Everyone has a story. Your story is shaped by the culture you live in. In my city, we’ve absorbed the story of success, which whispers that we’re only as valuable as our last achievement or our most recent promotion. We also buy into the story of optimization, where we think if we just have the right supplements, peptides, and diets, we can finally feel secure. We’re driven by the exhausting, unspoken script that says we must build a résumé that’s both professionally and socially impressive enough to justify our space in the world.
These stories are felt. They’re embodied. They live in our imaginations and dictate our emotions. But what happens when the script fails? What happens when you follow all the rules and achieve all the goals, and the bottom still falls out?
Not long ago, I watched The Princess Bride with my kids. Toward the end, the swordsman Inigo Montoya finally confronts the six-fingered man who had killed his father. As Montoya is about to defeat his long-sought enemy, he says, “Offer me money.” “Yes,” says the man. Montoya continues, “Offer me everything I ask for.” “Anything you want,” the man pleads. Montoya responds, “I want my father back.”
What happens when you follow all the rules, achieve all the goals, and the bottom still falls out?
I began to cry. I’ve seen this movie a dozen times. I’ve watched that scene without tears for decades. But not anymore. I wanted my father back too. He died a few years ago, but the grief doesn’t leave you. It doesn’t leave, because no amount of money, power, or achievement can return what you’ve lost. The six-fingered man is dead, and Montoya’s father is still gone.
This is where every story other than Christianity fails. Identity, power, freedom, morality, truth, happiness, and progress—none of them can give me an answer that will sustain me through the aftermath of my father’s death. Earlier in The Princess Bride, we’re told, “Death cannot stop true love. All it can do is delay it for a while.” For anyone who has no hope beyond death, that statement is a lie and a fantasy.
What if there was a story that didn’t erase our culture’s stories but completed them? Whether you’re a committed Christian or unsure and skeptical, it’s worth exploring whether a more beautiful story is out there, one large enough to address our deepest needs and longings. The Christian story doesn’t just critique our stories; it completes them. How?
Completing My Story of Grief
The Christian story completes many of our stories, but in my grief I needed its view on love. The Bible asserts that God is love (1 John 4:8), and we acknowledge that the world is made for love. Real love is sacrificial commitment that seeks someone’s flourishing simply because he or she is worthy of it.
Where does this love come from? At the center of the universe isn’t some vague deity; it’s the triune God—the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit who exist in what Jonathan Edwards calls “infinitely dear and incomprehensible mutual love.” Three persons pouring infinite love into each other with unimaginable joy and power—“the fountain of love” that “overflows in streams and rivers of love and delight, enough for all to drink at, and to swim in, yea, so as to overflow the world as it were with a deluge of love.” This is the heart of reality. Love isn’t something God does; love is who God is.
But if the center of the universe is an overflowing fountain of love, why is our world so sad? Why is there so much hurt and isolation?
The Christian story says it’s because humanity walked away from the fountain. Beginning with Adam and Eve in the garden, but continuing into our own lives, we think we can find life without God. So we built our own cisterns in our careers, our bank accounts, our romantic relationships, hoping they would satisfy our deepest needs. But they don’t contain enough water to quench our thirst. These water sources cannot give us ultimate meaning. They were never designed to provide it. The Bible’s story shows that though we walked away from God, he doesn’t walk away from us. He plunged himself into our drought.
We see it most clearly on the cross at Golgotha. Rather than demanding that we serve his flourishing, he served ours. Rather than requiring us to die for him, he died for us. This is the self-giving, costly, joyfully sacrificial love at the center of the universe. That’s why the key to human flourishing is to love and seek love from others.
When we put our trust in this story, the eternal love that flows between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit now enfolds us into it. Edwards tried to capture this when he said that we’ll all pour back “love into the fountain of love, whence they are supplied and filled with love and with glory . . . and thus they will live and reign forever and ever.”
Edwards is saying that the best moments of human love we experience—when we’re truly known and loved, feeling the delight of intimacy—aren’t illusions of reality but rather previews of a greater one. This is what Jesus means when he declares, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6). He’s saying, “The deepest longings of the human heart for meaning, truth, and life are ultimately met in knowing and being with me.”
What I Thought I Lost, I Found in Jesus
If the center of reality is a Person, the ultimate tragedy of human existence is the loss of persons. This is where theology meets our experience. For me, this this happened on a Sunday morning exactly one year after my father’s death. The topic of my sermon, planned months in advance, was how to praise God. How could I preach about praising God when in my grief I was struggling so much with praising him myself?
To prepare, I returned to a funeral sermon Edwards preached in 1741 at his uncle’s burial, titled “The Sorrows of the Bereaved Spread Before Jesus.” Toward the end, Edwards turned to his aunt and her weeping children with words that cut to the heart:
Children . . . now mourning over a dear departed father, [wondering] where to go and what to do. You will no longer have your father’s wisdom to guide you, his tender love to comfort and delight you, and his affectionate care to guard and assist you. . . . But in the blessed Jesus, your father’s Lord and Redeemer, you may have much more than all those things. Your father’s virtues that made him so great a blessing to you, were but the image of what is in Christ.
And then Edwards went on to say to the children, in effect, “As great as your father was, everything that made him great—the love he gave you, the wisdom he had—all of it came from Jesus. So when you go to Jesus, you realize you haven’t lost your father; you’ve gained everything your father was always about.”
