What Is A Healthy Way To Mourn The Loss Of Charlie Kirk?
What would you say is a healthy way of mourning Charlie Kirk’s death? It is really consuming the hearts and minds of people.
It’s okay to feel sad. When grieving the death of a loved one or a person who was important to you, you shouldn’t feel like you have to move on right away and make yourself feel happy. But I do think that there can be a healthy path forward. Allow yourself some time to mourn and then, if need be, put an expiration date on your mourning. You can decide, “By this date, I’m going to recognize I’ve given myself enough time for mourning. Now I’m going to rejoice in the fact that this loved one is in heaven.”
I know people can’t say this in regard to every loved one who is lost, but regarding someone who is in heaven, such as Charlie Kirk, we can say that God will use this terrible crime for His glory, and that God is going to be glorified in it. We sorrow, but in light of the resurrection, as Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15, we don’t sorrow as those who have no hope.
It’s okay to feel sorrow. As Christians, we shouldn’t feel that we have to deny our sadness or mourning when people dear to us or near to us go home to heaven, but we should always come back to our overwhelming confidence in the resurrection and in God’s greater work.
We’ve done a number of memorial services, and they’re always difficult. One of the things I’ve found to be the greatest comfort to people is the reminder that the grief and sorrow we’re experiencing at their passing is for our loss, not theirs. They’re a person who has died in faith. It really is comforting for the grieving to remember that the believer who has died is more alive now in the presence of Christ than they were ever on Earth. That really does seem to be a comfort. When we’re grieving, we are able to say, “I’m grieving for my loss, not theirs.”
In considering the manifestation of evil, we’re back to Psalm 73 and praying, “God, make things right.” When we see the prosperity of evil people, and they’re seeming to get away with it, there is a righteous anger that wells up within us.
In Psalm 73:17-18, it says when he went to the house of the Lord, he understood that the Lord had put his enemies in slippery places. The prosperity and the happiness of the wicked is really an illusion. It might be real in the moment, but it’s transitory, as in a dream.