The blog makes the case that God does not abandon a person who dies by suicide. This study is for the harder thing: living through the loss, or walking beside someone who is. It will not hand you an explanation. It will give you a way to stay with God, and with each other, in the part of grief that no argument reaches.
Go slow. You do not have to arrive composed. The people who wrote the Psalms did not.
A note before you begin. If you are in crisis right now, this study can wait. Call or text 988, the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, and talk to a real person first. You are worth that call.
Before you start: ground rules for a room that can hold this
If you are doing this in a group, read these out loud together. They are not optional. They are what makes the room safe enough to tell the truth.
- What is said here stays here. No retelling someone's pain as a prayer-request headline later.
- No fixing. Nobody in this room is a project. We are not here to repair each other, only to be with each other.
- No rushing to a verse. There is a time for Scripture, and it is not the second someone starts to cry.
- Silence is allowed. If no one talks for a while, that is not a failure. That is grief breathing.
Part 1: Say the true thing
Rev. Dr. Otis Moss III could not say the words my sister took her life for years. He told people she had a terminal illness. The grief he buried did not disappear; it went underground and strained his marriage. What finally freed him was simply telling the truth out loud.
So we start there. Not with an answer. With the truth.
Read Psalm 13 slowly, out loud if you can. Count how many times David asks how long before he gets anywhere near trust. Four. God put that prayer in the Bible on purpose. Lament is not the opposite of faith. It is faith that refuses to pretend.
- Write your own how long, one honest sentence. Not the version you would say at church. The real one.
- Now read the last two verses of Psalm 13. David does not explain his way out. He turns his face back toward a God he has not stopped trusting. You are allowed to hold both at once, the ache and the trust, in the same breath.
If naming the loss out loud feels impossible, you are in good company. Say it to God first. He already knows the word you cannot make yourself say.
Part 2: Hear the lie, and put it down
Many grieving families carry a second wound on top of the first: someone told them, with a Bible in hand, that God turned away from the person they lost. Moss calls that teaching the true violence the church does to people. This part of the study is for getting that lie out of your body.
Read Romans 8 verses 38 and 39 out loud. Read the whole list. Death, life, angels, demons, the present, the future, height, depth, anything else in all creation. Paul leaves nothing out, and he writes no exception for the sick.
- Where did you first learn what suicide does to a soul? Who taught you? Say it plainly.
- Read the verse again, slowly, and put your loved one's name into it. Nothing, not even this, can separate them from the love of God in Christ. Write what it does in your chest to say that.
Then read Psalm 34 verse 18. The Lord is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit. Near, not recoiling. Close to the crushed, not the composed. If the God you were handed flinches away from the person who could not hold on, that God is an idol. Set it down. The real One is already in the room with you.
Part 3: Sit in good company
You are not the first to stand here, and the people who stood here best did not get tidy answers.
- Job never received the why. He received God himself, and somehow that was enough to live on.
- Jesus, in Gethsemane, asked for the cup to pass. The sinless Son of God prayed to be spared his suffering. Your prayer to be spared this is not weak faith. It was his prayer too.
Pastor John Onwuchekwa, who lost his brother, describes grief as a non-perishable thing that sits on a shelf. However long it sits, the moment you crack it open it drops you right back into the day you lost them. He admits he once tried to wall the grief off to protect himself from future pain, and found he was only robbing himself of present joy. Joy and sorrow, he says, are not parallel streets running side by side. They cross.
Scripture to sit with, to be near God in, not to solve:
- Psalm 88. A prayer that ends in the dark with no tidy resolution. The Bible itself gives words to grief that has not yet lifted. Read it and let it be strange that God kept it.
- Psalm 13. Permission to ask how long.
- John 11 verse 35. Jesus wept at a grave he was about to open. He knew the ending and still cried. Your tears are not unbelief.
- 2 Corinthians 1 verses 3 and 4. The God of all comfort comforts us so that we can comfort others. Grief, brought into the light, becomes a way to carry someone else.
Part 4: A practice for this week, the examen of presence
Each night this week, before sleep, name two things on paper.
- One place the pain found you today. Be specific. Do not minimize it.
- One place, however small, God was near. A text from a friend. A meal someone dropped off. Five minutes you could breathe.
Do not force the second one. Some nights you will only find the first, and that is honest too. But over a week, watch what your attention starts to learn. Moss talks about holding the blues and the gospel together, because there is no resurrection without a Calvary. This practice teaches your eyes to do exactly that, to see the sorrow honestly and to catch the mercy you would otherwise have called an ordinary Tuesday.
Part 5: If you are sitting with someone else's suffering
Dr. Anita Phillips says the bravest thing you can do for someone in the dark is ask the plain question: are you thinking about ending your life. You will not put the idea in their head. You will tell them you are not afraid of where they are. Ask it. Then stay.
Dr. John Swinton, who was a psychiatric nurse before he was a theologian, draws one line that does not move: abandonment is never acceptable. If a situation gets to be more than you can safely carry, you hand the person to someone who can. You never hand them to no one.
- Do show up, stay, and let silence be okay.
- Do say I do not know why, and I am not leaving.
- Do learn the difference between your role and a clinician's, and make the call or the referral. Loving someone well sometimes means getting them to an expert, the way you would want a brain surgeon and not a dentist for a tumor.
- Do not rush them to a verse, a lesson, or a silver lining. A true thing said too soon lands as a dismissal.
- Do not make their pain your teaching moment. Make it a place you sat with them.
Discussion questions (build them in order)
- What did you grow up believing about suicide and God's love? Where did that belief come from, and is it actually in Scripture?
- Moss calls the teaching that God abandons these families the true violence. Have you seen that violence done, or felt it? What did it do?
- Read Romans 8 verses 38 and 39 together. If nothing can separate us from God's love, what does that say to a family grieving a suicide this week?
- Why do you think the church has so often treated mental illness as only spiritual? What changes, practically, when we also call it physical?
- Phillips says asking someone directly about suicide does not make them suicidal. Does that surprise you? What stops us from asking?
- Moss buried his grief for years. Is there a loss you have hidden in shame? What would it cost to bring it into the light with one safe person, and what might it free?
- Swinton says abandonment is never acceptable. What would a community of resilience look like in your church, the kind of presence that carries people who cannot be fixed in a day?
Leader notes
Watch the room more than the clock. Someone in this group has likely lost a person this way, or has sat where the person they lost was sitting. Plan for that before you begin.
- Have the 988 number written where everyone can see it for the whole session, and say out loud at the start that it is there.
- If someone discloses that they are in danger right now, stop the study. Stay with them, get another leader, and help them call or text 988 or local emergency services before anyone goes home. A person in crisis outranks the lesson plan every time.
- Do not assign the why. If someone asks why God allowed it, resist the urge to answer fast. Moss never got the why and still found God. Let that be a real and faithful place to stand.
- Close on time and close gently. End with the blessing below, not with an open theological debate.
A blessing to close
May you be honest enough to lament and held enough to stay.
May you put down every picture of God that has him turning away, and find instead the One who is near to the brokenhearted.
May you hold the blues and the gospel in the same hand, and trust that the God who wept at a grave has not left this one.
And when you cannot find the words, may you find him.
If you or someone you love is struggling, call or text 988, the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, any time. For ongoing mental health and substance support, the SAMHSA National Helpline is 1-800-662-4357. You are loved, and you are not alone.