Permission to Grieve
Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me.
— Psalm 23:4
The aisle of a Costco warehouse is not the kind of place most of us would choose to have our world fall apart. The fluorescent lights are too bright. The carts are too loud. The warehouse hum goes on indifferently, stacked pallets of paper towels and bulk breakfast cereal bearing silent witness to a thousand ordinary errands. It is not a sacred space. It is the opposite of sacred — it is entirely, aggressively mundane.
And yet, that is exactly where Peter stood one afternoon, batteries in each hand, when his phone rang and the voice on the other end told him his father was gone.
What happened next tells you almost everything you need to know about how most men — and perhaps most of us who have gathered in these pages — have been trained to navigate grief. Peter did not crumble. He did not sit down on the warehouse floor and weep. He did not call someone he loved. He did not even let himself feel, not then, not fully. Instead, he pulled up his shopping list.
I'd bring up my shopping list and I finish — because that's what rocks do. And I got my stuff and I took it to the car. And then I had a conference call for work. So I took a conference call for work. Did I tell any of my peers? No. I had work to do.
He went to the airport. He put his eighteen-year-old daughter on a plane to China to begin college. He kept moving. He kept producing. He kept taking care of everyone around him. And somewhere in the machinery of all that forward motion, he filed his father's death under the category of "later."
"I'm really good at later," he would say, years down the road, with a kind of rueful recognition. "I'm not sure later ever truly came."
This chapter is about permission. Specifically, the permission most of us have never been given — and have never given ourselves — to grieve. Not just the catastrophic losses, the deaths and the diagnoses, though those certainly qualify. But the smaller fractures too. The career that didn't go where you planned. The marriage that changed shape. The version of yourself you quietly buried somewhere along the way. The graph that was supposed to go up and to the right, and didn't.
Grief lives in the gap between what we expected and what we got. And until we learn to walk through that valley honestly — with God, with one another, and with ourselves — we will keep shopping for batteries while our hearts break in silence.
The Rock That Isn't Supposed to Crack
Peter's name, as he himself noted with some irony, means "little rock." He had always been drawn to that image — the idea of being strong, unmovable, stable, reliable. The rock is a reassuring thing to be. People lean on rocks. Rocks don't need tending. Rocks don't ask for help or make scenes in warehouse aisles.
The trouble is that Peter is not actually a rock. None of us are. We are flesh and blood and memory and loss, and the story of grief is ultimately the story of what happens when we pretend otherwise for too long.
Peter was honest about this. He had spent years, he admitted, becoming extraordinarily skilled at the art of not grieving. He was good at producing, at doing, at taking care of others, at pushing through. What he was not good at was stopping. Sitting with his own emotions. Letting the crack show.
He had a wife who, by the time of this conversation, had known him since 2008 — nearly two decades of shared life. In all that time, she had seen him cry exactly twice. Once at their wedding. Once when they laid his parents to rest, their ashes finally together in the ground after years apart. One moment of joy. One moment of grief. That was the entire visible emotional ledger of a man who had, in that same span, lost both his parents, navigated divorce, raised children, changed careers, and carried the ordinary crushing weight of a life fully lived.
"That's how horrible I am at showing my own emotions," he said, and there was no bravado in it. Just a man naming something true about himself, in a room full of other men who recognized it immediately, because they were living versions of the same story.
What We Were Taught to Do with Pain
Before we can talk about grieving well, we have to understand how thoroughly most of us were taught to grieve badly — or not at all.
The lessons came from everywhere. From fathers who modeled stoicism as strength. From coaches who praised the players who walked off injuries. From a culture that celebrates productivity and treats emotional processing as an indulgence, a soft thing, a thing for therapy couches and women's book clubs, not for men with work to do.
One man around the table put it plainly: "My dad would say, 'You better stop that crying, or I'll give you something to cry about.'" He paused, letting the familiar sting of that memory settle in the room. "That teaches me that you're not supposed to cry — suppress it."
