Grief is the Price We Pay for Love

It is the case is it not, that grief is, at the very least, one of the prices we pay for love? C.S Lewis grieved deeply over his wife's death, writing about it in his remarkable book, A Grief Observed. It was the death of his wife Martha after giving birth, that devastated Thomas Jefferson. Christian philosopher, Nicholas Wolterstorff went through the heart-wrenching tragedy of the death of his twenty-five year old son. Like Lewis, he too wrote a book entitled, Lament for a Son.


Grief is the price we pay for love. Wives and husbands know that, at some point in the future, unless both happen to die at the same time, one will grieve for the other. In most cases children will one day bury their parents, and some parents will mourn the death of a child. This is true for all relationships, including siblings and friends. Yet, in spite of the grief, we continue to love. Lord Tennyson was correct: "'Tis better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all."

God loves us because he is love. Since human beings are made in God's image, the desire to love and be loved are essential to our nature. Since God so loves us, God is also grieved: he is grieved over the almost inexplicable suffering in the world, he mourns with us as our loved ones die, since he loves them too. God is sorrowed by our sin and our continued insistence of living life outside his lordship. God could save himself the pain and just abandon us and the world, but that would not do either; for who can abandon those who are truly loved? It is love that motivates us to stick with each other through "thick and thin." It is love that sent God himself to the cross for us.

Grief is the price we pay for love, but the reward is relationship, which is what God wants from us and for us most of all.