And Still, We Grieve

A friend lost a child. It was devastating.

We don’t see each other often, so it was nearly a year before we finally had a chance to talk and reflect. Mostly, I listened as he wrestled with his pain.

Part of his anguish was dealing with all the bad advice people offered. Their words felt shallow, like a string of clichés you say when you have no idea what else to say. It was as if they were speaking to him in one dimension while he was trying to survive something far more complex.

As we sat beside a pond on a rugged old picnic table, he talked and I listened. I tried not to say much, and certainly tried not to speak in platitudes. I’ve been pondering and wrestling with his words ever since.

If I could redo our conversation, I might share this idea with him.

I didn’t grow up around cars that started on demand. I grew up around broken cars—most of them totaled. Junkyards teach you quickly that a car’s owner’s manual is written for undamaged cars. It tells you what to do when things work the way they’re supposed to. It’s not very helpful when the frame is bent, the electrical system is fried, and random problems keep showing up. After a wreck, you don’t consult the manual as much as you confront reality.

A lot of us live with a version of God that operates like the owner’s manual—one-dimensional, flat, and predictable. We’re told to believe the right things, avoid the wrong things, and then the machinery of life should run smoothly.

If it doesn’t, it must be user error. Read the book again. Tighten the belt. Swap the part. Confess. Pray harder.

But one-dimensional faith—faith that fits neatly in a manual—only works as long as you avoid the wrecks. And sooner or later, wrecks happen.

Wrecks can sometimes reveal a second dimension of God. God stops being a system and becomes a story. Scripture becomes narrative. You start to realize God has angles and depth.

Two-dimensional faith lives in the story rather than the schematic. It doesn’t throw away the owner’s manual; it just acknowledges there’s more going on than maintenance schedules.

If we stay in this second dimension long enough—not as a victim, and not in some self-punishing way, but as an explorer seeking truth—we might discover what the ancient Christian mystics discovered.

They don’t just study God or narrate God. They encounter God. For them, God stops being confined to manuals, and even goes beyond stories. God becomes experiential. Present. Alive. Demanding.

We rightly admire such people. We learn from them. But even they are just spiritual toddlers. Because here is the reality we struggle to grasp: 

God is not one-dimensional, or two, or even three. God is infinite dimensions.

Faith moves from a safe, comfortable, one-dimensional God, to a nuanced, curious, hard-to-explain two-dimensional God. 

Then—if we are lucky and persistent and willing to devote our entire being—faith sometimes moves into a third dimension that is frankly hard to grasp. It’s bewildering. It’s humbling. And it’s certainly beyond my pay grade to understand. I have been at this point, briefly, for just a few seconds, and it made my heart race. 

But I believe it keeps going, because then, when we finally take our nose out of the owner’s manual, and even let go of the idea that God must fit inside a single story or system—even the mystical ones—we might glimpse an infinite God.

We don’t have to understand it. We might not even believe it. But we can hope it. 

And then we have a God who, maybe… just maybe… can make sense of the loss of a child.

But until then, and perhaps even then, we grieve.