SEASONS OF SORROW:
The pain of loss and the comfort of God
By Tim Challies
Zondervan Reflective. 192 pages. £15.99
ISBN 978 0 310 136 736
On 3 November 2020, 20-year-old Nicholas Paul Challies collapsed unconscious to the ground at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky. He never revived. In a blink of an eye, Nick Challies went to Jesus.
Upon hearing the news, his parents Tim and Aileen flew out immediately. While on the plane, Tim (a popular blogger and author) had the compulsion to write. He said: ‘I wrote my praise and my lament, my questions and my doubts, my grief and my joy. I wrote through depths of sadness and heights of joy, through terrible fears and agonising pain.’ Tim wrote every day for the year that followed. The 42 short chapters herein are some of what he wrote.
‘I’m hovering in this place between belief and disbelief, between certainty and doubt. I don’t know what to think. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what to feel.’ Yet Tim puts into words what for many of us is inexpressible. He writes of our human experience in loss: the disorientation, the sorrow, the anger, the agony, the darkness, the disappointment. He writes of the Christian’s relationship with death: the brevity of life, the comfort of Jesus, Christ’s victorious resurrection, the surety of reunion and an eternal home. It is a memoir of grief, but it is also a powerful theology of death.
The tone and content is refreshing, as Tim draws upon the works of authors like J. R. Miller, F. B. Meyer, Theodore Cuyler, Thomas De Witt Talmage and John Flavel, amongst others. Just as they became Tim’s companions in grief, Tim becomes ours.
Death teaches us to live
Recently I have found myself drawn to books on death. Not least because this year has been for our family a season of sorrow, but also because meditating on death makes one live well.
Treat each day as its own little life. Each morning marks the creation of a new day, and each evening marks its passing away. The key to living life well is to live each day well. So begin each day as a fresh opportunity to bring glory to God, and close each day as if you will never see another.
As Christians we do not talk about death enough. And we do not face it with the confidence that those united with the resurrected Lord should. In this, our brother Tim Challies strengthens us.
