Chapter 1

Introduction — Why This Book Exists

Grief, Hope, and the Evidence You Haven’t Heard

An Afternoon Visit

Pastor Tom climbed the porch steps of the Whitfield home with a casserole in one hand and a worn Bible in the other. He had buried Henry Whitfield two days earlier. He had stood at the graveside while the wind tugged at his coat and Marjorie, Henry’s wife of forty-one years, had clutched a single white rose in a hand that would not stop trembling. Now he was here for the visit every pastor knows is coming and few feel ready for.

Marjorie answered the door in a cardigan she had not buttoned. She tried to smile. She did not quite manage. She walked Tom into the living room, sat down on the couch where Henry had read his evening paper, and folded her hands in her lap. For a moment, neither of them said anything. The grandfather clock in the hall ticked.

Then she looked up.

“Pastor,” she said, “where is he? Right now. Is he okay? Can he see me?”

Tom had been to seminary. He had taken pastoral care. He had buried good people and difficult people and people in between. He opened his mouth to give her what he had been trained to give — something gentle about resting in the Lord, something hopeful about reunion someday — and the words felt thin in his mouth. He said them anyway. He prayed with her. He left.

He sat in his car in her driveway for a long time before he turned the key. He felt that he had failed her. He was right. She had asked one of the most important questions a Christian can ask, and he had not really answered it.

This book is written because Marjorie deserved a better answer. And, quietly and carefully, that better answer exists.

The Pastoral Crisis This Book Addresses

I wrote this book because I have been in too many living rooms like Marjorie’s. I have watched too many sincere pastors leave too many grieving widows feeling more alone than they did before. The fault is not always the pastor’s. Many of us were never given the resources we need.

Most Christian books on grief fall into one of two categories. The first kind offers beautiful theological reflection on suffering and on hope.¹ These books help the reader carry the weight of loss. They do not, however, say very much about what has happened to the person who died. They tell you to trust. They do not always tell you why specific trust is warranted.

The second kind offers warm, sympathetic handholding through the seasons of grief.² These books are necessary. Grief is long, and it is heavy, and we need companions for the road. But these books often do not engage the most pressing question the grieving Christian carries into the night: where is my person? Are they all right?

Meanwhile, in the last fifty years, careful researchers — many of them physicians, several of them deeply skeptical when they began — have studied near-death experiences and deathbed visions in thousands of cases. They have published in peer-reviewed medical journals.³ They have catalogued patterns. They have noticed something remarkable: those patterns line up, again and again, with what the Bible already teaches about death, the soul, and the love of God.⁴

Most grieving Christians have never been told this. Their pastors have not been told it either. The result is a strange impoverishment. We have inherited a faith that promises living hope, and we are sometimes telling our grieving people to make do with cold comfort. This book is written to help close that gap.

What This Book Is, and What It Is Not

Let me say plainly what this book is.

It is a pastoral handbook. It is written first for the grieving Christian — the widow, the father, the daughter, the friend — and second for the pastor, the deacon, the lay caregiver, the small-group leader, and the friend who picks up the phone at midnight. The voice is the voice of a pastor who has sat on too many couches and who is sitting now, with you, on this one.

It is not an apologetic monograph. It is not trying to convince a skeptic. It is not picking a fight with anyone. There are other books — some of them weighty academic ones — that engage the philosophical and scientific arguments at length. This book draws on those arguments only as far as is needed to comfort the grieving. The scholarship is here in service of pastoral care, not on display for its own sake.

It is not a book that will tell you what to feel, or how fast to feel it, or when to be done feeling it. Grief is not a project to manage. It is a country to walk through.⁵

And it is not a book that promises what Scripture does not promise. I will not tell you that every near-death experience is a real glimpse of heaven. I will not tell you that every loved one who has died is certainly in glory regardless of whether they trusted Christ. The hope I offer is more careful than that — and, I believe, stronger.

This book draws on three streams of evidence: the Bible itself; the research literature on near-death experiences (NDEs for short); and the research literature on deathbed experiences (DBEs). We will look at each in turn. But the Bible is always our anchor. If at any point this book strays from Scripture, please drop the book and keep the Bible.

The Question Behind Every Grief: “Are They Okay?”

There is a question that nearly every grieving Christian I have known eventually asks. Sometimes they ask it out loud. Sometimes they only ask it in the long silences of the kitchen at three in the morning. The question is: Are they okay?

Marjorie was asking it. The young father standing over his stillborn daughter is asking it. The middle-aged man who just lost his agnostic father is asking it. The woman who buried a son after a long, painful estrangement is asking it. The question takes different shapes in different mouths, but underneath, it is always the same.

Are they okay?

This book takes that question seriously. Chapter by chapter, it gives a layered answer.

