Tiffany Stein is an ordained minister who also serves as a fourth-grade teacher. She previously served as a women’s pastor and marriage and care director at Irving Bible Church in Dallas. Her first book, Mourning God: Grieving Loss, Wrestling With God, and Finding Your Way Back to Life (NavPress), comes out in March 2026. Here she offers her top books on grief.
Is there anything more life-altering than tragic loss? While often associated with the death of a loved one, grief is the loss of anything that you weren’t prepared to part with. It could be the dissolution of a marriage, the severing of a friendship, the loss of a job, the onset of a debilitating disease, or the death of a dream. In the disorientation there is mourning and lament, and sometimes the questioning of one’s faith as well. Yet in all this Jesus invites the mourner to be transformed, not in spite of their suffering, but through their suffering.
Jesus, the Man of Sorrows, wept. He knows personally what it means to suffer and grieve, and how to enter into the pain and suffering of others. Yet all too often we’re guilty of giving hurting people the truth of God when in fact what they first need to experience is the love of God.
After all, why does “the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort” comfort “us in all our troubles” (2 Cor. 1:3–4)? So that our distress can be eased? Our sufferings soothed? Our pain made more bearable by his presence? Yes, but even more “so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves receive from God” (v. 4). Apparently, receiving God’s comfort in times of distress is never just about easing our own suffering—it’s also about entering into the suffering of others with the empathy that comes from shared weakness and vulnerability.
And while sharing how God has carried you through your own suffering is certainly a gift to the grieving, perhaps the best thing you can give them is your presence. Not a pat answer but genuine presence in the midst of their undoing and all that may result, be it doubt and wrestling or confusion and despair.