Probably nothing is wrong with you. Grief that rises up years after a loss is usually not a sign that you failed to heal or that your faith came up short. It is a sign that the loss was real and that it still belongs to you. John Onwuchekwa, who pastors Cornerstone Church in Atlanta and lost his brother six weeks before that church launched, says it in five words: “There is no expiration date.” Grief stays. What can change is how you carry it.
That can sound bleak at first. If grief does not end, what is the point of working through it? Behind that worry is usually a more frightened question: am I stuck like this forever? It deserves a real answer.
Why does grief come back when I thought I was done?
Most of us carry an unspoken picture of grief. It is sharp at the start, it fades with time, and one day it is gone. Onwuchekwa names that picture so he can set it aside: “It’s not like a loaf of bread.” Bread goes stale and gets thrown out. He offers a different image. He says “grief is a non-perishable food item that regardless of how long it sits back there on the shelf” stays good. He adds, “You can crack it open and be transported like right back to that like, place in time.”
He is describing his own life. Speaking about his brother, he says “it’s been seven years and there’s still songs that will come up that I can’t listen to because they transport me back instantly and it all comes out.” He also knows the shock that follows, the voice that says, “I thought I was done with that. It was so long ago.”
Then he makes the point that answers the reader’s question: “But time only matters if something has an expiration date.” If you believe grief should have run out by now, every return feels like a failure. You must be weak, or stuck, or faithless. Take away the false deadline and that accusation loses its footing. The song in the store did not undo your progress. It opened something that was always on the shelf. Onwuchekwa’s conclusion is that the loss becomes part of the equation of your life, and you learn to live with it there.
The image makes a modest claim, and its modesty is its strength. It says only that a loss can always be reopened, and that this is normal. It makes no promise about how fast the pain shrinks or how often it returns. That is a smaller claim than “time heals,” and an easier one to trust.
There is a real limit here. Normal grief and grief that has become something heavier can look alike from the inside. If years later the loss still keeps you from sleeping, eating, working, or wanting to be alive, that may be more than the shelf being opened. It may be depression or a grief that has become stuck, and it deserves care, not just patience. More on that below.
Onwuchekwa also widens the circle of who counts as grieving. “It’s a mistake for us to think that deep grief only takes place when you lose someone that you love,” he says. He names the college you never got to attend, a lost friendship, a lost career. If your lingering grief is over something other than a death, the same rule applies.
Isn’t a Christian supposed to be past this by now?
Many grieving believers hear a quiet message that real faith should shorten grief. A verse often gets pulled in to support it. Paul writes in 1 Thessalonians 4:13, “But I would not have you to be ignorant, brethren, concerning them which are asleep, that ye sorrow not, even as others which have no hope.”
Read the sentence to the end. Paul was writing to a young church troubled about believers who had died, and he goes on to point them to the resurrection. His instruction concerns the kind of sorrow, sorrow held inside hope. Hope changes the shape of grief. It leaves grief in place, and it sets no date for it to stop. A Christian who still aches years later is not disobeying this verse.
Jesus himself makes the same point without saying a word. At the tomb of his friend Lazarus, John 11:35 records two words: “Jesus wept.” He was about to call Lazarus out of that grave, and he wept anyway. Knowing the ending did not make the loss small.
Onwuchekwa says that “Everybody in our world is acquainted with grief in a unique way.” The phrase echoes Isaiah 53:3, which describes the Lord’s servant as “a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief,” a passage the New Testament reads as pointing to Jesus. The One you pray to knows the thing you are carrying.
Why does a good day sometimes make it hurt more?
Onwuchekwa’s church launched six weeks after his brother died. His family was there. More than two hundred people came. He calls it a good day, the kind where you start to feel you are coming up. That night his wife got a call that her grandmother had died. The next Friday they were at a funeral.
That is why he says, “The joy and sorrow aren’t parallel street. They don’t just run side by side.” We expect to take turns, a happy season and then a sad one. Life mixes them instead. He describes the confusion that follows: “there’s times where you feel like I should be crying, but you can’t cry,” and other times when you expect to smile and all you can do is cry. A joyful day reminds you who is not there to share it. When grief arrives at a celebration, the two are simply showing up together, as they usually do.
Can the ways I protect myself keep the grief alive?
Onwuchekwa is honest about two ways he tried to manage the pain. The first was bracing. Most people draw closer to family after a death. He did the opposite: “I distanced myself from everybody that was in my family because I was trying to brace for that pain.” If losing his brother Sam hurt this much, he reasoned, loving the others a little less would make their deaths hurt a little less.
He later saw what that cost him. In his words, “the only thing that I was really doing was robbing myself of present joy.” The future pain would come whether he braced or not. The distance only took away time with people who were still alive. He notes what went through his mind when Sam died: “I should have made more of the time.”
