Good Grief, Jesus: Writing This Book Has Changed Me

I think I crossed a line while polishing Chapter Six.

Not a deadline. Not a word count. Nothing I could mark off on a publishing schedule. Somewhere in the writing, this book stopped being something I believed and became something that was happening to me.

I know how that sounds. Writers can get a little grand about their own books. I do not mean that the manuscript floated down from heaven or that every sentence arrived fully formed. Some of them fought me for days. Some still are. I mean something simpler, and honestly more uncomfortable: I can no longer write about grief from a safe distance.

Good Grief, Jesus began with a conviction. The life, death, and resurrection of Christ reveal a pattern of transformation that we do not merely believe. We live it. Change leads to grief. Grief, carried honestly and in relationship, changes us from the inside out. Something dies. Something waits. Something is eventually reborn.

I had the framework. I had years of clinical experience sitting with people whose lives had been split into before and after. I understood attachment, nervous-system regulation, co-regulation, trauma, grief, and integration. I had language for all of it. But information is not integration.

Writing this book has forced me to follow Jesus slowly. Slower than I wanted to, apparently. I could not jump from Lazarus walking out of the tomb to Easter morning without first sitting with Jesus as He wept. I could not write about surrender in Gethsemane without noticing that before Jesus gave the Father His yes, He told the truth about His no. I could not write about the Cross as a pattern of transformation without looking at Judas, Peter, Mary, the women who remained, and the people whose imagined future with Jesus collapsed overnight.

Then I reached Chapter Six.

The chapter begins where the previous one ends: somebody stays.

The women stay near the Cross. The Beloved Disciple stays. Jesus looks at His mother and gives her another person to love and be loved by. He does not explain what is happening to her. He does not offer a theological interpretation of her pain. He gives her a person. He makes a relationship among those who will have to keep living after Him.

While writing about that, I found this sentence:

We are received before we are renewed.

I stopped there. As a therapist, I can explain why that sentence makes sense. Grief is an attachment experience. The body reaches for someone and encounters absence. When another person stays present without fixing us, crowding us, or requiring us to become less affected, the body learns something new. It learns that sorrow does not automatically cost us belonging. It learns that we can fall apart without being discarded. Over time, being received by another person can become an inner capacity to remain with ourselves.

That is part of what psychologists mean by earned secure attachment. The past does not become safe. The people who failed us do not become the people we needed because we finally found the right interpretation. Something changes in the present. The old expectation that need will lead to abandonment is interrupted by a different experience.

I understand all of that professionally.

The sentence still turned around and looked at me.

Where do I still believe I must be composed to remain lovable? Where do I offer an intelligent understanding of my feelings instead of letting someone actually be with me in them? Where do I hurry toward meaning because grief leaves me helpless? Where do I give someone a polished response when what love is asking from me is much harder and much less impressive?

Stay.

But the sentence did something else. It began returning me to people.

Long before I knew the language of attachment, God, or grief, there were people who gave me brief experiences of what it meant to be received. I had never thought of these memories as belonging together. Writing this book has changed that.

The first time someone told me about Jesus, I was in early elementary school, sitting at a lunch table. Down the table from me, a young girl was talking excitedly about Him to anyone who would listen. Looking back, it felt like a sermon. A very small preacher in a school cafeteria.

I think she said that Jesus saved us by dying. Something like that.

I had no idea what she meant. I had never been to church, and I would not meaningfully enter a church for another thirteen years. At one point, I lost a spelling bee because I could not spell “hymn.” That was about the extent of my religious education.

Still, I was curious. Confused, but curious. Before I had time to make the question sound polite or intelligent, I heard myself ask her, completely earnestly, “How do you know He was real?”

A few beats passed. Then she began crying loudly.

The teacher came over, removed me from the table, and scolded me. I remember feeling guilty. The girl was crying, so I must have done something wrong. That seemed to be the conclusion. Nobody asked me what I had meant. Nobody helped her say what my question had touched in her. Tears appeared, an adult assigned blame, and I was taken away.

