Talking to God During Great Grief

The first funeral I officiated was for an eighteen-year-old girl killed in a car accident. To this day I’ve never experienced a more difficult funeral. And as I spoke and looked out into a sea of grief, one face stood out—that of her boyfriend. I met with him shortly after the funeral and learned that days before the accident he had purchased an engagement ring and had been planning to propose.

Neither of us spoke much during that initial meeting; words felt treasonous. But in the meetings that followed, we gradually opened up to one another, and he asked me how to deal with all the anger and grief. He told me prayer had never come easily for him. He never knew how to talk to God, and at this particular moment he had nothing nice to say. So I gave him a Bible, put a small bookmark in Job 1, and suggested this was a good place to start. We met a few weeks later, and when I asked him how the reading was going he said, “I didn’t know we could talk to God like that. If I can talk to God like that, maybe I can talk to God.”