Grief: The Emotion That Keeps on Giving!

Host: Dr. Jamie Mitchell

Guest: Andy Farmer

Note: This transcript is taken from a Stand in the Gap Today program aired on 4/14/26. To listen to the podcast, click HERE.

Disclaimer: While reasonable efforts have been made to provide an accurate transcription, the following is a representation of a mechanical transcription and as such, may not be a word for word transcript. Please listen to the audio version for any questions concerning the following dialogue.

Jamie Mitchell:

Welcome friends to another edition of Stand in the Gap Today. I’m your host, Jamie Mitchell. Statistics tell us that approximately 13% of Americans, that would be 12 years and older, experiencing right now depression. Over a lifetime, 28% of US adults will battle some kind of depressive struggle. And of those experienced depression, more than 30% of people attribute their depression to grief. As I began to probe these facts, I kept finding a connection between mental health issues and the ability to deal with grief in our lives. One can conclude that if we can help people deal with grief, much of their emotional issues will be minimized. What is interesting is I have found as a believer in Christ, as a pastor for four decades, the church does not do a good job discussing the issue of grief and adequately equipping God’s people to understand this most common emotion.

As a matter of fact, if we do get our hearts and our minds around this subject of grief, we may even grow through it and not just groan because of it. And with all of that in mind, today on Standing the Gap, we want to pull back the curtain on the topic of grief and gain insights that will help us personally and prepare us to help other believers. And to help me as a return guest. And what I would consider a perfect person to help us navigate this issue of grief, Pastor Andy Farmer has served for, well, 40 some odd years at Covenant Fellowship in Chad’s Ford PA. God’s used Andy to counsel, encourage, and equip believers to find biblical answers to face life issues. He’s authored a number of books and one of them in particular, real peace that I think will be great help for you.

Andy, my dear friend, welcome back to Stand in the Gap.

Andy Farmer:

It’s great to be on the show, Jamie. It’s great to talk to you again.

Jamie Mitchell:

Well, it’s great to have you and especially about this subject of grief. Andy, let’s get right at it. Grief can be a huge subject, and I found that everybody has their own definition idea. Can you help define what grief is? Where does it come from? And is it wrong for Christians to grieve?

Andy Farmer:

Yeah. Well, you actually said it well in your introduction. It is one of the most common experiences anyone will have. We all die. We all experience death. And so therefore, in our experience in life, we will encounter the death of loved ones. And now we’ll talk a little bit about grief separate from death experiences, but everyone will face death in life. So grief will be a topic for everyone to experience. One of the things that I try to do is I … When you’re thinking about grief, there are two concepts to keep in mind. One is the concept of bereavement, and one is the concept of grief. And bereavement typically is the experience of loss. The fact that I lose something or you lose something or someone is an experience. Grief is the emotional and often physical and mental response to what you lose. So it’s good to keep in mind because everybody will have losses.

Grief is how we deal with those losses and what those losses produce in us. So I think, yeah, all Christians will experience grief. The Bible is full of grief and people who grieve and doesn’t ever treat grief like a sin.

Jamie Mitchell:

Andy, it would seem then that God has built in us this ability to grieve or this grief response in us. Am I right about that? Is this just part of the way God has made us?

Andy Farmer:

I don’t think we were designed by God to grieve. I think grief is a result of the fall. When sin enters the world, death enters the world and with death comes grief. And so I think grief is the experience that all humans have because of the fall. And just like injustice and other experiences we have that God didn’t design for people, but they are part of our experience now. What God has done is he’s given us redemption in Christ to help us to not only know how to grieve, but to find meaning in grief when we experience it.

Jamie Mitchell:

Andy, I’ve met Christians over the years who, whether they articulate it this way or not, they portray this idea that as a Christian, you shouldn’t grieve. God is in control. There’s no reason to be sad. There’s no reason to mourn. That can’t be healthy. There must be some backlash that that kind of approach to grief causes.

