How to Deal with Grief as a Christian — Spurgeon on Dying Well
⏱ 13 min read
You did not come to this page on a bright Tuesday afternoon. Somebody is gone. Or somebody is going. Or the year-mark has passed and the people around you have, gently and without meaning any harm, stopped asking — and the grief is still in the room, occupying the chair it has occupied for months, and you have begun to wonder whether something inside you is broken because the calendar has moved and the weight has not.
There is nothing broken in you. The weight is the weight. The calendar does not know what to do with a grief like yours, and the church often does not either, because the polite Christian timeline for grief is shorter than the actual one, and you have been quietly outliving it. This is not a piece of writing that is going to tell you the grief should be over by Easter. It is the slow version of how to deal with grief as a Christian — three passages from Charles Spurgeon, a pastor who buried his own and never pretended otherwise, read slowly, the way an evening is read. The Everspring Christian Healing Journal carries this kind of reading into a daily companion for the woman whose grief is still the room she lives in. For now — sit somewhere quiet. There is no rush. (If the loss has changed something underneath that you cannot yet name, the companion what does the Bible say about death — Spurgeon on dying well walks the doctrine itself at this pace. If the heaviness has begun to feel like more than grief, can a Christian be depressed — Spurgeon on the minister’s fainting fits is the gentle next page. And if the dry seasons keep arriving in waves you cannot predict, a devotional for spiritual dryness was written for the same kind of long quiet.)
Spurgeon was twenty-two when his first sermon was published and fifty-seven when he died. Between those years he buried his mother, his closest friend, two grandchildren in infancy, and many of the men and women he had baptised as boys and girls. He suffered a chronic depression that he wrote about plainly, in language nobody else in his century quite dared use from a pulpit. The grief in his pages is not a literary device. It is the residue of decades of standing at the side of other people’s losses while carrying his own. He knew what it was to be told to be brighter about a thing that had not stopped being heavy. He never told anyone else that.
The first passage — the delightful sense of perfect peace
Spurgeon recorded, in one of his evening meditations, a small unscripted half-hour that he had no plan for and that arrived anyway.
“I was sitting, the other night, meditating on God’s mercy and love, when suddenly I found in my own heart a most delightful sense of perfect peace.”
— Charles Spurgeon
Read it once. Then read it again, slowly.
Notice the verbs. Sitting. Meditating. Found. He did not pray the peace down. He did not wrestle it out. He sat. He let his attention drift across the mercy and the love of God — not a sermon’s worth, not a study, just a small turning of the mind toward Him in the evening — and the peace was found, the way a small bird is found on a windowsill in the morning by somebody who was not looking for one.
This is the first thing to say about how to deal with grief as a Christian. The peace does not arrive on schedule. It is not a thing you produce by being good at being sad. It is a thing that comes — sometimes — when you have stopped trying to make it come, and have only sat in the chair and let the mercy and the love be the thing your mind is drifting across.
Spurgeon’s word delightful is worth pausing on. He does not say adequate. He does not say sufficient. He says delightful, which is the word a man uses when something has crept up behind him and gladdened a heart that was not ready to be gladdened. The grieving woman is often suspicious of delight, because delight feels like betrayal — of the one who is gone, of the seriousness of what was lost. But Spurgeon, who knew loss intimately, was not embarrassed by the delight that arrived unbidden in the chair that evening. He named it. He wrote it down. He did not apologise for it.
The peace will visit you in this way too. Not the loud kind. A small sense, in a quiet half-hour, of being held by something larger than the loss. It will not last all evening. It will visit and go. The visiting is not betrayal. The visiting is mercy. Spurgeon’s evening is permission for yours.
For the woman who has not felt the visiting yet — six months in, a year in, two years in — Spurgeon is gentle here. He does not tell you it will arrive on a particular Tuesday. He tells you the chair he sat in, and the small thing his attention was doing, and the fact that the peace was found, not made. The making is His. The chair is yours. (If the chair has been empty for too long and you do not know what to write when you sit down, the companion Christian journal prompts for women — healing after a hard year holds nine slow returns for the season after the storm.)
