Learn to walk slowly with grief

How do Christians respond to grief? Malcolm Duncan is trying to find the answers

- Malcolm Duncan

Malcolm, you’ve just published your latest book, Good Grief. Can you tell us about it?

Good Grief is about the inevitability of grief, how we walk through it and how we can turn one of the darkest and most difficult seasons in our lives into one where we can encounter God, be honest with him and grow.

It looks at the whole process of grieving, the uncertainty of it, and the ways in which we can find ourselves in places we never thought we would.

I’ve looked at issues like how you live through grief and how not only to survive it but also to find a way of thriving despite your circumstances.

You share some of your own experience of grief in the book. How has loss impacted you?

Grief has marked my life in ways I hadn’t expected. My father dropped dead in 2002, and then between July 2014 and March 2016 there were three suicides and two sudden deaths in my family, including my nephew, brother-in-law, sister-in-law, my brother and my mother. My son and his wife lost a baby too, and my son’s mother-in-law died in that season. And as a pastor, I had close friends at church and one of my closest confidants die.

I found myself having to navigate what it meant to walk through pain and loss personally, but I also had to navigate it as a pastor, walking my congregation through it.

Everywhere I looked there was grief, sadness and sorrow.

Did this challenge your faith?

It caused me to ask a lot of fundamental questions about who God is, who I am and how I relate to the world.

What did I believe about God? What did I believe about healing? What did I believe about hope? How can I engage authentically with God in the midst of all that, and not just go through the motions of pastoring or of faith? How, in the midst of that storm, do I navigate the uncertainty grief brings with it, the sorrow, the heartbreak and the sheer exhaustion?