Andy Farmer:

Yeah, I’m sure it does. But we’re all sort of wired differently. There are people who … And that’s one of the interesting things about grief is what you’re grieving over maybe something that wouldn’t really bother me. Some people might grieve over, for example, the end of a season of parenting where your last child moves out. For some people, that might be a time of intense grief. For other people, it might be a time of, “Oh, now it’s a new start.” So many things in life factor into what we feel lost over, that we don’t sort of presume that every loss is an experience. The same with even death. It’s one thing to … My mother passed away at 94 last, about a year ago, and there’s grief with that because I loved her and I miss her, but I also recognize that she was suffering and there was a certain amount of peace and rest that she no longer suffered.

That’s different than the sudden loss of somebody through a tragic circumstance. And so I think that for Christians who say you shouldn’t grieve, I just wonder what you’re doing if you’re not grieving. That’s my question.

Jamie Mitchell:

Yeah, because that sadness, that emotion, it has to go somewhere and trying to repress it or push it down, that’s not good either. We’re going to talk about the importance of mourning and finding healthy ways to express maybe a deep sadness that comes into our lives. Or when you do lose something, listen, when you lose something, you have an affection towards them. You love them. You love being around them. You see a void or an absence. All of that is real and all of that has to be dealt with. And that’s what’s so important. Friends, we’re going to discuss this issue of grief. It’s seemingly a natural and necessary response that comes out of our lives when we deal with loss in our lives. And we all face loss. And so we’re all going to grieve at some level in some way. When we come back, what kind of losses do we face?

Andy’s mentioned one, the issue of death, but we want to talk more about additional losses that may bring about the response of grief and how do we respond. We’re trying to help you and equip you today to walk in victory here at Stand in the Gap today. Well, thank you for staying with us today. For this most important discussion, Pastor Andy Farmer is with us and we’re trying to take a deep dive into the subject of grief. As was stated, one of the most common emotions that we deal with, and Andy tried to help us to understand that there is a difference between bereavement and grief, the loss of something, but also the emotion that affects us, that emotional response that happens. Now, most times we only think about grief when there is a death of some kind, but grief comes from all kinds of losses.

Andy, from your 40 years of pastoral and ministry experience, there must be some common losses that we might face that could fuel or ignite grief. As you’ve been dealing with people all these years, what kinds of losses might people have in their life that will trigger grief to come about in their emotions?

Andy Farmer:

Yeah, that’s great. I mentioned one, which is, and I’ve seen this a lot, when people who’ve been parenting for maybe 20 or 25 years are no longer parenting and they lose that role, that can come with a certain amount of grief. You sort of realize, “I’ll never have that again.” That’s a common experience and grief is realizing I’ll never have that again. So parenting loss can be that way, retirement. I’ve seen folks really struggle emotionally with grief, realizing that I’m no longer in a career, loss of a career. One that’s very common that people can make light of, but it’s not insignificant is a dear pet. If someone has had a pet that they’ve had for years and that’s been a companion, that can be a loss. A childhood home, leaving a childhood home, betrayal. You can lose relationships through betrayal. What you lose, you and I might lose the same thing, but it might affect me differently than you.

But I think those small grief experiences happen throughout life and are punctuated by the big losses that will really mark us and can turn out for good for our lives or can actually bring a lot of negative fruit and wreckage in our lives.

Jamie Mitchell:

You know, Andy, having ministered for years to younger congregations, I did a lot more weddings and baby dedications and baptisms than I did. In recent years, I’ve been thrust into ministering to a lot more seniors, I think probably because I’m getting old myself, but I really locked into this whole issue of grief when I met a myriad of seniors who, as you were saying, all of a sudden they had to move from their home, they changed location, their kids told them they shouldn’t be driving anymore, so they took their car away from them. And the ladies lost their hairstylist that they had had for 25 years and the list goes on. And I saw happening in this large group of seniors who had these similar experiences, but didn’t have a death experience. They hadn’t lost someone recently. They were showing signs of grief. And I think that that’s one of the things that I hope people pick up today is that we really need to monitor how those types of losses affect each of us and at what level they affect us.

Isn’t that really an important thing to learn about yourself and about this issue of grief?

