Finding Hope After Devastating Loss

Author Biography

Helen has been writing, editing, and proofreading for CBN since 1986. She enjoys cooking, the Oxford comma, learning guitar, and practicing the remains of her Hebrew with her husband and two adult children.

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Helen R. Smith - Senior Proofreader

“Please update your information and give it to the nurse when you go in.” The receptionist handed me a clipboard and a pen.

I took my paperwork and sat down. I started filling in the routine facts as I had done dozens of times before—either for me or for one of my children.

This time was different. I was a new widow. My husband of almost 30 years, suddenly and with no warning, had a heart attack and did not survive. This was my first doctor visit since his death. I went down the list and updated “marital status,” “emergency contacts”… By the time I got to “Have you experienced feelings of sadness?” I wanted to run out of the waiting room sobbing and screaming. The person I was describing in the medical forms was not “me.” What happened to my life, and how could the world just keep heartlessly moving forward?

It was a time of many other “updates” for me. Bible passages I had studied for decades took on new life—especially the book of Job. Job was hit by a nuclear bomb of loss. He mourned the loss of his children, his health, his friends, his wealth, and his standing in the community:

“How I long for the months gone by, for the days when God watched over me, when his lamp shone on my head and by his light I walked through darkness! Oh, for the days when I was in my prime, when God’s intimate friendship blessed my house, when the Almighty was still with me and my children were around me” (Job 29:2-5 NIV)

This was how I felt! I was already well into the process of becoming an “empty nester.” Then one beautiful Palm Sunday, I became a widow by sundown. How could this possibly be God’s plan for our lives? Didn’t He understand that our family unit was everything to us? I mourned, like Job, for the days when “God’s intimate friendship blessed my house.”

Much of human suffering is about loss—death of loved ones, loss of health, of a home, of meaningful work, of a dear pet, of possessions, of hopes and dreams. And at the core of it all is a loss of self—of our identity, of what we believed ourselves and our lives to be. Overwhelming loss can be disorienting when we “lose” the person we once were.

If you have been devastated by loss, please take heart. Our Redeemer lives. Job clung to this (Job 19:25-27), even though he could not yet fully know his Redeemer, who would one day suffer an even greater loss than Job’s—or mine. And his story is given to us so that we may also know our Redeemer lives.

Our Redeemer does not minimize our suffering or deny our pain. Far from indifferent to our loss, He offers something radically healing and transformative: an invitation to walk into our true identity in Him. Every good hope that is lost will be restored. Nothing cherished is forgotten or treated lightly. Jesus asks us to share in His identity—and His sufferings—as beloved sons and daughters of His Father. And that identity forever revokes the life-sentence of desolation that comes with loss. Christ offers more joy, more love, more abundance than we have sorrow. The Good News only gets better as time moves forward. Death is overcome. Our Redeemer lives, and so do we.

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