He does not present himself as fully recovered. He says a close friendship of nearly two decades is still a little strained, and he takes the blame himself: “I’m damaged goods in a sense.” That admission matters for anyone asking what is wrong with them. A pastor who wrote a book on grief still feels its effects in his relationships. You are not behind. You are in the middle of something long.
The second way is staying busy. Onwuchekwa describes how it sounds from the inside: I know I am hurt, but God has something for me to do. He warns that “when we do that, we dehumanize ourselves.” We treat ourselves as tools, “we turn ourselves into some soulless, embodied commodity” offered to God, while the soul quietly shrinks. He grants that this is easier in the short term. It also “exacts a large toll in the long run.” Grief that was postponed rather than faced is still waiting, which may be part of why it feels stronger now. The same goes for grief poured out online. Posting pain to strangers, he says, “may feel cathartic, but it is not healing.”
If you have kept people at arm’s length, or kept moving so you would not have to feel, naming that is a reasonable place to start. Both are natural instincts, and both tend to cost more than they save.
Where do the anger and doubt go?
Long grief often carries a question that feels too dangerous to say out loud: is God actually good? Onwuchekwa does not shy away from it. He describes a prayer that admits, plainly, that you do not believe God is good right now, and that asks whether God even cares. He calls that a different conversation, one that has the power to move you forward.
He offers an image for why that honesty need not end faith. “Doubt in and of itself is not an enemy of faith,” he says. “Any more than wind is an enemy of fire.” Wind can blow out a birthday candle. It can also turn a spark into a forest fire. In his view, “if our doubts aimed directly and channeled rightly, it’s not gonna put out our faith.” Direction matters. Doubt spoken to God often can grow faith in a way that doubt buried in silence, or spent on strangers, rarely does.
He points to a place to start: “Psalm three is a great script.” The psalm’s heading ties it to David fleeing from his son Absalom, a moment of betrayal and loss. Psalm 3:4 says, “I cried unto the LORD with my voice, and he heard me out of his holy hill.” The psalm leaves David’s situation unsolved. It shows a man saying what is wrong, out loud, to God.
Honest lament does not always land somewhere bright. Psalm 88 ends in darkness, with the psalmist still feeling cut off from friends and from God. That such a prayer sits in Scripture is its own comfort. God kept a prayer that never resolved. If your honest prayers have not yet turned into relief, you are still praying the way Scripture shows.
Onwuchekwa also reflects on Ecclesiastes, where the writer looks at a world in which the innocent often suffer and the guilty live long. His takeaway is blunt: “you do not put your hope for joy in a formula.” The idea that grief should end by a certain year is one of those formulas. When it fails, the failure is the formula’s, not yours. His counsel is simple: “feel what you’re gonna feel.” Then, “Grieve, don’t be ashamed of it.”
So what is the next step?
Onwuchekwa takes his answer from teaching his young daughter to climb stairs. His legs are longer, so he can take several steps at once, and she wants to keep up. He tells her, “you’ve gotta hit each step. It’s gonna be slower, but look, you’re gonna get there.” Then the line he applies to grief: “Your focus is not the end goal. Just hit the next step.”
That changes the question. Asking why you are not over it yet measures you against a finish line that may not exist. Asking what your next step is gives you something you can do today. Onwuchekwa also resets the clock most of us carry in our heads. “Three years is not a lot of time,” he says, and “Seven years is not a lot of time.” Life is short, he grants, but “life can be long,” and grief takes up some of that length.
He is honest that this road does not lead back to the old life: “There is no back to normal. There’s a new normalcy that comes on.” If you keep comparing yourself to the person you were before the loss, you will keep feeling like you are failing. That person is not the measure anymore.
The next step is rarely a solo one. Onwuchekwa describes grief as “us just being able to have somebody to come alongside us” and remind us to take the next step. He names the people who were patient with him and says, “I’m grateful that in the same way grief didn’t expire, that their patience didn’t expire either.” Part of your next step may be letting someone like that close again, especially if you pulled away to protect yourself.
Some grief needs more than friends and prayer. If your loss still keeps you from sleeping, working, or caring for yourself, a trained counselor is a wise next step. Seeking a counselor is not a lapse in faith, and God often works through trained clinicians. If grief has brought thoughts of ending your life, call or text 988 to reach the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline in the U.S., at any hour.
Onwuchekwa does not claim to be an expert. He says of his own writing, “I didn’t write this as some expert,” and invites readers to “tap in and tap out where it’s helpful.” Nobody is owed a finished grief, including you. What you can give is the next honest step, taken in the company of God and at least one other person.