For the loved one who died in clear, settled faith in Christ, the answer is richer and more specific than most grieving Christians have ever been told. The Bible says they are with the Lord (we will read those passages carefully in Chapter 2). The careful research on the dying — the visions of Jesus, the unexpected lucidity in the final hours, the peace that descends — corroborates a faith that is anything but mere wishful thinking.⁶

For the loved one whose spiritual state was unclear, the answer is quieter, but real. We do not know everything about that person’s final encounter with God. But we do know this: God is love. God’s pursuit of the lost did not end at midnight on the hospital monitor. The character of God revealed in Jesus Christ is the foundation of a hope that does not lie.

And for the loved one who, by all earthly indications, did not know Christ, the book will say what an honest Christian book must say: we do not know the outcome with certainty. But the same God who said “while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” is the God who meets the dying and the dead.⁷ Hope — warranted, biblical, careful hope — is allowed.

Two Honest Concerns Up Front

Before we go any further, two concerns have to be named.

The Concern About NDEs

Some of you picked up this book worried that I will hand you a stack of “heaven tourism” memoirs and ask you to believe everything in them. The genre has, frankly, earned some of its bad reputation. The Alex Malarkey case — a young boy whose alleged trip to heaven was retracted by him as fictional — left many pastors warier than ever.⁸ I share your concerns. I do not believe everything that has been written under the heading of “I went to heaven and back.”

What I will ask of you instead is discernment. Throughout this book, we will weigh every claim against Scripture. We will lean on peer-reviewed research and on long-term, well-documented studies, not on bestsellers. We will distinguish between core, repeatedly observed patterns — the consistent reports of being met by Jesus, of overwhelming peace, of reunion with loved ones — and the more colorful details of any single account. When something does not square with what God has already revealed in Scripture, we will set it aside. Discernment is not the opposite of openness. Discernment is what makes openness safe.

The Concern About False Hope

The second concern is the concern about false hope. This is a deep and worthy concern. False hope is cruelty dressed up in kind clothing. I will not give you false hope.

What I will give you is the hope Scripture actually offers. That hope is, I think, far richer than most grieving Christians have been told. It is more specific than “they are in a better place.” It is more grounded than “we just have to trust.” It is — to use the New Testament word — elpis (ἐλπίς), which is not wishful thinking but confident expectation rooted in the character and promises of God.⁹ Hope, in the New Testament sense, has a person at the center of it. His name is Jesus.

A Word for Those Whose Loved Ones Died Without Clear Faith

Some of you reading this are not just grieving. You are afraid.

You are afraid because the person you loved did not, as far as you could tell, walk closely with Jesus. Maybe they walked away from the church in their twenties. Maybe they never walked in. Maybe they professed something once and you never quite knew if it took. Maybe their last years were dimmed by addiction, by anger, by dementia, by a hardness that grew up between you and them. You loved them. They are gone. And the chapter on heaven that the funeral preacher read does not quite fit, and you do not know what to do with the shape of your grief.

I want to speak to you very gently.

This book will not lie to you. It will not tell you that your father is certainly in glory because no honest Christian book can guarantee that of any specific person we have not seen receive Christ. Salvation is by grace through faith in Jesus. That is the gospel.

But here is what this book will tell you, and what I believe with all my heart: God’s love for your father did not end the day his heart stopped. The God who is described in Scripture as “not wishing that any should perish” (2 Peter 3:9) is the God who meets the dying. There are biblically defensible reasons to believe that real, meaningful encounters with the risen Jesus occur in the dying process, in the intermediate state, and at the final judgment, and that those encounters are genuine offers of grace rather than empty formalities.¹⁰ We will spend an entire chapter on this hope (Chapter 13). It has been held by significant Church Fathers and by serious contemporary evangelical scholars. It is not wishful thinking. It is a live, biblically grounded option.¹¹

You may not be able to be sure. Few of us can. But you are allowed to hope. Real hope. Specific hope. The hope that God is even kinder than you have been told.

How to Read This Book — and a Note About Tears

Now a word about how to use what is in your hands.

You can read this book straight through. You can also open it to whichever chapter speaks to your situation today. There is no wrong way. The early chapters lay foundations — what the Bible says about death, why we have a soul, what NDEs and DBEs are.¹² The middle chapters address specific questions and specific kinds of loss. The later chapters speak to pastors and to the long road of grief through the first year and beyond.

If you are a pastor or a caregiver, the section at the end of every chapter labeled “For Pastors and Caregivers” is for you. Read those even when you are short on time. They will help you sit with your people.

If you are the grieving reader, read at the pace your grief allows. You may put this book down for two days. Or two months. That is fine. The book will be here when you come back.

And one more thing.

You will weep while reading this book. Not because the book is sad — though parts of it are tender — but because grief moves like a tide, and a sentence on page sixty-three may suddenly bring back the sound of his laugh, or the way she said your name when you were a child. When that happens, please put the book down. Hold it on your lap. Let the tears come. They are not interruptions of grace. They are part of it. Jesus wept (John 11:35).¹³ You are in good company.

Hopeful Grievers: 1 Thessalonians 4:13–18

Let me leave you with one passage. It is from Paul’s first letter to a young church in Thessalonica. Somewhere in that little church there were freshly grieving Christians who did not know what to think about the believers among them who had died. Paul wrote this:

Notice what Paul does not say. He does not say, “Do not grieve.” He says, “Do not grieve as others do who have no hope.”