I cried often myself, so the shame traveled in more than one direction. I came away with the feeling that I had caused something bad in her and that there might be something wrong with me too. Crying, apparently, was evidence of a problem.

I did not tell anyone what had happened.

But at home, I asked my mother about Jesus and God. She said, as best as I can remember it, that this was something I would discover for myself in relationship over the course of my life. She could not tell me what to believe. I would have to find that.

She did tell me what she believed. She believed in Jesus Christ.

Then she gave me a Bible.

I felt excited and frustrated. I wanted answers. I tried reading the Bible as best I could, still moving forward with the same confusion and curiosity. I understood very little. But I felt loved by my mother in that exchange. She did not know what had happened at school, so she could not have known that she was repairing anything. She simply received the question that another adult had treated as dangerous.

My mother did not give me certainty. She gave me room. She told me what she believed without using her belief to take possession of my journey.

Before I believed, I was received.

Years later, when I was seventeen, I was working a cash register very, very early in the morning at Fulmer Supermarkets. I had barely slept. I was alone at the front of the store and already in an altered state from the lack of sleep when a woman came through my line.

She was probably in her forties. Everything about her seemed bright. Bright eyes, bright hair, an almost angelic presence. I am not saying she was an angel. I am saying this is how it felt to be near her.

She looked at me. Really looked. She made conversation and asked about my life. Somehow, I began telling her that I had been accepted into a competitive college acting program and had received a scholarship. She could feel how excited I was. I could feel her feeling me.

That is still the best way I know to say it.

She smiled and said, “Oh dear, you look just like a young Paul Newman!”

Of course, I remember the compliment. I was seventeen. But it was not really what she said. It was her presence. I felt seen, heard, and felt in a way I was not accustomed to.

Then she left. A few minutes later, I became aware of myself again. I had tears in my eyes and was folded over the grocery-bagging area of my station, trying to pull myself upright. What happened between her walking away and me peeling myself off that counter has stayed with me nearly every day since.

I experienced the crucifixion.

I do not mean that I thought about it or pictured a painting of it. I experienced it. I was there. I wanted it to stop.

Interlaced with the crucifixion were visions of the earth and the universe expanding until they could expand no farther. Then everything contracted at the same pace, forming the same matter again on its journey back. Then the universe expanded again.

This happened seven full times.

With every expansion and contraction, I experienced the crucifixion again. Along with it came a knowing that things could be different if all of us collectively chose to stop this together. I did not have language for what “this” was. Violence, abandonment, suffering, what we do to one another, what we do to love. Maybe all of it.

It was revelatory and disorienting. It was grief. Deep grief. And beneath, within, and somehow around all of it, I felt connected to God.

I have clinical language available to me now that I did not have at seventeen. I know what sleep deprivation can do. I know something about altered states, dissociation, and nervous systems that become unusually open when the ordinary organizing mind loosens its grip. Fine. All of that may be part of what happened.

But I will not use clinical language to bully the experience out of me.

Maybe lack of sleep opened the door. It does not tell me everything about what came through it. Whatever that morning was, it changed me. The woman left the supermarket, but her presence did not leave me.

Two years later, at nineteen, I had quit college. I was walking around full of trauma and unprocessed grief that I did not yet know I had. I started attending church with my girlfriend, Kelly, at Maiden Lane Church of God in my hometown of Springfield, Ohio.

I loved going. I was still infused with the same confusion and curiosity. I did not suddenly understand Christianity. I was being moved, though. It took me a while to realize it.

During the services, I watched young people my age and younger leave their pews and walk to the altar to pray. Some of them would begin crying. Then something happened that I had not seen before. Other young people would get up and go to them. They would place a hand on someone’s back or shoulder and remain there while that person cried.

They did not seem frightened by the tears. They moved closer.

One day, I felt myself being moved toward the altar. I went up, knelt down, and the tears began streaming. I felt the grief, although I still could not have told you what all of it was. While I cried, hands came to rest on my back.

