This is part of my year-long series exploring human-centered alternatives to the spiritual promises in Oswald Chambers’ classic devotional My Utmost for His Highest. Today’s entry, “Acquaintance with Grief”, promises that believers can become “acquainted with grief” like Jesus by recognizing sin as the root cause of all sorrow, claiming that understanding this spiritual diagnosis allows God to eliminate sin and its associated suffering.
Here’s what happened when someone actually tried to grieve this way:
“Jesus was acquainted with grief because he understood that sin causes all sorrow,” her pastor explained gently. “Emma’s death, your pain—it all traces back to humanity’s rebellion against God. Once you recognize sin as the root cause, you can let God’s life kill the sin in you and find peace.”
Lisa’s sixteen-year-old daughter had been killed by a drunk driver three weeks earlier. The unbearable pain felt like drowning in molten lead, but her pastor offered this spiritual framework as the path through grief. If sin explained all sorrow, then understanding this truth would somehow transform her relationship with suffering.
She studied Scripture about sin’s effects. Prayed desperately for God to rule in her life and eliminate whatever spiritual rebellion had caused Emma’s death. Waited for the promised acquaintance with grief that would bring divine peace.
But this theological explanation felt like salt in an open wound. Emma hadn’t died because of sin—she’d died because someone chose to drive drunk and ran a red light. The grief consuming Lisa wasn’t mysterious spiritual consequence but natural human response to losing her child.
Where was the peace that was supposed to come from understanding sin’s role? Where was God’s life killing the supposed spiritual cause of her sorrow?
Her sister Janet, a grief counselor, watched Lisa’s struggle with growing alarm. Janet understood sorrow as complex human experience involving love, attachment, and devastating loss. She didn’t need spiritual explanations for why people suffer when those they love die.
“Grief is the price of love,” Janet told Lisa bluntly. “The intensity of your pain reflects the depth of your bond with Emma. This isn’t divine punishment requiring theological interpretation—it’s human experience requiring patience, support, and time.”
When Lisa finally joined a secular grief support group, she encountered people who understood her pain without needing to explain it through sin. Other parents who’d lost children didn’t discuss rebellion against God or spiritual mutiny. They shared practical strategies for surviving holidays, handling triggers, rebuilding meaning after unthinkable loss.
The “acquaintance with grief” that actually helped came through connecting with others who’d experienced similar devastation. Their wisdom wasn’t about sin causing sorrow but about grief as natural response to love interrupted by death.
Lisa’s healing began when she stopped trying to understand Emma’s death through spiritual frameworks and started honoring her grief as appropriate response to losing someone irreplaceable. Comfort came not from God ruling over sin but from human community that understood suffering without explaining it away.
The breakthrough was realizing that some losses don’t require theological interpretation. They require human compassion, time, and the gradual rebuilding of life around the permanent hole left by love.
The silence where divine explanation was supposed to provide meaning delivered the most honest truth: grief doesn’t need spiritual justification. It needs human understanding.
Reflection Question: When has understanding grief as natural human response to loss been more helpful than seeking spiritual explanations for suffering?
This story is part of my upcoming book “The Undevoted: Daily Departures from Divine Dependence,” which offers 365 human-centered alternatives to the spiritual certainties in Chambers’ devotional. Each day explores how reason, community, and human resilience can address life’s challenges without requiring divine intervention.
God or Delusion? 