The following is an adapted excerpt from Facing Loss: Lessons of Hope from My Unwanted Journey, by D. Ray Davis, from WestBow Press (2026).
The sudden death of Kim, my wife of over thirty-five years, thrust me into grief. I learned it to be true what Julie Yarbrough wrote in her book, Inside the Broken Heart: Grief Understanding for Widows and Widowers: “We do not enter into grief. Grief enters into us.” Grief does not give a choice. You are swept away to face grief, and you are compelled to decide what to do with grief.
So, I began a journey to dig through grief, and I eventually compiled a plethora of lessons of hope. One of those lessons came from reading a book, Be Still, My Soul.
In this book, compiled and edited by Nancy Guthrie, Tim Keller has a chapter called “Suffering: The Servant of Our Joy.” In his chapter, he recounts a study by Marilyn McCord Adams, a philosophy professor at Yale, who studied female Christian mystics of the Middle Ages. Her findings point to important lessons about the pitfalls of facing grief or suffering of any kind.
I was hooked because the book gave me some descriptions of how people deal with grief. Marilyn McCord Adams offers some poignant counsel which, in the end, is helpful when facing the kind of grief I experienced in the wake of Kim’s passing.
Adams, Keller explains, “has distilled” from the mystics “teaching some remarkable teachings about suffering.” Further, Keller points out that “Adams says that the Stoics said to accept suffering, the Epicureans said to avoid suffering, and the ascetics and masochists said to embrace suffering.”
Beware of Accepting Suffering
The Stoics, according to Adams, accepted suffering. The grieving process begins with denial and ends, after all, with acceptance. Early in grief, you simply cannot get your mind around the new reality. Your mind fluctuates between two tracks: accepting and denying your loss is real. While acceptance is a healthy part of the grief process, quick and simple acceptance is not healthy. True acceptance comes only with work and time, and you can expect to bounce back to denial many times before settling into a baseline state of acceptance.
The way of the Stoics, however, did not encourage this kind of processing. Acceptance for the Stoics was to be, well, stoic. To be stoic is to endure without revealing your humanity. It’s the stiff-upper-lip approach. Grin and bear it. Move straight from loss to acceptance, with no stops along the way.
But, facing loss requires recognizing your humanity and accepting your loss. Accept loss, but remember your humanity.
There is nothing incongruous in a set jaw along with tear-dimmed eyes … We do not have to choose between cry-baby sentimentalism on one hand and stoicism on the other.
—Vance Havner, Though I Walk Through the Valley
Grief takes time. Time, and tears. Jesus Himself, who knew that Lazarus would be raised from the dead in mere minutes, still took time to weep with His friends (John 11), to experience the pain of searing loss that comes from living in a world where death is both real and inevitable. Don’t try to be stronger or more stoic than Jesus. Weep. Be human. Allow the gift of acceptance to come as God intends it — slowly, gradually, and with real time for mourning.
Beware of Avoiding Suffering
The Epicureans, according to Adams, avoided suffering. This is a significant warning for us in our modern day. We tend toward sanitizing pain, suffering, and death. We keep it at bay. We ignore it. We hide it. We avoid it at all costs. Our modern approach is to do everything possible to stiff-arm any manner of suffering. We are unable to talk about it. It’s uncomfortable. We seem to believe suffering reveals a weakness in God’s character. So we avoid suffering and even the subject of suffering.
We are so accustomed to luxury we think of traffic jams as hardship.
—Elisabeth Elliot, The Path of Loneliness
Facing loss requires recognizing that suffering is part of living in our broken world. Refuse to avoid suffering. Don’t insulate yourself from painful experiences. Don’t medicate your discomfort with distractions. Weep with those who weep. Allow suffering to assume its proper place in your life as a thing to be reckoned with, not avoided.
Beware of Embracing Suffering
The ascetics and masochists, according to Adams, embraced suffering. They seemed to be drawn to pain. In fact, they seemed to gain pleasure from their suffering. I was cautioned early in my journey to be aware of pathological grief. Basically, I needed to avoid enjoying and, thus, staying in grief. Stuck. I’ve done my best to maintain a balanced approach, but I have met or heard about people who seem to seek pity for staying in their valley. They embrace and enjoy their grief to such a degree that they prefer to stay in it.
Facing loss requires that we not embrace or enjoy suffering in such an unhealthy manner. Be careful to avoid staying in and embracing your suffering. Your pain is real. But it is not everything.
Few perversions of life could be sadder than this dwelling ever in the glooms and shadows of past griefs.
—Miller, The Ministry of Comfort
To be fair, there is a sense in which it is appropriate to accept, avoid, and even embrace suffering. We must accept suffering, in the sense that we make peace with its reality and presence in our lives. We can avoid suffering, in the sense that we can sidestep opportunities for needless grief or disappointment. And we are free to embrace suffering as the “schoolhouse” of our soul, where we are trained to trust God better and love Him more. However, these responses to suffering are incomplete.
The Gospel Engulfs Suffering
Finally, Adams “points out, the gospel does not accept, avoid, or embrace suffering; it engulfs suffering.” It is simply incomplete—not enough—to accept, avoid, or embrace suffering. It’s preferable to overwhelm suffering. Grief can be engulfed. Grief is redefined by the gospel.
You don’t have to accept suffering or grief as the last word. You don’t have to avoid or fear suffering because it is so distasteful. Neither do you need to embrace suffering in an unhealthy, masochistic manner. The gospel should redefine how you face your grief. We do not mourn without hope. Suffering is an unavoidable part of your story, but it is not the full story. It is just one voice that makes up the harmonious chorus of your existence, and we can trust that the great Maestro is orchestrating our lives in such a way that “though in all lands love is now mingled with grief, it grows perhaps the greater,” as Galadriel reminds us in Tolkien’s Fellowship of the Ring.
So don’t succumb to some bowed-back acceptance of grief. Neither should you fear grief and, thus, seek to avoid it. And do not settle into grief, enjoying it in a pathological sense.
Instead, allow the gospel to engulf your grief!
Every genuine disciple of Jesus, every heir of heaven, ought to possess deep and abiding resources of joy, that lie … beneath the tempests of trial.
—Theodore L. Cuyler, God’s Light on Dark Clouds
