One afternoon years ago, heavy of heart, I crawled alone into the backseat of our Prius and let loose with a half hour of blubbering yells. 

The soul can only get so hot before it blows. Better to give it room to blow in a controlled environment than for it to explode without warning on friends and family or implode into depression and despair.

That was a trying season for me. Never mind why — each of us has seasons of trouble and loss and a different ​“maximum carry capacity.” But at some point, all of us need to unload, to unpack… to grieve.

Amanda Opelt, our podcast guest this week, also discovered a car can be a cabin of catharsis. In her season of loss, people said, ​“process your grief,” but few said how. Screaming into the steering wheel became one practice for entering that process.

People have been grieving for millennia — since Eden, come to think of it — and generally our ancestors were a lot better at it than we are. One ancient Irish ritual Amanda found is called keening, which is more or less an extended communal version of the car screaming.

Many of us modern Christians don’t have such rituals and are bad at grieving in general. Here are a couple possible obstacles to grieving.

The first is to minimize our loss by comparing it to someone else’s. 

Someone right now in Gaza, in Ukraine, in Sudan has experienced a level of trauma few of us can imagine. If I put my loss and their loss on separate sides of some objective scale — as if such a cold thing could exist — theirs is heavier. In light of that, what right do I have to ​“feel sorry for myself?” 

While a healthy dose of perspective can be good medicine, stuffing grief on account of someone else who has it worse doesn’t do us or them or God one bit of good. The best way to serve the world is by becoming whole. And if we have experienced a loss significant to us, the path to wholeness passes without exception through grief. 

A second obstacle is believing that the hope of resurrection negates the need to grieve. 

The story of Lazarus can be our teacher here. You know it well, but hear it again…

Lazarus gets sick. 

Christ delays. 

Lazarus dies. 

Christ shows up. 

“Lord, if you’d been here,” Martha says.

“Lord, if you’d been here,” Mary says.

Jesus sees Mary’s tears. 

He sees more wet faces. 

He’s moved. 

But it’s the sight of the lifeless body of his friend that breaks him and gives us the most miniscule and magnificent verse in Scripture: Jesus wept.

Commentaries and pastors pontificate endlessly about why he wept. Some say he cried at the crowd’s unbelief. I say he cried because his friend died and death is obscene and people were sad and he was sad right along with them. He knew what he was going to do. He delayed his coming to do it. But he still needed a moment to grieve what was lost to prepare the way for the joy of resurrection. 

So, Father, we know we do not grieve as those who have no hope, but we grieve all the same. So we trust that you, revealed to us in your weeping Son, grieve with us and forge within us a hope that holds up, come what may.