Andy Farmer:

Certainly. And I think for people who are aging, and I’m in my 60s now, one of the things that happens is grief accelerates. There are more and more things you lose. You lose health, you lose relationships. You go to more funerals when you’re older, friends, even friends that maybe you haven’t kept up with that every passing affects you. And my grandmother used to listen to this radio program she’s in down in rural Georgia and it would be the obituaries. They would just read the obituaries on the local radio. And as a teenager, I’m going, “Man, how depressing that is. ” But what was she doing? She was trying to keep up with all the losses in her life. And so I think there is, I think for younger people, it’s also it’s people to recognize that older folks are dealing with grief and anticipation of death in a way that’s very real and very, very relevant on a day-to-day experience.

And so that’s what I’ve learned ministering to people in my own life

Jamie Mitchell:

Too. Andy, I don’t want to ignore the fact that death and the loss of a loved one certainly brings grief, but depending upon the intensity and suddenness of death, our grief could intensify. Are there degrees of grief that we could experience depending upon the type of loss? And does that mean that we need to learn and understand how to respond differently?

Andy Farmer:

Yeah. I mean, I think they used to talk about the five stages of grief, and that’s kind of no longer viewed. I think culture changes and our culture avoids negative things. Being the fluent culture, we can largely avoid things when we don’t go to hospitals. That’s why we tend to move our older people to a place where we don’t deal with them. And so I think any losses really affect us. Interestingly, we have more ability to shield ourselves from losses than any other generation or people on earth, but we are more hung up on these things than anyone else because we live in avoidance. So I would say, yeah, certainly a sudden death, unexpected. There are other things that come into play. There are jagged edges in certain situations where maybe it’s a relationship that was never mended or a relationship that you desired to have.

There are a lot of things that can shape grief, but I try to, when I’m ministering to people, I try to walk, accept that person where they’re at in their story and their loss is embedded in a bigger story in their life. And if I’m going to help them, I need to know more about their whole story and what this means for them. What I think it should mean is not the issues. What does it mean for them? Well,

Jamie Mitchell:

That’s good because I wrote something down to ask you, and that is, Andy, as a pastor, you get a lot of these opportunities. And so just give me in a couple of minutes here, just initially, if I were to sit down with you and you know that I’ve experienced some kind of loss in my life, what are you trying to get me to communicate or how are you trying to help me facilitate to be able to communicate what I’m feeling?

Andy Farmer:

Well, I’ve learned, again, if it’s somebody who’s just had a loss in the last week or two and it’s raw, that’s one thing. If you’re talking to somebody six months out afterward, that’s another kind of way approach. But basically, I want to come alongside. I want to sit with somebody. The Jews called it Sit Shiva where you sit with somebody and you become a part of their safe environment. So before you speak, are you a safe person for them to talk to? There are people who are well-meaning, who just speak too much, too early, and speak the wrong things, and they just don’t realize it’s not helpful. And so what I want to do is I want to read the situation, ask God by spirit to give me a wisdom and discernment and compassion, and then let the Lord guide our conversation. I don’t presume what a person should be sharing with me.

Sometimes it’s going to unfold bit by bit. Sometimes it’s going to be little layers of story that I hear. Sometimes it’s going to be anger. Sometimes it’s going to be fear. So many emotions, but somebody who’s grieving needs to feel like they’re in an environment where they can be what they are in that moment without someone evaluating them too heavily. So I think that’s the first step.

Jamie Mitchell:

And as they do that, it’s okay if there’s confusion. It’s okay if there is doubt and anger and those things are a part of the grieving experience to even identify those things and what you’re feeling.

Andy Farmer:

And didn’t Jesus model that with Mary and Martha and Lazarus? He let them be raw. He let them say things that weren’t true because he cared more about their hearts and he was actually moved by them. He weeps for them and for the situation. He weeps because people face death and he knows he’s the resurrection, but now he’s not going to be shown that way to them until ultimately we are all resurrected in Christ. But I think that heart of Jesus is really important. And I think the other thing too, I think is to recognize we don’t come in with big scale platitudes. We don’t come in talking about big theological concepts. We want to present the Jesus who met with Mary and Martha. We want to present the Jesus who comes alongside, who knows our griefs, who knows our sorrows. And at the end of the day, they need to be engaging him, not my theological concepts that I think are necessary.

Those can come, but they’re usually not best brought before you bring in who Jesus is as their comforter.