There is grief that knows no hope. That grief is dark, grinding, hollow. Paul has seen it. He does not pretend grieving Christians ought to skip over their tears. He does not tell the Thessalonians to be tougher, more spiritual, less sad. He tells them to grieve differently. He tells them their grief is allowed to be wet with tears and steady with hope at the same time.

Paul calls the Christian dead “those who are asleep.” This is a tender image of the body laid in the ground — not of unconscious souls. The body sleeps. The believer is awake with the Lord. We will look at this carefully in Chapters 2 and 3. For now, hold the comfort: the day is coming when the trumpet will sound, the dead in Christ will rise, and we will be caught up together with them in the clouds, and so we will always be with the Lord.

Always. With the Lord. With them.

That is the kind of hope that lets a widow grieve and look up at the same time. That is the kind of hope this book is for.

This is a book for hopeful grievers. I am glad you are here.

For Your Reflection

1. Why did you pick up this book? What were you hoping to find when you opened the cover?
2. What has been the hardest question in your grief so far — the one that keeps surfacing even when no one else is in the room?
3. If real, biblically grounded reasons existed for more specific hope about your loved one, what would that change in how you carry the weight you are carrying?
4. What well-meant words have you heard since the loss that did not actually help? What words do you wish someone had said?
5. Are you afraid of something — of letting your guard down, of hoping too much, of being disappointed again? Can you name it before God?
6. Is there a pastor, friend, or small group to whom you could say, “I have hard questions, and I need someone who will sit with me while I ask them”?
7. As you begin this book, what would it mean to give yourself permission both to grieve fully and to hope honestly?

For Pastors and Caregivers

If you are reading this section, you are walking with someone through grief. Welcome. The chapters that follow will give you specific, scriptural, evidence-informed help. This first chapter sets a few foundations.

Key pastoral observations. First, the most important thing you can do in the early weeks is give the bereaved permission to ask hard questions. Most grieving Christians fear their hardest questions will scandalize you. They will not say, “Where is he, really?” if they suspect you do not know what to do with the question. Your job is not to know everything. Your job is to refuse to flinch. Second, do not assume composed equals fine. The widow making coffee and signing thank-you cards may be holding herself together by sheer will; the man who has not cried at the funeral may be thirty days from a collapse. Recent grief science has shown that grief courses are far more varied than the old “five stages” popularizations suggest.¹⁵

What to say. Three sentences will serve you better than ninety percent of the cards on the rack:

— “I am so sorry. I love you. I am here.”
— “You can ask me anything.”
— “When you are ready, I have some things from Scripture I would like to read with you. Not today. But soon.”

That is enough. You cannot fix it.

What NOT to say. The well-meant Christian commonplaces are more wounding than most pastors realize. Avoid:

— “He is in a better place.” (Often true; said this way it sounds like minimizing the loss.)
— “God needed another angel.” (Not biblical, and it turns God into the villain.)
— “Everything happens for a reason.” (Not what the bereaved needs in week one.)
— “At least you had so many years together.” (At least is the worst phrase in pastoral care.)
— “I know exactly how you feel.” (You do not. This loss is theirs.)

If you slip — we all have — apologize, sit closer, and try again.

A watch-out. Be especially careful when the deceased’s spiritual state was unclear. The grieving family is not asking for your final theological verdict on their father. They are asking whether they are allowed to hope. Do not foreclose that hope with a grim shrug. You can hold honest uncertainty about a particular soul and at the same time speak with confidence about the character of the God who holds that soul (Chapter 13).

Next steps. Leave this book on your second visit, not your first. The first visit is for tears, casseroles, prayer, and presence. The second visit, a week or so later, is when the bereaved are starting to ask the questions and starting to want substance. Then, gently: “There are some things I would like to read with you. Are you up for that?” Come back in two weeks. And again in two months. Do not disappear at week five.

Until we meet again is more than a sentimental closing line at a graveside. It is a Christian promise. It is the bedrock of the calling we share.

For Further Reading

• Nancy Guthrie, Holding On to Hope — a short, deeply pastoral book by a mother who buried two children, written for the believer in the early seasons of grief.
• Jerry Sittser, A Grace Disguised — Sittser’s account of losing his mother, wife, and daughter in a single accident, and what God did with him in the years that followed; a classic of Christian grief writing.
• C. S. Lewis, A Grief Observed — Lewis’s raw, unfiltered journal after the death of his wife, including his honest struggle with God and his slow recovery of faith.
• Tim Keller, Walking with God Through Pain and Suffering — a careful theology of suffering that puts Christ at the center.
• Randy Alcorn, Heaven — a thorough, evangelical, biblically grounded answer to many common questions about heaven and the world to come.
• John Burke, Imagine Heaven — a leading pastoral synthesis of NDE research, weighed against Scripture; a good entry point for readers cautious about the genre.