The Church and the Complexity of Grief

I was going to write about something different this week, but in light of recent events I feel compelled to speak from the heart.

The church, for all its talk about compassion, often struggles to understand grief. Too often, it tries to dictate how, when, and even who people are allowed to grieve. It rushes to control the narrative, to make emotions neat and “acceptable.” But grief isn’t neat. It’s messy and layered. It can hold relief, sorrow, anger, and even indifference all at the same time.

What the church often forgets is that not every life is mourned in the same way. There is a difference between grieving the fact that a human life was lost and grieving the legacy that person leaves behind. One honors the sacredness of life itself; the other weighs the impact of choices and actions.

When someone who caused deep harm dies, people sometimes feel a strange sense of relief. I’m not a violent person, but even I can understand why—when Hitler killed himself—many felt the world was a little less dangerous. The grief wasn’t gone, but it shifted. It looked different.

This is where the church struggles most. It often wants grief to look like a single emotion—sorrow—and anything else feels uncomfortable, un-Christian, or unloving. But when we erase the complexity of grief, we also erase the voices of those who were harmed. We tell victims that they must honor the memory of their abuser simply because he bore the image of God. That is not compassion.

The truth is that we are capable of holding two realities at once. Charlie Kirk was a man whose words and actions harmed countless people. And at the same time, gun violence is never the answer. Both can be true. Both must be true.

Even Scripture shows us how layered grief can be. When King Saul died, David lamented him (2 Samuel 1). He honored Saul’s role as Israel’s king, even though Saul’s reign had been marked by violence and cruelty. That grief was real, but it was also complicated. David himself would later become a source of both celebration and heartbreak. He was a man after God’s own heart, yet his actions toward Bathsheba and Uriah brought devastation. The stories remind us that grief and legacy have always been tangled.

Jesus also told us to look at the fruit of people’s lives (Matthew 7). By their fruit, we would know them. That means it’s okay to be honest when the fruit is rotten. We don’t need to pretend otherwise just because someone has died.

If the church were more honest, it would give people permission to grieve in ways that are authentic. It would understand that lament sometimes looks like tears, and sometimes looks like a deep exhale of relief. Sometimes it is mourning who someone could have been, while also naming who they chose to be.

Perhaps that is what we need most right now: permission. Permission to grieve honestly. Permission to sit with the discomfort of complex emotions. Permission to hold space for both the sorrow of loss and the relief of release.

Grief doesn’t need to fit into the church’s script. It only needs to be real. And maybe that’s where healing begins.