The somatic — for the body that has been carrying it
Pause here. The grief has a body to it. It has been sitting in the room with you the whole time you have been reading, and the body that is carrying it deserves a small acknowledgement before the next passage.
Sit somewhere quiet. A chair, not the bed. Both feet flat on the floor. Place one hand, lightly, on the centre of your chest — the place over the sternum where grief most often lodges in the body. The chest there has been small and tight for a long time. The breath has been working around it. You may not have noticed how chronically the breath has been working around it until you placed the hand there.
Take one slow inhale. Not deep. Slow. Let the breath travel into the place under the hand, until the chest receives a small portion of air it has not been receiving. On the exhale, let the breath go all the way out, slower than the inhale. As you exhale, let the jaw soften, and the small held place at the back of the throat let go, just a little.
One more slow inhale. One more longer exhale. Then take the hand away.
The body did not need to do anything. It only needed the acknowledgement that the chest has been holding the weight, and that it is allowed to lower it for the length of two slow breaths. Spurgeon, who wrote about the heart in right tune, would not have separated the slow exhale from the doctrine. The body is the instrument. The slow exhale is one small adjustment of the strings. Grief lives in the body the way music does — and the unbracing, even for two breaths, is a small piece of how to deal with grief as a Christian, before any word has been read or written.
The second passage — the cool twilight
Spurgeon, in Morning and Evening, wrote one of the most quietly beautiful prayers in English devotional literature. The picture is so gentle that it is easy to miss what it is doing to the grief in the room.
“Speak, Lord, for thy servant heareth. O that he would walk with me; I am ready to give up my whole heart and mind to him, and every other thought is hushed. I am only asking what he delights to give. I am sure that he will condescend to have fellowship with me, for he has given me his Holy Spirit to abide with me forever. Sweet is the cool twilight, when every star seems like the eye of heaven, and the cool wind is as the breath of celestial love.”
— Charles Spurgeon, Morning and Evening
Read it twice. Slowly.
The picture is an evening one. A man, standing outside, in the cool air after a long day. The stars are out. The wind is soft. He is not in church. He is not at a desk. He is in the small open quiet of his own evening, and the language he reaches for, to describe what the wind is doing on his face, is the breath of celestial love. The wind is a real wind. The breath is real breath. The two are touching, in his evening, in a way the daytime had been muffling.
The line worth keeping near the page is the last one. The cool wind is as the breath of celestial love. The grieving woman has been bracing against the wind for months. The wind that touches her face in the morning has been only weather — only the indifferent air movement of an indifferent world, in which somebody she loved has been taken. Spurgeon’s sentence is a slow correction. The wind is not indifferent. The wind, on your face this morning, is the breath of celestial love. The same Father who is breathing the wind across the world is the Father who received the one you have lost.
For the woman whose grief has been bound up in the worry about whether her loved one was met at the end — Spurgeon is gentle. The same breath that is on your face today is the breath that received them. The receiving is not separate from the wind you are walking through. You and they are inside the same breath. The wind is small evidence that the breath is still breathing — that the country your loved one has gone to is not on the other side of an ocean you cannot cross, but inside the same air, just on the side where the muffling has been lifted.
This is the second thing to say about how to deal with grief as a Christian. The grief does not have to be resolved before the wind can become the breath of celestial love. The grief can be in the room. The breath can be on your face. Both are true at once. Spurgeon, who carried his own losses to the end of his life, did not pretend the wind was always felt this way. He told us about the evenings when it was. The evenings when it is, for you, are worth writing down. The evenings when it is not are not failures. They are weather.
The Everspring Christian Healing Journal was built around exactly this kind of slow noticing — of the wind, of the twilight, of the small evidences of the Father’s hand in a day that is otherwise heavy. One short passage each evening, a verse held next to the loss, a small place for the honest sentence about the day. The journal is not the cure for the grief. Christ is. The journal is the chair the noticing happens in.