I was in touch with something deep and painful, and I was still being received.

They had my back.

More experiences like that followed. Eventually, I felt moved to be baptized. During the baptism, I spoke to the church about what had been happening in me. I felt the same grief and gratitude, and again I was seen. Deeply witnessed. Deeply held.

One of the young people who put his hands on me during those years was Matt McQuinn.

Before I tell you what happened to Matt, I need you to know that he was part of a living community. He was not only the person he would later become in the news.

I directed plays with the youth group, and Matt acted in them. One I remember vividly came from a song by Ray Boltz called “The Hammer,” which I turned into a play. One by one, the young people walked across the stage and laid their hammers down. Matt laid his down too.

We once stayed awake through the night watching The Lord of the Rings films, then gathered in the morning at a movie theater we had rented to see the third installment together. Those are the memories I want first. The plays. The long night. The ridiculous exhaustion. The feeling of making something together. Church not only as a place we attended, but as a place where we knew one another.

I eventually moved away from Springfield and lost touch with Matt and many of the others. Then in 2009, when I was twenty-five, I adventurously moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, with my then girlfriend, Gabrielle. I later found out at age 26 in 2011, Matt moved to Denver, Colorado with his girlfriend, Samantha.

In 2012, I was finishing graduate school and completing an internship in Peru when I received the news.

Matt had been killed in the movie-theater shooting during The Dark Knight Rises. When the shooting began, Matt and Samantha’s brother, Nick, used their bodies to shield Samantha. Samantha and Nick survived. Matt did not.

I was thousands of miles away. The grief came hard, and I carried much of it alone in Peru. When I returned, I went back to Maiden Lane and laid down flowers to honor him.

I am grieving again as I write this.

I cannot miss the connection between the young man who once put his hand on my back while I cried and the man who later placed his body over someone he loved. But I do not want to make his death into a tidy metaphor. I do not believe God needed Matt to die so that I could write a meaningful paragraph years later. I do not believe those youth-group memories existed to foreshadow his final act.

Matt was a person. He lived. He laughed, prayed, acted, stayed up all night watching movies, and moved toward people when they were hurting. His death is not what made his life matter.

Resurrection does not travel backward through time and make crucifixion good. It does not make a shooting good. Some suffering simply hurts. Some losses remain losses.

What resurrection does is refuse to let death become the final interpreter of a life.

When I place these early experiences beside one another now, I do not get an argument proving that God exists. I get people.

A little girl speaking excitedly about Jesus at a lunch table. My mother placing a Bible in my hands without demanding that I believe what she believed. A stranger at a supermarket who saw something in me and, for a few minutes, let me feel completely known. Young people moving toward tears instead of away from them. Matt’s hand on my back.

God kept reaching me through people.

Maybe this is why the sentence from Chapter Six stopped me. “We are received before we are renewed” was not merely an idea I had written. It was my own history finding language.

At school, tears brought separation and blame. At Maiden Lane, tears brought people closer. Somewhere between those two experiences, my body began learning something that my mind would spend the next several decades trying to understand: grief does not have to exile us from relationship. In the presence of people who can stay, grief can become a place where we are found.

And this did not end with the people from my early life.

My wife, Lyndsey, has received me in places where I was anything but composed. She has loved me when I felt strong and when grief was visible in my body, even when returning from Peru when I had fallen to a gaunt 165 pounds and barely felt at home in myself. She could still see me in there. She received me from the airport and promptly took me to a Five Guys, Burgers and Fries and just listened intently as she asked me about my experiences of Peru. Those bright eyes. That bright smile. Those tears.

I sometimes call her my queen. I know that can sound grand, too. What I mean is actually very ordinary. I have experienced something of God’s presence in her eyes, her smile, her tears, and her laughter. Not because she is perfect, and certainly not because our marriage is. It is because she has stayed close enough for love and grief to become something I can feel, not merely something I know.

