I recently woke from a dream where the angel of death came for someone I love. It left me sitting in the quiet morning, wrestling with a question that has echoed through human hearts for centuries:

If we know Jesus, and we know where we are going, why does death still hurt so much?

We know the theological truth. We know that if our loved ones knew the Lord, they are suffering no more. They are experiencing the very glory that we are still looking forward to.

They are home.

But the pain we feel isn’t for them—it is for us. We miss their physical presence in our daily lives. We are bound by linear time, forced to walk through the quiet of their absence, while they have stepped into eternity.

I remember when Kevin was in the CICU. I remember walking into our house alone, the silence thick and heavy. His presence was everywhere, yet he was not. I stared at the empty spot on his side of the bed, finding that sleeping in his t-shirts added an extra layer of comfort in his absence. I looked at his empty stool in the morning quiet. Even the kitchen window felt still and lonely, waiting for him to open it up, toss out peanuts, and talk to the cardinals like he always did.

In those quiet rooms, I felt the truth of what writer Jamie Anderson once wrote:

“Grief is really just love. It’s all the love you want to give, but cannot. All that unspent love gathers up in the corners of your eyes, the lump in your throat, and in that hollow part of your chest. Grief is just love with no place to go.”

My story had a happy ending.

Kevin came home.

He still sits on that stool, and he still feeds his cardinals through the kitchen window. But having stood on the precipice of that loss, my heart breaks completely for those whose stories did not end the same way. I know the terror of looking into that empty space, and my heart aches for those who must learn to live in it.

Scripture meets us directly in that tender space of shared sorrow.

Psalm 34:18 says, “The Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit.”

Our grief—and our deep empathy for the grief of others—is not a sign of weak faith. It is the price of deep love.

Even Jesus, who held all power over the grave, stood before the tomb of His friend Lazarus and wept. He knew He was about to perform a miracle, yet He didn’t offer a lecture on theology; He simply shared in the sorrow of those He loved. He wept because death is an intruder, a tear in the design of a world meant for eternal connection.

We do not grieve as those who have no hope. But we do grieve, and we are allowed to. We hold fast to our gratitude for the time we have, and we trust that the One who wept at Lazarus’s tomb is holding every broken heart in the quiet space of their waiting.