What do you do when you receive the shocking news that your son has suddenly died? How is God sovereign over loss? How is he good in loss? How do you pass through times of grief while keeping your faith? How is it possible to love God more after loss than you loved him before?
Bible Gateway interviewed Tim Challies (@challies) about his book, Seasons of Sorrow: The Pain of Loss and the Comfort of God (Zondervan, 2022).
Please describe how this book came to be.
Tim Challies: On November 3, 2020, my family received the news that my son had collapsed and died. Nick was a seminary student at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary when, without warning, his heart failed and he passed away. We were quickly able to get a flight down to Louisville to be with our daughter who was also a student there. While I was on the plane I began to write. I wasn’t writing a book yet—just writing for the sake of processing my shock and grief. Over the months that followed I continued to write as my way of thinking and meditating, of considering my fears and doubts, my joys and laments. And as time went on and the amount of writing grew, I began to wonder if I may have been writing a book all along. It eventually grew to become Seasons of Sorrow.
Why is your book divided into seasons of fall, winter, spring, and summer?
Tim Challies: For two reasons. The first is simply because the book was written over the course of a year, beginning on the evening Nick died and continuing until the first anniversary of his death. The second is that dividing the book by seasons provides a bit of structure for the narrative that unfolds as I grapple with what had happened, what it meant, and how the Lord was calling me to respond.
[Read the Bible Gateway Blog post, Christian History Told Through 33 Objects: An Interview with Tim Challies]
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What did you mean when you and your wife said to each other, “We can do this”?
Tim Challies: On that very first evening, when we had known for only a few minutes that our son had died, I took my wife by the shoulders and looked into her eyes and said, “We can do this.” I knew immediately that Nick’s death had not happened apart from the will of God, and this gave me assurance that God was calling us to something—he was calling us to endure this trial in a distinctly Christian way. If our faith had ever been real, it needed to be real now! In that moment I wanted to reassure my wife that God had given us all we needed to succeed in this calling. He had given us his Word, he had given us his Spirit, and he had given us his church. If we simply took hold of what God had given, we would be able to endure our trial in a way that would bring him glory.
Early on you write, “I know I am heading into a future that is utterly unknown, utterly foreign, utterly opaque.” What is the correct way people can help others who feel the same way in their darkest moments?
Tim Challies: When we’re in times of great grief and sorrow, we need other Christians who can guide us to what is true. God’s Word provides the anchor we need. When our circumstances are dire and when everything else seems uncertain, we can always rely on God. And so the best thing we can do to help others is to help them understand and believe and rely on what is true, what is fixed, and what is unchanging. God makes so many precious promises, and we can honor him and love our friends by drawing their hearts and minds to these promises.
You recount a time when Nick was three and became upset that a character in a movie died. You write you wanted to tell him of the death of death. What do you mean?
Tim Challies: Part of the beauty of the gospel is that it assures us that death is no longer solely an enemy but, in a strange way, also a friend. Without Christ, death delivers us only to condemnation, but with Christ, death delivers us to heaven. We all long to be delivered from sin and all its consequences, we all long to be with Christ, we all long to be reunited with those whom we have loved and lost. Death is the means through which we close our eyes to all that is sinful and painful in this world and open them to all that is perfect and glorious in heaven. Through Christ, death itself has been put to death as the great and fearsome enemy of our souls.
What role did (and does) the Bible have in your time of grief?
Tim Challies: I don’t know how I could have endured this trial without the Bible. We made the conscious decision from the very beginning that we would allow the Bible to guide us in our sorrow—that we would believe what it says about life and death, about pain and loss, about grief and hope. We made the decision that we would trust the Bible, that we would take hold of its truths, and that we would rely on its promises. We determined that we would not interpret the Bible through our circumstances, but that we would interpret our circumstances through the Bible. It would be the lamp to our feet and the light to our path, illumining the way God was calling us to go.
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How do you hope this book will help readers?
Tim Challies: None of us can avoid all sorrow and suffering. None of us will escape this life unscathed by grief and loss. And so I very much hope that Seasons of Sorrow will help readers better understand grief, loss, sorrow, and suffering. This may be their own or it may be that they are helping loved ones or church members through trials and difficulties. And then I hope it may articulate what other people may be thinking or feeling, but are perhaps having trouble expressing, as they go through their own times of suffering and sorrow.
What is a favorite Bible passage of yours and why?
Tim Challies: After Nick died, I asked my father-in-law to make a glass case in which to store Nick’s Bible. He built one that is just perfect and ever since he brought it to us, Nick’s Bible has been in it, laid open to 1 Corinthians 15. These words remind me that Christ’s triumph over death was also mine, and also Nick’s. They remind me that death itself has been vanquished in the death of Christ so that “as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive.” I express in one part of the book that on days when a particularly deep sorrow washes over me, on days when it seems as if I may be overwhelmed, I raise the glass and take the Bible from its case. I rest it in my lap, read that very passage, and imagine my precious boy doing the same. Then I consider its wonderful promises and smile to think that Nick has already seen the best of them fulfilled.
What are your thoughts about Bible Gateway and the Bible Gateway App and Bible Audio App?
Tim Challies: I’m so thankful for the access we have to the Bible itself (in so many translations) and to tools meant to help us study it. We need the Bible so desperately and Bible Gateway is committed to helping us have full and unfettered access to it. What could be better than that?
[Read the Bible Gateway Blog post, Explore the Many Ways Bible Gateway Helps You Study the Bible]
Seasons of Sorrow is published by HarperCollins Christian Publishing, Inc., the parent company of Bible Gateway.
Bio: A pastor, noted speaker, and author of numerous articles, Tim Challies is a pioneer in the Christian blogosphere. Tens of thousands of people visit Challies.com each day, making it one of the most widely read and recognized Christian blogs in the world. Tim is the author of several books, including Visual Theology and Epic: An Around-the-World Journey through Christian History. He and his family reside near Toronto, Ontario.
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