Grief, Jesus’ Words, and the Way Forward
In late 2017, I started a reading project. It had been a rough year. My second child, Hannah, had turned 18 in March and passed away from cancer in April. My wife, Rachel, and I felt like a part of us had died with her.
We had moved back to the U.S. in the summer of 2015, having spent the previous seven years as missionaries working in the Netherlands, serving at Tyndale Theological Seminary and Crossroads International Church. We returned to the U.S. knowing that Hannah’s time was near, mainly because her epilepsy was causing the rare complication of respiratory and cardiac arrest, just one symptom for our severely handicapped daughter. The diagnosis of cancer in September of 2016 came out of nowhere and her swift passing just a few months later was devastating for us as parents, as well as for her older sister and her three younger brothers.
By the end of 2017, I felt “low” and simply just wanted to hear from Jesus. So, I started reading the Gospel of Matthew, over and over. Now in late 2023, I am not sure how many times I have read Matthew, but it is a lot. By the nature of who I am, this has mostly been in Greek, but sometimes in modern Hebrew or German. I keep reading because Jesus constantly points the way forward, regardless of what any given day holds or how I feel.
“I keep reading because Jesus constantly points the way forward, regardless of what any given day holds or how I feel. ”
Somewhere along the way I started calling every day “a red-letter day,” a reference to some Bibles that put Jesus’ teaching in red letters, because I began to notice that I was constantly making decisions in any given day based on Jesus’ actual words from Matthew.
Of course, as a Bible professor and pastor/teacher, I am constantly reading the whole of the Bible, books about the Bible, and my favorite type of fun reading—biographies, a few thousand pages this year, in multiple languages. However, I cannot get enough of Jesus. He points the way forward when I am alone with my own feelings, in my family, in my church, in my city, and at Western. Jesus’ teaching is for real people, in a real world that includes both mourning and making disciples of all nations. I look to him as he continues to guide in these extremes, and everything between. I am pretty sure given the pattern of the last few years, Matthew will continue to be on the constant reading list for this year.
