so tenuous that our failure to adequately notice somehow robs him of significance? We imagine him behaving like the insecure teenager who constantly demands that people validate their smallest achievements. Again the problem is thinking of God as an oversized human being. GOd does not need our praise (Ps 50:8-15; Acts 17:25). It is not that we must give him glory in order to add something to him; rather, he calls us to seek his glory because it is what is best for us. We are a part of that chorus of creation, designed to gorgeously resonate with his praise. Perhaps a different picture is necessary. Stop imagining God in terms of a human being. Instead, when we speak about God's glory, we are speaking of something more like the radiant light of the sun. Creativity and power and righteousness and wisdom unavoidably shine forth from him, simply because he is God. There is no need for arm-waving or attention-seeking. At the same time, our call to glorify him is nothing more than a calling to live in that life-giving light. Our job is one of reflection; the problems is not the God lacks light in himself but that when we refuse to be his mirrors, shadows enter the world and darkness increases.
64: How does God's glory meet our grief? We think that happiness is the goal of life, but happiness is a mediocre purpose. Those seeking it never accomplish much of worth. Given that life in clouds suffering and, ultimately, death, what we need is a purpose big enough to make that struggle worthwhile. We need something worth laboring for, and there is no worthier goal than God's glory embodied in our lives.
67: In practice, living in this seasons is not some grandiose sweep of glory and more a series of small, hard choices. I must choose to do the next thing, to go to work and invest in the people God has called me to care for, to be present with my children, and to not withdraw from my marriage into myself. ...Many days feel like moving through a at of molasses. What his glory provides, though, is a different perspective on what I am choosing in each of those moments.
God beside us
74: Sorrow shared is a powerful bond.
82: The God who is sovereign, Scripture says, is also the God who suffered. There is an unavoidable connection between the sovereignty and the suffering. Peter proclaims that Jesus was "delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God" (Acts 2:23). His betrayal and arrest were, as the apostles pray to God, what "your hand and your plan had predestined to take place" (Acts 4:28). In case we're tempted to read those passages and still try to make it only the Father's will, we are chastised by the words of Jesus himself: "No one takes [my life] from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have authority to lay it down, and I have the authority to take it up again" (John 10:18).
89: Perhaps the most dangerous of these half-truths is the promise that God will make things turn out for the best. That is how the Biblical idea is summarized by pop theologians; Scripture's words are a bit more complicated, and we'll return to them later. For now, the danger is this: that statement becomes destructive when the good is put forward as if it cancels out the evil. It conveys an economics of consolation. ...God is working good, but that doesn't make evil less evil. Death and pain and grief and sin are terrible. We should never speak in ways that deny their darkness.
90: What is the difference between true hope and false comfort? In the case of false comfort, the goal is to make sorrow smaller. The Christian hope instead it takes it all in and says, "Yes, but as horrific as everything is, there is also resurrection."
God Within Us
104: I have taken two lessons from those nights. One is the power of human presence, the need to simply sit with someone and bear witness to the darkness. ...The deeper lesson is that I need this same kind of presence from God. ...Christianity audaciously claims that the same God who rules over the universe and worked salvation on the cross has drawn near to us in this way, God is present with us in our grief.
117: Psychologists talk about the "stages of grief"...While this rubric has some value, those in the middle of grief often find it unhelpful. Not that the categories are wrong-they describe real emotions-but that they are too neat. The labels don't communicate the jumbled agony of the experience. Denial and anger and bargaining and sadness are ever-changing faces of one awful reality rather than events we can pry apart.
120: Instead, the Bible offers two pictures of what experiencing God's presence is like-a messy duality rather than a list to be mastered.
Wrestling (Jacob): the Bible is full of saints wrestling with God. Job complaining; the authors of the Psalms lamenting; the prophets arguing with the divine in the face of judgment; Paul weeping for the brokenness of the church; Jesus in the garden praying, sweating blood-all walk this road in Jacob's wake. Much to the surprise of some Christians, having doubts and fears and struggles in our hearts is not actually a problem. Faith is not an absence of wrestling; if it were, God would not have named his chosen people Israel. Faith is choosing to wrestle with God. (122-123)
124+ Resting: We are called to wrestle rather than withdraw. However, if that were our only image, our only experience of God's presence, we would be exhausted. Struggling with God takes strength, and strength is in short supply when sorrow saps the vigor from our bones. That is why God does not just leave us with wrestling with him as our only option. the Bible also calls us to rest in him.
Matthew 11 - Come - learn from me: What is this restful motion? First, it is a lowering of ourselves. The rest God offers stems from our humility. Consider Ps 131:1-2; 1 Peter 5:6-7: The quieting of ourselves in humility is the very thing that delivers us from our fears. These verses are all describing the same experience. When we are brought to the end of ourselves, we are forced to acknowledge our limitedness. ...God is near in two ways. One is in his strength. Circumstances that are beyond us are firmly under his control. ...At the same time, as we are brought to the end of ourselves, we are reassured that God is good.
God Victorious
134: The story we tell about our life determines how we experience it. We weave the varied moments of each day into a narrative, tracing certain threads while ignoring others. ...The power of story is an unavoidable psychological fact. Struggles with depression, fearfulness, or insecurity are in part a product of dysfunctional narratives. When we mess up, is that an obstacle to be overcome or another example of how we are doomed to always fail? When we are afraid, do we tell ourselves we'll get through tis or do we catastrophic, spinning out every uncertainty into the worst imaginable outcome? The biography of our life is written as much in our imaginations as in our circumstances.
149: We cannot separate the Christian story from its ending. This world is not enough for us. Thanks to the overlapping ages in which we live, the present will always be a broken and painful place. But the age to come shouldn't disconnect us from this one. Far from making us so heavenly minded we cease to be any earthly good, Scriptures vision calls us to engage with this world as we await the one to come.
170: While Scripture insists that God can heal, it never promises that he will. ...An inappropriate hope in God's healing isn't just dangerous because it is untrue; it is also dangerous because it can prevent us from finding the real sources of hope that Scripture provides. ...Our hope rests in God himself.
174-175: Though the fig tree should not blossom, nor fruit be on the vines, the produce of the olive fail and the fields yield no food, the flock be cut off from the fold and there be no herd in the stalls, yet I will rejoice in the Lord; I will take joy in the God of my salvation. God, the Lord, is my strength; he makes my feet like the deer's; he makes me treats on my high places (Habakkuk 3:17-19)
January 10, 2025
Eric Tjones writes like an old friend. Someone who you could imagine coming over for dinner with and staying late into the night discussing all things raw and real. Either Way We'll Be Alright is a honest and vulnerable reflection of grief from the lens of someone who has walked this path themselves. The topic is handled with grace and great care, his hands do not callously fumble the topic, but rather form and shape the picture very delicatly for the reader.
With solid theology, poetry, and truth interwoven through these pages, I can certainly recommend it.
With solid theology, poetry, and truth interwoven through these pages, I can certainly recommend it.
Read
December 31, 2024Summary: Think much about God and His plan for the world when you are suffering.
My evaluation: The scattered insights on living in a sinful world were often forgotten when he took swings several times at dispensationalism, premillennialism, and cultural holiness.
My evaluation: The scattered insights on living in a sinful world were often forgotten when he took swings several times at dispensationalism, premillennialism, and cultural holiness.
May 14, 2022
It is a little contrived at times, but also has some really good moments to describe the real experience of grief.
November 9, 2024
Chapter 8, 11, and 12 were helpful
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