The third passage — the heart in right tune
Spurgeon, late in one of his published meditations, gave a small image for how the Christian carries the long weight. The image is musical, and it is exact.
“Come, then, my Lord, and give me Thy love with Thy grace. Take good heed, Christian, that thine own heart is in right tune, that when the fingers of mercy touch the strings, they may resound with full notes of communion.”
— Charles Spurgeon
Read it once at speed. Then read it again, slowly.
The heart, in Spurgeon’s image, is a stringed instrument. The Christian’s small daily work is not to play the instrument. The Christian’s small daily work is to keep it in tune. The playing is His. The fingers of mercy come at moments — at the verse that lands in the kitchen, at the kind word from a stranger, at the slow Sunday morning, at the unexpected quiet that arrives in the middle of a Wednesday — and the heart that has been kept in right tune, by the small daily adjustments, resounds.
For the grieving woman, the application of this image is exact. You do not have to make the grief produce communion. You do not have to wrestle out of the loss a particular spiritual lesson by Friday. Your daily work is the tuning. Sitting in the chair. Reading the slow verse. Writing the honest sentence about the day. Letting the breath have one longer exhale at the kitchen sink. These are the small daily adjustments. They are not the playing. The playing is what He does, when His fingers touch the strings — and the playing will come at moments you did not schedule, in evenings that did not begin promising anything in particular, in the small unscripted half-hours Spurgeon was already writing about three passages ago.
This is the third thing to say about how to deal with grief as a Christian. The grief does not interrupt the tuning. The grief is the season the tuning is happening in. The strings have to be kept ready for the touch — and the touch, when it comes, will not stop the grief, but will, briefly, let the grief and the communion sound the same chord. Spurgeon called this full notes of communion. The grief and the communion are not separate instruments. They are the same heart, kept in tune across a year that has not asked your permission, played by hands that know what they are doing.
What the slow reading will do over a year
If you sit with Spurgeon’s three passages — one a month for three months, and then the long question how to deal with grief as a Christian as your slow companion for the rest of the year — what happens is not dramatic. The grief does not lift the way mist lifts. What happens is that the centre of gravity of the carrying moves.
The carrying, slowly, stops being a thing the chest does in isolation. The chest is still the chest. The weight is still the weight. But the delightful sense of perfect peace will visit, in small evenings, the way it visited Spurgeon’s chair. The cool wind as the breath of celestial love will become, on some mornings, the thing the wind actually feels like. The heart in right tune will become a way of describing what the slow daily small adjustments are doing — the verse, the breath, the honest sentence, the quiet half-hour. The phrases, slowly, become small lit rooms in the mind that you can step into when the grief asks where you are.
The slow reading does not promise the grief is finished by the year-mark. It is not. Spurgeon never said it would be. He carried his own losses to his last evening, and his last evenings were tender ones, and the tenderness did not disqualify the communion. He told the truth about how long a grief can carry, and the truth is that some griefs walk with the Christian for the rest of the road. They do not stay the same. They change shape. They become, in the long carrying, something the heart has learned to play in tune with, even when the chord is a heavy one. That is not failure. That is faith working at the speed faith actually works.
For the woman who has been told her grief is taking too long — Spurgeon is gentle. The grief is taking the time it takes. The fingers of mercy come on their own schedule. The tuning is yours. The playing is His. The country your loved one has gone to is real, and the wind on your face is its breath, and the small evening half-hour you spent in the chair tonight, doing nothing in particular except letting the mercy and the love be the thing your mind was drifting across, was — Spurgeon would say — exactly the kind of evening in which the peace is most likely to be found.
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A daily home for the slow carrying
The slow practice we just walked has its 140-day form in Christian Healing Journal. Each evening, one short passage and a verse, with room for the honest sentence — a small daily place to keep the heart in right tune while the grief is still in the room.
The Everspring Christian Healing Journal carries Spurgeon’s slow vocabulary — the delightful sense of perfect peace, the cool wind as the breath of celestial love, the heart kept in right tune — into a daily companion for the woman whose grief is taking the long road, without rushing and without pretending the calendar should have lifted it already.