That phrase — "you better stop that crying, or I'll give you something to cry about" — may be one of the most efficient emotional damage mechanisms ever devised. In a single sentence, it accomplishes several things simultaneously. It teaches the child that their pain is inconvenient. It suggests that grief is a performance rather than a reality. It implies that stronger suffering is more legitimate, training us from childhood in the art of comparison-based emotional invalidation. And it delivers the whole package with the authority of a parent, which means it lands in the deepest rooms of who we are.
Many men received versions of this instruction. Not always in those words. Sometimes it came from the culture of the church, which offered its own brand of suppression dressed in scripture. Peter had absorbed certain verses in a particular way growing up — passages about fearing not, about perfect love casting out fear, about rejoicing always, about casting anxiety on the Lord. Taken as a checklist rather than as an invitation, these verses can become a theological argument against feeling anything difficult.
"From a church that I saw growing up," Peter reflected, "I got the message that Christians are not supposed to fear. We're not supposed to have anxiety. We're not supposed to be worried or concerned. And if you do feel those things, it's because you don't have a strong enough relationship with God. It's on you."
He paused. "I carried that for years. Probably still do, to some degree."
One man named the cultural dimension precisely: "I think the Western Church is very cerebral, very linear. It describes how we should be, how our culture is designed to think. But then you're still feeling things. And nobody's addressing what to do with that feeling. I feel pissed off. I feel like cussing. I'm mad at the world. Well, don't be — but what do I do with it? And that creates this whole dysfunctional way of dealing with pain."
The dysfunctionality compounds over time. It doesn't go away because we're not looking at it. It goes underground, and underground things have a way of finding pressure points to emerge through. They come out sideways — as irritability, as distance, as numbing, as an explosion that seems wildly disproportionate until you understand how long the fuel was accumulating.
One man described exactly that kind of detonation at work — a moment when years of suppressed grief over his mother's passing, layered over professional frustration and the relentless pressure of leadership, finally uncorked. "I don't care anymore," he had said, and meant it in a way that shocked even him. Looking back, he could see that grief and stress and unprocessed loss had pooled beneath the surface until the dam simply gave way. "I'm connecting the dots to grief," he said, "and it just exploded."
This is where unfelt grief eventually lands. Not in some tidy later that never comes, but in the unexpected ruptures of ordinary life — the outburst, the withdrawal, the numb going-through-the-motions that becomes indistinguishable from who we are.
The Comparison Trap
One of the most insidious tools we use against our own grief is comparison. Peter named this with characteristic honesty.
The very day he was let go from his job, he learned that a friend's fourteen-year-old son had been diagnosed with a neuroblastoma — a large, life-threatening brain tumor. "Okay," Peter reasoned in real time, "I lost my job. That's not that bad. This fourteen-year-old may lose his life. So I'm really good at comparing to something else that's more catastrophic and being like, okay, I should really grieve this? By comparison, this is nothing."
It sounds almost reasonable. It even sounds humble. But it is one of the subtler forms of self-abandonment. Because grief does not work on a relative scale. Your pain does not require a permission slip from someone who is suffering more. The loss you are carrying is real regardless of whether someone nearby is carrying something heavier.
Another man made the point directly: "I think comparison on anything is, at very best, not helpful — whether it's good things or bad things. We can't compare grief. It's not a matter of how big yours is. It's a matter of how does it affect you. I could lose my dog. You lost your wife to cancer. Who gives a crap about my dog? But no — it's affecting me."
He continued: "We never want to downplay our grief when we're comparing it to somebody else's, because that's not helpful. I think it's destructive. We have to embrace our grief and know that you losing your dog might not affect you the way it did me, but that doesn't change the fact that it devastated me."
Someone offered a simple reframe: "Maybe it was mistyped. It's not 'do not covet.' It's 'do not compare.'"
The laughter that followed was the kind that comes from recognition — the small, illuminating shock of seeing something true you hadn't quite seen before.
Comparison steals the permission we need to grieve. And without that permission, grief doesn't disappear. It simply goes somewhere else.
The Narrowing Heart
There is a particular kind of damage that comes from a lifetime of suppressed grief, and it is not always dramatic. It does not always announce itself as a breakdown or an addiction or a failed marriage, though it can become those things. Often it announces itself more quietly — as a narrowing.
