Aubrey Sampson has been a Christian for more than 30 years and a church leader for much of that time. But until about a decade ago, the co-planter and teaching pastor at Renewal Church, a multiethnic congregation in the Chicago area, hadn’t been formed in suffering. It was at that time that Sampson experienced the type of pain that causes a questioning of faith and a wrestling with God.
First came the death of Sampson’s cousin, who was more like a brother to her; then the news that her youngest son would need spinal cord surgery and years of intensive medical care; and finally her own diagnosis with a debilitating autoimmune disease. Those experiences led Sampson to fine-tune her broader ministry work to reach hurting and grieving Christians. Since then, she has written several more books to that audience, co-hosted the Nothing Is Wasted podcast, and coached through Propel Ecclesia.
When Sampson’s best friend died of cancer, that experience shaped her latest book, What We Find in the Dark: Loss, Hope, and God’s Presence in Grief (NavPress). And as of this writing, Sampson was grieving yet again, having just buried her father. Needless to say, she has become a reluctant expert on Christian grief. However, she says, those experiences have forged a relationship with God that is deeper, more authentic and more profound than it ever has been.
Here, she talks with Outreach about what suffering has taught her.
What have you learned as a leader experiencing grief yourself and leading others in grief?
I just lost my dad. I’m in it right now, and I’ve had to create some space. I’ve canceled some speaking engagements, said no to a few things. Our culture doesn’t allow for grief, for just breathing. I think what I learned is that as a leader, you’re going to have to set the pace, and you’re going to have to say no, because no one’s going to do that for you. Now, maybe you’ve got a great team around you, and they’ll tell you to take some time off, but in general, our culture just doesn’t allow it. So I think you just have to be able to rest and slow down and tend to your soul. It makes you a healthier leader on the other side of your grief, so that you can minister out of a place of rest and healing instead of burnout.
The other thing I’ve learned, especially when it comes to leading other people through this, is that we have a tendency to want to focus only on victory, on praise, on all of these wonderful things that are true about God and are what we have in Jesus because of his resurrection. I don’t want to undermine those things, but it is so hard for us as church communities in the U.S. to pause and have seasons of lament where we stop and honor people’s pain. I’m a teaching pastor, so I plan our programs, our services, and it’s become important to me to pause and spend a month on lament, to dive into the difficult Psalms, to have a prayer service that is specifically lament. I want that to be part of the rhythm of our church calendar, because I want our people to understand that suffering is part of the rhythm of a flourishing relationship with God. If we miss that, we’re being sort of malformed or halfway-formed.
“God is doing something beautiful in the darkness, even though it’s painful and not fun.”
Part of it is just loving them well by seeing the pain they’re in. As a leader, if you name it and see it, and you grieve with those who grieve, and you do all those very shepherding, pastoral things, then people feel loved and sense the presence of Jesus. We see so many people walk away from their faith when they hit seasons of grief or pain. But if people are formed to know that this is just part of what it means to be human, to walk with Jesus, and that somehow God is going to meet us in this, then your people have more resiliency when they hit hard times. It’s normalizing grief so they’ll stay strong in their faith rather than walk away when it hits.
Talk a little bit about how you view grief and darkness differently.
I know this may be a little bit controversial, because of course we know there are ways Scripture talks about darkness as evil, and how Jesus overcame that. And yet, what we also see throughout Scripture and from our own experience as humans who go through difficulty, is that somehow God also uses seasons of darkness to form Christlikeness in us, to form a deeper intimacy and union with us. There’s an empathy, a gravitas, an understanding of what matters, a reprioritization that happens in darkness. There’s a letting go.
I think God uses darkness to help you identify what you’ve been clinging to, to numb or to self-soothe. Those are idols that can only be illuminated in the darkness. You find that when you go through a dark season you run to these things to comfort you. So the darkness becomes a spotlight for the places where the Lord wants to set you free, to shape you, sanctify you, and move you into deeper intimacy with him. What I have found is that the darkness is an invitation. It’s a strange gift. God is in it and doing something beautiful in the darkness, even though it’s painful and not fun. But we have to be willing partners.
When you were in the thick of your grief, you write that you were surprised by God’s love. Why was it surprising when he showed up?
Because my grief felt so heavy. And one thing I write about in my latest book is a spiritual experience known as the dark night of the soul, where, for some reason, God seems to remove a felt sense of his presence. Now we know from Scripture that God never leaves us nor forsakes us, and his presence is everywhere we are, right? And yet there are seasons as Christians where, for some reason, it feels like God removes that sense of his presence.
That was my experience when I lost my best friend. That was part of what made it so hard. I so desperately needed the Holy Spirit to comfort me. But I was getting nothing. I didn’t have a sense of God being with me. So I began to realize faith is more than a feeling. There was some work God was doing in me. When God finally did begin to show up in these very cool, mysterious, specific, tangible ways that only God can do, I was like, Oh God, thank you. You are here. I had to train my eyes to look when I couldn’t see God. I just began to note it for my own soul and faith.
“Those we shepherd will see that it is in our honest crying out to God in our pain that our worship grows more authentic.”
It’s hard as a leader when you’re walking through grief, because you don’t always get pastored when you’re a pastor. You don’t always have those people who are pouring into you. And so, as a leader, it’s important to take seasons where you’re very intentionally looking for God’s goodness and love.
Any final wisdom or thoughts you’d like to offer?
My husband Kevin had to preach two Sundays in a row right after my dad died. He just cried as he preached, and our church cried with him. I think that’s something beautiful about the body of Christ. Even if you’re the leader, you can be vulnerable. You can allow your community to see you grieve and to grieve with you. And in that, the Holy Spirit does something toward the church that unifies us. As a leader, you can let your church people into your grief and let them see you wrestle with God and with the hard things. I believe they’ll even be formed in that.
A friend attended my dad’s burial, where I led the community through a eulogy, a prayer and a reading of Romans 8, all while weeping. She sent me a video of it afterward and said, “Here you are, leading through pain … just like Jesus.” When we, as leaders, lament or grieve publicly—even if it’s ugly, even if we are angrily blaming God in our grief—we embody for those we lead a truly remarkable thing: It is possible to have a deeply fearless, intimate, covenantal relationship with God, whereby we are free to be our truest selves, and also express the full gamut of our emotions without fear that God will walk away from us. Those we shepherd will see that it is in our honest crying out to God in our pain that our worship of God grows more authentic.