“But what is grief, if not love persevering?”

Quoted by Vision in the Disney+ series Wandavision, this question quickly resonated with viewers all over the country and all over the world when episode eight aired. We live in a broken world, and none of us are strangers to grief. We’ve all experienced the deaths of aging parents, close friends, and unborn children. We’ve all dealt with painful break-ups and awful falling-outs with people we loved dearly. We’ve all been betrayed or attacked by someone we once trusted and thought very highly of. And with everything that has happened in our world over the past two years, our levels of grief are higher than they’ve ever been before.

Grief causes us to feel a lot of things. Angry. Confused. Numb. Depressed. Anxious. Devastated. Guilty. Listless. Helpless. Alone. When we’re grieving the loss of someone or something, we may even feel like God is far away from us, ignoring our prayers and pleas. But the truth is that God draws near to us in our grief. And this is made evident to us when we see Jesus encounter a grieving widow in Luke 7.