Jamie Mitchell:

Hey, Billy Graham once wrote a book on grief and he said these words, “We all grieve and it hurts.” And when we come back, we respond to grief by mourning. What is that? Is there a biblical and godly way to mourn? Stay with us. Don’t go anywhere. Well, welcome back to Stand in the Gap. If you’re just joining us, we’re looking at the subject of grief. It is a common emotion that we will all face because we all face loss, but at times we avoid talking about it. Andy Farmer is our guest. He’s a pastor. He’s somebody who is acquainted with ministering to people in the church setting and has probably encountered many people who both have been very open about their grief and even those who he have known, as I have known, people who have experienced losses, but they avoid dealing with it.

Andy, I want to talk about mourning in this segment, but before we do that, why do people avoid talking about grief or even admitting that they’re struggling with a loss in their life?

Andy Farmer:

Well, I think part of it’s because they don’t know who to trust to talk about it. Trust is a huge issue for people. And if I’ve got something very personal and I open it up to you and then you end up sharing with other people because you thought it just would be helpful for you two, that could be very difficult for me. Or if the way you speak to me, I feel like you’re not really getting it. I don’t want to have a conversation with you. And so what ends up happening and many people … There’s also, Jamie, there’s a reality that when we’re grieving, our ability to think is foggy, our ability to form what we think is … It can be very difficult to even speak about it, even if you want to.

Emotion can be overwhelming, and people will talk about, “I’m just tired of crying today. I don’t want to talk about this. I’m tired of living with this. ” So I think that it’s always going to be hard. Other people will talk very freely about it, but the way they talk about it can alarm people and they can respond poorly to that. So I don’t think there’s a, here’s what good talk is about grief. I think you’re dealing with somebody who is processing a lot of emotions and a lot of thoughts and maybe some serious questions about God, because maybe what often what happens is loss reveals what we really trust. And if our trust has been built on things that aren’t found in Christ, then a loss in that area is going to be particularly hard for us.

Jamie Mitchell:

Yes. Yeah, no, that’s exactly. I think trust issue and I think the fog of loss is for sure a big part. Andy, if we experience loss, then we’ll more than likely experience this grief. And if we are grieving, then we need to do something with it and we need to learn in some respects how to mourn in order to respond in a healthy way. What does it mean to mourn and is there good mornings and bad mourning?

Andy Farmer:

Yeah. In the way we’re talking about it, I would understand mourning is what am I doing in my grief? What’s occupying my thoughts, my time, how am I expressing it? How am I commemorating the loss? How am I dealing with it? So I would not so much say there’s good and there’s bad, but I think there’s healthy mourning and there’s unhealthy morning. There are things that you will do that can help you get through day by day, hour by hour, sometimes minute by minute that can be healthy. And there are things that can actually exacerbate the sense of loss or make other matters worse. One of the things that many people who counsel people in grieving is one of the questions you ask is, tell me about, are you drinking? If someone falls into drinking through grief, that can be heavily destructive. If someone is overly isolated, they withdraw.

It’s understandable that you don’t want to go out in social circumstances, that you don’t like being around people who are having a good time. When you’re with people and they aren’t thinking about your loss, you’re … One person said like this, “My problem with being among people is that nobody is there in a way that I can relate to them. People who are not thinking about what I’ve lost, I feel like I can’t connect to, people who are focused on it, I feel like I don’t need you. I can do this by myself.” So that sense of relational people, all that’s going to happen. And so I think healthy morning is recognizing that, yes, I’m going to probably need more solitude, but I cannot have isolation. I’m going to need some breaks, but I can’t have escapes from this. I’m going to need to move on and sense with just managing my life, but I can’t do that and avoid the emotional experiences I have.

So there’s all these balances that I think could result in a healthy morning where you don’t minimize what you’re going through, but it doesn’t so define you that you, it actually has a detrimental effect on you as a person. Andy,

Jamie Mitchell:

Let me make an observation and then I want you to weigh in on this. The whole culture of when people die and we begin this bereavement time, this morning time has changed drastically. Here’s what I mean. When I was a kid, I came from a big family and when there was a loss in our family, it could be like a three day event. I mean, I remember being at a funeral home sitting there for at least a day or two and seeing people come by at viewing times. And then we had a service and then we were at the church and then we went to the graveside. And after the graveside, we had a dinner. I mean, it was an event. We saw a lot of people, there was a lot of conversation and there seemed to be used to allow mourning to happen, but today somebody dies.