Peter described it this way: men who do not process their grief don't become stronger. They become distant. They become people who know sad, mad, and glad, and that's it. Their emotional range gets narrower and narrower, and their capacity to connect — with their spouses, their children, their friends, their God — narrows right along with it.
One man had noticed exactly this pattern in himself and his son. He could see how his father's closed-off emotional world had shaped him, and how his own patterns had in turn shaped his son now in his late twenties. "He stuffs it. He can't express his emotions well. But he's working on it." There was grief in that observation too — a father reckoning honestly with what had been passed down, wishing he could have passed down something different, grateful it was not too late to change course.
Another man offered one of the most striking insights of the conversation. He had noticed that his emotional range — his capacity for both sorrow and joy — seemed to function as a single spectrum. "To the extent that you can allow yourself to feel sorrow," he said, "is also the extent to which you can allow yourself to feel joy."
He had experienced this directly. In seasons when his heart was locked down, when he could not grieve and could not cry, he had also found that he could not laugh freely, could not feel joy. And when something broke through — when laughter cracked open the sealed door — it would spill immediately into tears, because all of it was connected. The joy and the grief were not opposites. They were neighbors, and locking out one meant losing access to the other.
The image he offered is worth sitting with. Zero to ten on one side is joy. Zero to ten on the other is sorrow. You cannot expand one end of that spectrum without expanding the other. The man who will not grieve is also, in some real sense, the man who cannot fully celebrate. He has not built an armor against pain. He has built an armor against feeling.
In the times that my heart was locked down and I could not grieve, I could not cry, I could not access my pain — I also could not laugh and I could not feel joy.
Grieving the Positive
Somewhere in the conversation, the discussion took an unexpected turn. Someone raised the question of whether grief was only for losses in the traditional sense — deaths and endings and failures. One man, drawing on years of military chaplaincy and leadership coaching, pushed back gently on that assumption.
"I think there's a grieving process when somebody gets a promotion," he said. "That's why we have people who are micromanagers — they don't let go of what they were really good at doing before. Their role has changed, but they haven't grieved the old one. They're still doing what they were comfortable with."
He went further. Retirement carries its own grief — the loss of identity tied to a role, the disorientation of becoming, as he put it, "not a paid engineer anymore." Launching a child into adulthood. Completing a chapter that was important to you. These are gains, and they are also losses, and they deserve to be grieved.
"It's interesting that we tend to associate grief with things that are bad," someone said. "I never thought about grieving the positive."
Ecclesiastes understood this. There is a time for everything — a season for each experience along the arc of a life. The wisdom of that ancient book is not that we must feel nothing when seasons change, but that we must feel honestly what the changing requires. Holding on to what was, refusing to grieve the endings even of good things, is its own form of avoidance. It keeps us standing in the summer long after the autumn has arrived.
The Scriptures We Weaponized Against Ourselves
Peter came back, more than once, to the way scripture had been used — often unwittingly, sometimes systematically — to shut down the very emotional honesty it was meant to invite.
"Fear not, for I am with you." — Isaiah 41:10
"Perfect love casts out fear." — 1 John 4:18
"Cast all your anxiety on him because he cares for you." — 1 Peter 5:7
"The joy of the Lord is your strength." — Nehemiah 8:10
"Consider it pure joy whenever you face trials." — James 1:2
"Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me." — Psalm 23:4
Read as commands — as measuring sticks for the quality of your faith — these passages become a closed door. They say: if you are afraid, you have failed. If you are grieving, you are not trusting. If you are struggling, your relationship with God is insufficient. You should be doing better. Feel better. Try harder.
But that is not what they say. That is what we made them say, often because someone else taught us to hear them that way.
The man who did not find the Lord until he was forty-two said something important about this. He had not grown up inside a church that shaped his hearing of these verses. He came to them later, without as much of that particular kind of damage. And he had come to understand that what these passages offer is not a demand but an invitation — not "fear not, or else" but "fear not, because I am with you." The difference is everything.
Psalm 23 does not say we will bypass the valley. It says we will walk through it. The valley is real. The shadow is real. The threat is real. What the psalm promises is not that we will feel nothing but that we will not walk alone. That is a completely different comfort than the comfort of pretending the valley isn't there.
