TRANSCRIPT

My name is Tiffany Stein, and I'm an ordained pastor, a writer, and a shepherd of women. I served on staff at a large church in Dallas, Texas—Irving Bible Church—for ten years.

In 2018, my world was rocked. I had preached on the goodness, nearness, and love of God. I had walked with people who were suffering, studied the theology of suffering and lament, and already wrestled with how a good God could allow evil.

I thought I had it in the bag, and then my firstborn son died in April of 2018, having spent all fifty-three days of his precious life in the NICU. In many ways, when I walked out of that NICU, I didn’t just leave David behind. I also felt like I left behind the God I thought I knew.

I couldn’t fathom how a good God would not only let an innocent child die but would also abandon me in my suffering. After David died, I spent nine months in the dark night of the soul wrestling with God and crying out, “Who are you, God? What do you want from me?” It was a season of mourning the God I thought I knew.

But my experience isn’t unique.

As people of faith, we think we know God. But then something tragic, traumatic, or chaotic enters our life, and suddenly God doesn’t fit the expectations or the box or the picture we had painted of him. Perhaps God disappoints us, or he doesn’t come through in the ways we expected. What do we do then? Do we walk away from the faith? Do we wrestle with God? Do we ask the hard questions and remain through the confusion?

Perhaps you or a loved one are asking similar questions right now. While I certainly don’t have all the answers, as a pastor and fellow mourner, it would be my joy and privilege to walk with you through this hard season of wrestling with God in my upcoming book, Mourning God: Grieving Loss, Wrestling with God, and Finding Your Way Back to Life.

Believe it or not, in this painful season, there are gifts still to be found. We can be stripped of the false narratives we believe about God. We can better see the God who comes near, and we can know more fully the self-revealing God: a God of love, comfort, and goodness.

Because somehow, in God’s great mystery, he is good, loving, and powerful—and he allowed David to die. I may not understand it this side of heaven, but this I know: We serve a God of resurrection. And he creates in us a hope, an expectant hope, that doesn’t disappoint.

I hope you’ll journey with me as we go through Mourning God.