Grief, like joy, is full of surprises. Unlike joy, most of grief’s surprises are unwelcome, and make the whole experience worse. One of these surprises, I have discovered, is that grief addles the mind with lies and tricks—for example,
- Am I a Christian?
- I will never pray again.
- What possible thing did I do to deserve this?
- God has stopped speaking to me through his word.
- Does God even exist?
They trip through the mind like so many bedraggled beggar children, creating confusion and clatter, and refusing to exit the premises.
It hardly seems fair, given everything else one has to manage in grief. The well-meaning, yet ill-advised words that sometimes spill from the lips of others need to be acknowledged with grace. The kaleidoscope of different emotions coalescing in long moments of acute pain need to be endured with patience. The weariness of relating to others or of discharging one’s responsibilities through a fog of mental fatigue needs to be suffered with gentleness. The sheer ocean of loss needs to be at once acknowledged and mourned, and navigated so as to avoid the ever-present temptations to bitterness and self-pity.
There’s just a lot to do to grieve well as a Christian.
Personally, being deceived by one’s own thinking stands as one of the hardest and most unexpected things in this whole process. It demonstrates that so much of our faith is in our heads—that is, what we think about God and his rule in our lives depends on our minds working properly. When our minds don’t work properly—when we are sick or grieving or suffer from some kind of mental illness—then we often can’t think about God properly. So we find ourselves both needing God and yet not able to think about him well. Furthermore, this affects how we relate to God, and so affects how we relate to others.
I am sure it affects all of us differently. For example, someone might become certain that God doesn’t exist and can’t hear us, though they pray anyway. Another might get stuck with a wrong thought that won’t budge, such as a fixation. But whatever shape it takes, it leaves us exhausted and fragmented, and more tempted to be unkind and bitter.
Worst of all, being deceived comes with its own temptation to take our thoughts too seriously. If this is what we think of God now, when things are difficult, perhaps it is what we always thought of God. Or maybe we think that our hearts have committed themselves to never trust God again. We might even find our knowledge of Scripture condemning us as we think about how suffering is supposed to demonstrate the purity of our faith. We may therefore exclude ourselves from even being Christian, because we believe that no Christian could possibly think about a heavenly Father the way we are thinking. So we are deceived by our own deception and robbed of God when we need him most.
What can be done about this? How can we speak to ourselves in this situation? How can we pray for those in this desolate place?
There are all kinds of responses. Here’s just one thought.
Jesus is truth. (John 14:6) This really matters. I think we often skid over Jesus’ revelation of himself as the one who owns and brings truth into our lives. It seems rather metaphysical and fuzzy. But it’s when we realize how little we are in control of our own minds and how easily we are deceived that we realize how much we need Jesus so we can think properly about God and ourselves.
Of course, there are no shortage of Bible passages that demonstrate that without God, we cannot know God. But we can assume that once we’re converted, we don’t need to worry about this. We don’t fear being deceived because we fundamentally trust our own thinking as it’s shaped by our prayerful study of Scripture. Yet we can be deceived and forget important things. The devil roams about trying to destroy us, and he is the master of deceit. Why should he plague us with boils when he can trample us with lies?
Depending on Jesus rather than our post-conversion selves to think well about God changes the equation when it comes to grief (and other such maladies). It means that we can ask God for genuine truth and wait out the scary thoughts that skitter across our minds. We can depend on him to change the way we think. We have no need to live in fear of the devil or our own hearts’ deception. But the reason we have confidence is because Jesus is truth, and so our confidence is in him, not in ourselves. We depend on him to bring truth to us in our need. Indeed, we are most his disciples when we realize that we need him for everything—even for the very faith we need to believe even that.
So we are not left in the dimness of muddled thinking. We don’t need to sort out our thoughts first, and then pray. We can do what we did at our conversion because our conversion is the pattern of our lives: ask Jesus to supply what we need. The one who calls to the weak and heavy-laden is expert at dealing with such broken hearts, and is not intimidated by our myriad deficiencies. He supplies all our needs—even the need for truth—out of his own generous sufficiency.