David soaked his bed with tears. He cried out in desperation from the depths of suffering. He wrote, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" and meant it. And he was called a man after God's own heart. Jesus, standing at the tomb of Lazarus, wept — even knowing what he was about to do, even knowing that death itself was about to be undone, he wept. The emotional range of scripture is not narrow. It is vast. And the God who inspired it is not frightened by our grief.
To sit with someone who is drowning in pain and tell them to feel the joy of the Lord is not ministry. It is avoidance dressed in theology. What the brokenhearted need — what God himself offers, according to the Psalms — is proximity. Presence. The assurance that our suffering has not made us invisible or embarrassing to the divine.
"God is close to the brokenhearted," Peter said near the end of his reflection. "I've used the Bible as a weapon against myself, and I need to delve into the truth."
When God Pursues the Heart
One of the men shared something that cut to the center of what grief avoidance ultimately looks like when it encounters the divine. He had noticed a pattern in himself: when going through something genuinely painful, his first instinct was not to run toward God but away.
Not into sin, he was careful to say. Not into anything dramatic. Just away. Off the trail. Out of the quiet. Away from the listening and the being heard. He stopped wanting to receive affection. He stopped showing up.
When he examined that pattern honestly, he found something surprising underneath it. The avoidance was not, at root, a failure of faith. It was something closer to a preemptive defense. Because when he did show up — when he did go out on the trail and sit in the stillness — God did not want to stay on the surface. God pursued his heart. And God's pursuit led directly to the places he most wanted to avoid.
He doesn't want to spend time on the surface stuff. He pursues my heart. He's the one who says, 'No, son, you need to grieve this.' I don't want to. And so I avoid him because he's going to make me go into my suffering where I need to go — because he wants to heal my heart.
There is a profound and humbling thing in that admission. He avoided God not because God was absent but because God was relentlessly present — present in the way that healing requires, which is not always comfortable. And the healing, when he let himself be led into it, was real. But the path to it went directly through the grief he had been sidestepping.
This is, perhaps, the most important thing this chapter can offer. Grief does not resolve itself by being set aside. It resolves — to the extent that it can be resolved this side of eternity — by being entered. And the One who invites us into it is not standing at the threshold with a stopwatch and a critique. He is already inside, waiting, the way a father waits for a child who has been afraid to come home.
The Man with Work to Do — Revisited
We return, now, to the man in the Costco aisle. To the batteries. To the phone call. To the conference call he took while his father's body was still being processed. To the airport, the daughter, the plane bound for China. To the car, finally, where perhaps he allowed himself a moment — he wasn't sure he had even done that much — before closing the lid on what had happened and moving on.
That man was forty-something years old, competent and capable and genuinely beloved by the people he served. He was good at his job. He was good at being a father. He was good at being the one people leaned on. He was terrible — by his own reckoning — at being the one who needed something.
Years later, sitting in a room with other men who were working through similar patterns, Peter looked back at that afternoon with new eyes. He had thought, for a long time, that what he'd done was manage his grief well. That he had given himself space. That eventually he had dealt with it. But the truth, as he came to see it, was simpler and harder than that: he had gone back to being the rock. He had patched the crack. He had made sure no one could see it. And then he had continued.
"I'm not sure I ever really let myself grieve that," he said. "I'm not sure later ever truly came."
What would it have looked like if Peter had let himself grieve? Not on the Costco floor, necessarily — there is something legitimate in the observation that men are often designed to secure the perimeter first and feel the feelings after. A battle is not the time to fall apart. But "after" cannot mean never. Later cannot mean buried.
Perhaps it would have looked like a conversation with his wife in the car before the airport. Perhaps a phone call to a brother or a friend. Perhaps a deliberate choice, that evening or the next day or the next week, to sit with what had happened. To say his father's name. To let whatever needed to come, come. Perhaps it would have looked like the kind of counseling session that Russell described — four hours over four months with a wise and unhurried woman who had been trained to help him find his way to his own heart.