The best moments of human love we experience—when we’re truly known and loved, feeling the delight of intimacy—aren’t illusions of reality but rather previews of a greater one.
At this moment, sitting alone in my study with my father’s notes, tears welled up, but not tears of despair. My story, fused with the greater story of what Jesus is doing in this world, means my father isn’t gone, because everything that was good about him and that I loved about him came from Jesus.
For anyone who has lost a father, mother, or friend, the good and honorable aspects of what you lost can be accessed in Jesus anytime you choose. You want that comfort? Jesus is there. You want that kindness? Jesus is there. You want that wisdom? Jesus has it. You miss that patience? It’s all there in Jesus.
What do we do with our sorrows and sadness? We don’t ignore them, detach from them, or overspiritualize them. We plunge them into the character and love of God. Plunge your loss of family, friends, fame, and fortune into God’s love in the finished work of Jesus, and you’ll find praise and joy oozing out and eventually bursting forth. In Jesus, love really does win. Death really is just a delay. I will get my father back.
Put Your Story into His
This is what it means to let Christ’s story complete yours. Every good desire, every partial truth, in every human story finds its fulfillment in him. Whenever we’re downcast, it’s because at some level we’ve forgotten that Jesus truly defeated death. That knowledge—that the worst that can happen to us has been defeated—changes everything. Will you let it change you?
Dad has been gone for a while now. I thought I’d never gain access to his wisdom, heart, kindness, or encouragement again. As I rooted myself in the story of Jesus, however, I began to see how absence can reveal presence. Only after my father was gone did I realize how often I went to my dad instead of to my heavenly Father in prayer. Since Dad’s death, I’ve called out more to Jesus, and I’ve needed him more. The truth is, he was always there; I just wasn’t seeking him to the same degree.
Isn’t it a wonder that God can take our suffering and sadness and weave them into a larger story of hope and redemption? He uses what most hurts us, not to signal the end of our lives but to reveal all he has in store for us. What are you seeking instead of him? What cultural story, what false hope, what insufficient narrative are you clinging to? Could the absence of what you thought you needed be the very opening through which Jesus enters?
Perhaps the absence of what you miss most will become the way for you to see Jesus’s presence. Maybe the moment you think your story has gone off-script is the time it’s being joined to God’s greater story of redemption and renewal. It’s a story that invites us to bring our deepest sorrows to a Savior who meets us in our grief and then does something about it on the cross.
Seeing Jesus changes our story. If you place Jesus at the center of your life, his presence will not make the absences you feel go away. But you will find that the things that once gave you joy—the things you miss or that may be gone forever—have their ultimate home in him. Will you plunge your sadness, sorrows, and disappointments into his love?
Here are three practices to help you do just that.
1. Gaze at Jesus in Scripture and prayer.
Don’t just read for information, but keep looking until what you read becomes real.We know how to read documents to analyze the content, and we need to bring that same rigor to reading Scripture.
At the same time, you’re not just to read Scripture; you’re to let Scripture read you. To gaze at Scripture means to linger on the text until God’s character becomes real to you. Ask this: If I believed this more deeply today than yesterday, how would my life look different?
As you fill your mind with biblical truths, you can move what’s in your head into your heart. When you pray, don’t just present your requests. Sit in his presence. The difference between having simply a cognitive understanding of Jesus and having an experience of his love and grace is that you don’t just know a lot about God but actually experience his love.
2. Seek out community and opportunities to love and serve.
The Christian story is inherently communal. We aren’t just individuals finding personal meaning; we’re members of a body—part of the family of God. Alone, every cultural narrative exerts maximum power. In true community—not just casual attendance and not just doing networking exercises—you find people who can speak truth to you even when you’ve forgotten it.
When you love and serve others, you don’t have to be the author of your own story. You don’t have to be at the center. This is the process by which the gospel message gets into your very bones as you live it out in relationships. The Christian story says we find our life by losing it. We discover joy by giving it away.
3. See how your story is complete in the story to come.
The cross is where Jesus says, “My life for yours.” When that becomes your story, it changes how you live, whom you love, what you prioritize, and what gives you meaning and happiness.
For anyone who has lost a father, mother, or friend, the good and honorable aspects of what you lost can be accessed in Jesus anytime you choose.
The Christian story isn’t only about the past and what Jesus did, nor only about the present and the way we live today. It’s also about the future and what’s still to come. In Revelation, we glimpse how it ends: we see a new heaven and a new earth where God lives with his people, every tear is wiped away, death is no more, the broken are healed, the lost are found, and everything sad is made untrue (21:1–4).
Grabbing hold of this future hope will shape the way we live right now. When you suffer, you suffer with hope, knowing the end hasn’t yet come. When you grieve, you grieve with hope, knowing you haven’t lost everything. The gospel narrative is the story that’s big enough to hold all the beauty and brokenness of this world. It’s big enough to hold all the glory and grief of human existence. Don’t just believe this story. Live it.
Let it become so deeply embedded in your imagination that you see everything and everyone through its lens. As we do, it’ll protect us from all the incomplete stories and allow us to live with grace and boldness amid our culture’s narratives. As we marvel at the gospel, we can live in the reality that it’s not just one more story among many but rather the lens through which we make sense of all the other stories of our lives.
The Gospel Coalition