When the Grief Came

“My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” — 2 Corinthians 12:9 (ESV)

It would be dishonest to tell Amanda Smith’s story as one victory after another. Her life held a staggering amount of loss. Her first husband went off to the Civil War and never came back. She buried children — a baby taken by sickness one hard summer while she worked as a cook far from home, and later a little boy, Tom Henry, after weeks of suffering. Out of thirteen brothers and sisters, only she and two others lived to adulthood. Her second marriage, which she had hoped would finally give her a Christian home, turned out lonely and painful; her husband had misled her about his plans and had little patience with her faith.

And through much of it she was poor and working herself to the bone. She took in washing to survive, and she describes standing at the washtub straight through the night — starting at six one morning and working to six the next — so tired she would lean her head on the window ledge to sleep a few minutes, then keep going by lamplight until dawn. This is the real texture of her life: grief and exhaustion stacked on top of each other, with no obvious relief coming.

For a long time her instinct was to try to escape the trials — to pray her way around them, to reach a place in life where the pain would finally stop. Then an older woman named Mother Jones came by one morning while Amanda was crying over the washtub, heartbroken about her husband’s coldness. Amanda poured out all the good things she had done and how unfair it all was. Mother Jones did not tell her the pain would end. She said something else: that what Amanda needed was “enduring grace.” Not a life with no trouble — the strength to stand up inside the trouble. Amanda realized she had spent all her energy “planning to get out of trials, instead of asking God for grace to endure.”

That is a genuinely different idea about faith, and it is worth slowing down for. A lot of people, when they are hurting, are really asking God to make the hard thing disappear — heal it, reverse it, get me out. And sometimes he does. But Amanda learned that the deeper, more reliable gift is grace strong enough to carry you through the thing that does not disappear. The verse she leaned on did not promise her power instead of weakness. It promised power made perfect in weakness — right in the middle of it, not after it is gone.

You are going to lose things and people, some of them badly, some of them unfairly, some of them soon. That is not pessimism; it is just true, and nobody your age is served by pretending otherwise. When it comes, you will be tempted to measure God by whether he removes the pain fast enough, and to feel abandoned when he does not. Amanda would tell you to ask a better question: not only “God, take this away,” but “God, hold me up in this.” She buried more than most of us ever will and did not stop trusting — not because it stopped hurting, but because grace turned out to be sufficient, exactly as promised.

One thing to do: think of a hard thing in your life right now that probably is not going to just vanish. Instead of only praying for it to be removed, start praying — out loud, honestly — for the strength to walk through it well. Then name one person who is grieving something and go sit with them, the way Mother Jones sat with Amanda.