Perhaps, with the permission he did not have then, it would have looked like this: a man who could receive the news of his father's death, allow the grief its rightful place, and still get on the plane. Not because he stuffed the grief, but because he honored it. Not because rocks don't crack, but because even a cracked rock can hold its shape when it knows what it is carrying.
Peter at the end of this conversation is not the same man who stood in the Costco aisle. He knows more now. He has sat in rooms like this one, has listened to other men tell their own versions of the same story, has felt something loosen in himself that had been cinched tight for years. He has not arrived anywhere in particular. But he has, perhaps, given himself permission to begin.
"I realized through this process," he said, "I have some things I have not allowed myself to grieve that I need to go back and reprocess."
That sentence, quiet and undramatic as it is, represents a kind of courage. It is not the courage of a man who has conquered his pain. It is the courage of a man who has decided to stop running from it. Who has decided that later can be now. Who has looked at the rock he was told to be and understood, finally, that Peter the rock only became who he was in combination with someone stronger — not alone, never alone, but in tandem with the One who walks through every valley alongside us.
Reflections: Questions for the Valley
Peter brought with him a set of questions he had prepared for this conversation — questions he admitted he would need weeks or months to sit with in his own journal. They are offered here not as a quiz but as an invitation. The kind of questions worth writing down, returning to, sitting with in the presence of God and trusted brothers.
Reflection: What losses — expected or unexpected, large or small — have you never fully allowed yourself to grieve?
Reflection: Is there a "later" in your life that never came? Something you told yourself you would deal with eventually, and didn't?
Reflection: How do you tend to respond when life does not go up and to the right — when the graph dips? Do you push through, compare, minimize, or something else?
Reflection: When did you last cry? What does that tell you about the current state of your heart?
Reflection: Do you have a brother — a real one, not just an acquaintance — to whom you can bring the unpolished version of your grief?
Reflection: Where have you heard scripture used as a reason not to feel? What would it mean to re-read those passages as invitations rather than commands?
Reflection: Is there a way you have been avoiding God specifically in your grief — staying on the surface, off the trail, out of the stillness?
Reflection: What would it look like to give yourself permission — today, not later — to grieve something you have been carrying?
A Closing Prayer
Father,
We come to you carrying things we have been too busy, too proud, or too afraid to set down. Things we filed under later. Things we told ourselves we had handled, when really we had only kept moving. Things we compared to other people's losses and decided didn't qualify. Things we were taught, by fathers and coaches and churches and cultures, were not ours to feel.
We confess that we have sometimes used your own word against ourselves — turning your invitations into indictments, your promises into proof of our failures. Forgive us for that. And teach us to hear what you are actually saying: that you are with us in the valley. Not watching from a distance. Not waiting for us to feel better. With us. Present. In the dark.
For the man who got the phone call in the Costco aisle and went back to his shopping list — meet him in the later that never came. For the man who watched his father model silence and passed it on to his son without meaning to — give him words and tears that can travel across generations and begin to heal what was sealed. For the man who lost children, who buried them in his own heart while he took care of his wife — hold him in the grief he carried alone. For the man navigating the ending of something good, wondering who he is now that the season has changed — give him courage to grieve the letting go.
For all of us who know sad, mad, and glad and not much else — expand our hearts. Teach us that the depth to which we can grieve is the depth to which we can also joy, and that both are gifts. That you are not threatened by our tears. That you are close to the brokenhearted — not nearby, not accessible upon request, but close. Right here.
Give us brothers who can sit with us in it. Give us the courage to be brothers who sit with others. Give us communities of men who have learned that strength is not the absence of grief but the willingness to enter it — together, honestly, without comparing or minimizing or rushing toward the resolution.
And for the man who is carrying something today that he hasn't told a single person — let this be the day that changes. Let him find one safe place. One honest hour. One crack in the rock where the light gets in.
You walk through every valley. We do not walk them alone.
In Jesus' name,
Amen.
—
Grief is the experience of loss — real or perceived.
Whatever you are carrying today — named or unnamed, large or small, long ago or just yesterday — it qualifies. You do not need to compare it to anything. You do not need to wait for later. You have permission.