What Grief Can Grow

Today, I am thinking of several friends who are going through a season of loss and are feeling a deep sense of sorrow.  

Their grief resonates with me because I understand it, and thinking about them reminds me of my own losses and griefs, and how they have shaped me.  It takes a long time for some of us to move through sorrow to experience joy once again, and it can be a painful journey that often feels as though it will never end. 

But I am learning that even in the pain of that journey, new life can spring up from what was, if we are willing to let it grow.  We can, if we are courageous, let go of our grief, surrender it, then let it instruct us.  

But this is difficult work, and we often struggle to do it.  The sorrow from grief and loss can be powerful, and not at all simple.  

Sorrow has a way of rearranging the soul. It comes uninvited, heavy and disorienting, stripping away what once felt stable and familiar. In seasons of loss, we often assume grief is only destructive—only a breaking. But Scripture, and the wisdom of faithful poets, suggests something deeper: sorrow can also be a strange kind of holy soil.

The 13th-century poet Rumi once wrote: 

“Sorrow prepares you for joy. It violently sweeps everything out of your house, so that new joy can find space to enter. It shakes the yellow leaves from the bough of your heart, so that fresh, green leaves can grow in their place. It pulls up the rotten roots, so that new roots hidden beneath have room to grow. Whatever sorrow shakes from your heart, far better things will take their place.”

That word violently feels honest. Grief rarely arrives gently. It tears through our assumptions, shakes loose our illusions, uproots plans we thought were permanent. Yet Rumi hints at a spiritual paradox: sorrow does not always come to destroy us—it can come to make room within us. It can empty our clenched fists, so we can finally receive.

The Bible names this mystery again and again. The psalmist promises, “Weeping may linger for the night, but joy comes with the morning” (Psalm 30:5). Not because sorrow is small—but because God is faithful. Paul writes that “suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope” (Romans 5:3–4). Notice: suffering doesn’t skip us to happiness. It forms something sturdy inside us, something grief cannot easily undo.

Even Jesus entered this truth fully. He was called “a man of sorrows” (Isaiah 53:3), and in His own grief, He wept (John 11:35). Yet even the Cross—where Jesus expressed sorrow at feeling the loss of God —became the doorway to resurrection. That’s what God does. God brings life out of death. Not as a cliché, but as a promise written into the very heart of the gospel.

If you are carrying sorrow today, know this: grief may stay with you, but it does not get the final word. God can transform even what broke you into wisdom, compassion, and a new way forward. The leaves that fell may become the ground where something green begins again.

Prayer

God of tenderness, meet me in my sorrow. Hold what I cannot hold. Heal what I cannot fix. Make room in me for new hope, and shape my grief into a deeper faith. Teach me to trust that resurrection is still possible. Amen.

Reflection Questions

1. What has sorrow “swept out of your house” that you are still grieving?

2. Where might God be making room in you for something new to grow?

3. What would it look like to carry your grief and still expect joy?