The cremation, the percentage of people being cremated is much, much higher today. The likelihood of having a funeral home, having a viewing, having a funeral service has been minimized. And even if you have a service, a lot of times they have this celebration of life, memorial service, and it could be weeks after the person is gone. In the 40 years I’ve been a pastor, I’ve seen a dramatic change in just that alone. Is that worth considering looking at? And is that helping mourning or not helping mourning? What do you think?

Andy Farmer:

Yeah. Well, I think particularly for Christians, the church has always been the center of bereavement and grief and loss. How many churches, they had cemeteries on site because they wanted to see the continuity between who the church is at the moment and who the church has been through history. And so these days it’s much more difficult to do that and it’s not likely to happen in new church buildings where you basically have to have everything paid for parking and you don’t have that kind of land. But I think that’s a change in the culture. I do visit old cemeteries because I do a lot of work in history and you sort of recognize this whole community for generations was defined by the centrality of the church. People don’t live that way anymore. The centrality is not the community of faith. It’s the community of the sports.

It’s community of work. It’s community of school. And so it’s very difficult to get everyone from these various worlds to one place to remember and reflect on the person. And then generationally, people are living all over the country sometimes and are not connected. I don’t want to say that we need to go back to the good old days because change just happens. But I think that combined with the idea that in an American Western culture, we can relegate the dying experience to the periphery of our lives leaves us unprepared to mourn together as people. And so people tend to make it short … I’ll say this and maybe you have another question before the break, but I do funerals for believers and for unbelievers, and it is markedly tragically different in the way that takes place. And what I hear from people as they’re in these services, and it grieves me when people grieve without a hope in Christ.

Jamie Mitchell:

Yeah, no, for certain. Just watching this, and you mentioned something, I think it’s worth noting, you said the word, how do we memorialize or how do we remember? And no matter what the loss is, it is good to remember. I mean, if you lose a job and it’s painful or you lose a career, there still should be an opportunity to go back and remember what you gained from it, the things you learned, the relationships that you had, the funny stories, the difficulties, the challenges, all of that, friends, is part of the mourning process and so important. And that is why one of the responses we have What to be careful of is isolation. And even though we respect want to be alone, it’s important to verbalize, to talk, to share, to remember. Well, when we wrap things up, I want to consider the role of comfort and being comforted, but also how we use our grief to comfort others.

And maybe there’s something full circle that God could do through our grief experience. Don’t go anywhere. Stay with us for the last sake. Stand in the gap today. Well, this has been a tremendous discussion today as Pastor Andy Farmer of Covenant Fellowship in Pennsylvania has been giving us a tutorial on grief. We haven’t really discussed it, but Andy wrote a wonderful book called Real Peace. And I want to encourage you to go to Amazon and get that book. Peace, we’re all trying to seek it. We’re also trying to find it in different ways, but we need to know what real peace is. And when we’re going through grief, it’s that peace, the peace of God. And Andy, I want to read, if I can, my favorite passage when I have to either go through grief or I’m helping somebody. And it’s two Corinthians one, and it says this, “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and the God of all comfort who comforts us in our affliction or we can replace that with our loss or our grief so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God.

For as we share abundantly in Christ suffering so through Christ, we share abundantly in comfort too. And if we’re afflicted, it’s for your comfort and salvation. And if we are comforted, it is for your comfort which you experience when you patiently endure the same suffering we suffer. Our hope is for you unshaken, for we know that as you share in our suffering, you will also share in our comfort. Andy, throughout that passage is a word that keeps repeating itself. Comfort, comfort, comfort. What role does comfort play in the grief process and what is comfort? Well,

Andy Farmer:

It’s interesting, at least in the first couple verses there that you wrote, comfort, the Greek word, the root coming alongside. It means to come alongside. It’s used in various places in the scripture, certainly used in reference to the Holy Spirit, who is our prayer who comes alongside us. But it’s also used for various ways we come alongside one another. There are times where that word is used to … We’re to encourage one another. There’s times where it’s used to exhort one another. Here, it’s used to comfort because the nature of this word, comfort, this Greek word, is adapting yourself to the need of the other person. And so when it comes to grief to come alongside in comfort, means I need to not come in with my own agenda. I need to come in and stand alongside somebody and help them bear a weight.