Through Lyndsey, being received became more than an occasional encounter. It became a home. Then our children came, Lowen and Vanessia, and the lesson changed again. They receive me with their bodies before they understand anything about the work I do or the books I write. They climb into my arms. They cry without making an argument for why they should be comforted. They need, reach, protest, soften, and grow.

To love them is to discover how much of life is receiving and releasing at the same time. One day a boy jumps and no longer needs me to catch him in my arms. The child who needed to be carried everywhere becomes the child running ahead, and then back again. We celebrate the growth, of course. We should. But love notices what disappears too.

Parenthood keeps teaching me that grief is not proof something has gone wrong. Sometimes it is evidence that we were attached, that we were present, that what changed mattered to us.

Writing this book has changed the way I pray. I am less interested in bringing God the edited version. I do not need to arrive after I have organized the fear, found the lesson, and made my grief theologically presentable. Jesus did not pray that way in the garden. He asked for another way. He told His friends He was overwhelmed. He fell to the ground.

Then He surrendered.

The order matters. Maybe more than I understood before writing it.

I gave myself to Christ, and I meant it. Writing this book has shown me that surrender can be completely sincere and still keep moving through parts of us that arrive later. Some part says yes while another is still frightened. Another is angry. Another is holding tightly to the life it thought it was promised. Jesus does not shame those parts into silence. He keeps bringing the whole person into relationship.

I can also see now that when I gave myself to Christ, I was responding to Someone who had been approaching me for a very long time. Through a child. Through my mother. Through a stranger. Through adventures with Gabrielle. Through Kelly and the young people at Maiden Lane. Through Matt. And now, every day, through the family in front of me.

This book has changed the way I understand Jesus too. I have always known the theological claims. But I have become more attached to His humanity while writing these chapters. His body is not a footnote to the Gospel. He gets tired. He is touched. He weeps. He asks His friends to remain near Him. He cries out from abandonment. Even while dying, He notices His mother.

Christianity does not ask us to escape being human. God entered human life all the way.

That has changed something in me as a therapist. I feel less impressed by the perfect intervention. Sometimes the most healing thing in the room is not an interpretation. It is the moment a person finally touches the grief they have spent years managing and looks up to discover that I have not gone anywhere.

Even a tissue can mean two different things. It can say, “Here, I am with you.” Or it can quietly say, “Please clean this up.” The body usually knows which one we mean.

I am learning not to rush.

This book has made me less willing to turn pain into a lesson too quickly. Pain does not make people wise by itself. Healing is not a clever explanation for why the wound was necessary. The wound may remain. Our relationship to it changes. It becomes part of us without being permitted to become all of us.

Maybe healing is not arriving somewhere beyond grief. Maybe it is the growing ability to carry grief without abandoning ourselves, God, or one another.

Sometimes we do not recognize that change while it is happening. We notice it later. A conversation no longer terrifies us. We receive help without immediately trying to repay it. We tell the truth sooner. We stop calling isolation strength. We become able to sit beside another person’s pain without reaching so quickly for the exit.

The grief has changed us from the inside out.

That is the book I thought I was writing. Christ’s movement through attachment, loss, surrender, death, waiting, and resurrection as God’s living pattern for human transformation.

I did not know I would be one of the people it changed. I did not know that writing it would return me to the people through whom God first taught my body what faith, grief, and love could feel like.

I guess, in some way, I am writing this book for that little girl. For my mother. For that stranger at Fulmer Supermarkets. For Gabrielle. For Kelly and the young people at Maiden Lane who placed their hands on my back. And for Matt, Samantha, and Nick.

I am also writing it from inside the life their presence helped make possible. A life with Lyndsey and our children, where I am still learning how to stay, how to be stayed with, and how to let love change me.

Maybe that is why the title feels different to me now. Good Grief, Jesus is still playful. A little exasperated. But it has also become a prayer.

Good grief, Jesus.

Look what happened while I was writing about You.

Craig Thomas McAdams, MA, LPCC
Actor, Professor, Psychotherapist
(505)-469-7709