It’s the same word that actually that Paul uses in Galatians six: one. Bear one another’s burdens. It’s the same word. It’s the idea that we’re not coming in and telling somebody how to think. We’re not coming in and agreeing with everything they say. We’re coming alongside and our demeanor and our words are intended to help somebody bear up under the burden that they need to carry. We can’t carry grief for people. We can’t take it off of them, but we can stand alongside them so they know that they’re not alone. And whatever we say flows out of that heart. And I found my experience is I can … I rarely know the best thing to say. When in doubt, edit yourself. And when you speak, you speak tentatively.

You don’t speak as if you understand the will of God clearly for their lives. You speak as one who has been comforted by others, has been comforted by God. And if you’ve ever had God’s comfort, you realize that it realigns your soul Godwardly. And I think that’s our goal. We cannot remove or get rid of people’s struggling emotions. We cannot get them to move faster through their mourning process than they might want to move, but we can stand alongside them and be part of that ministry of the Holy Spirit where they feel the presence of God and experience the presence of God in our words and in our demeanor.

Jamie Mitchell:

Amen. Andy, I know you work with a lot of pastors as I now do. And here’s what I found. I found that pastors suffer a lot of loss. They have grief in their life, but because they are the ones who everybody is always looking to for comfort, they face their losses alone a lot of times, and I think they can experience compounded grief. What would you say or share with pastors about grief and managing their own soul?

Andy Farmer:

Well, the first thing I would do is I would actually speak to churches. I would speak to your audience who are church members or church leaders or deacons or elders who work with a pastor. Do you have an environment where your pastor can share their losses? Or are you creating an environment where they are having to perform at a level that nobody else in the church has to perform at? If so, are you really setting that pastor up for eventual failure or heartbreak? I’ve been blessed to be part of a pastoral team where we’ve shared our grief together over decades. We’ve walked with each other. We’ve cried with each other. We’ve been at funerals of family members. We have been at bedsides with each other. And so it’s a true blessing to me that I never grieve alone. If I experience a loss, I’ve got other pastors coming to me and standing alongside of me, and they know me well enough to know how to help me.

So I speak first to churches. That’s a culture thing that I would encourage you to build. To pastors, I would say, do what you can to help your church know how to care for you.

And that might mean conversations with deacon boards or elders or whatever structure you have there, so that the church can learn how to care for you. And then for yourself, pay attention to your soul because I think pastor grief, they sneak up on you. There are things that other people wouldn’t think about. I would say demonic aspect to sometimes where things that shouldn’t affect you the way they do, you have an enemy who is trying to use that to bring discouragement. And so I think for pastors, recognize that you’re going to experience these losses that other people don’t understand, but it doesn’t mean you need to carry them alone.

Jamie Mitchell:

Amen. And boy, I’ll tell you, when the body of Christ is working together, whether it’s a leader or just a layperson in the pew, and they are sensitive and aware of the reality and the power of grief in a person’s life, and the effect of loss in a person’s life, and we come around each other. And as Andy said, we are the one who comes alongside and we offer the comfort that God has given us. It’s a beautiful, beautiful thing. Well, we could keep going. And what’s interesting is that for this subject that we do not like to discuss, we probably have a lot of questions. And I know that we’re just scratching the surface and it’s been so helpful. Andy, thank you again. You are always a blessing, my friend, and we love having you on our program. Friends, if after today, you realize that you might be grieving and you haven’t maybe mourned well, you didn’t have somebody to go to, let me encourage you to seek out a pastor or a trusted, godly, mature believer.

Share your heart with them. Be open about your loss. The first step is always acknowledging the difficulty, the loss, the problem, the struggle, and the God of all comfort will meet that need. I believe it. I’ve experienced. I know it. That’s what we’re here for. So thank you for being with us again. We hope today has comforted and encouraged you. And until tomorrow, this is Jamie Mitchell from Stand in the Gap Today. God bless you.