He doesn’t withhold his questions, nor restrain from following his pain to its divine confusion. Sometimes the only thing you can do with suffering is to suffer.īut while Lewis never tries to mask his raw suffering with insincere assurances or affections, he does bring his pain in its raw form to the feet of God. Walking with the great 20th-century thinker through his grief is like observing a modern David wrestle with God in the Psalms. “Aren’t all these notes the senseless writings of a man who won’t accept the fact that there is nothing we can do with suffering except to suffer it?” However, he quickly realizes that there is no end to the map, that if he allowed himself to go one grieving, and not choose some arbitrary moment in time to recover, he will be consumed in his grief.įrom this book, I have taken the following three things away about grief and will seek to apply them this last day in 2020, and use them to push forward in hope and trust in God for 2021. He suggests that he is trying to map out the human emotion of grief. Lewis speaks honestly to man and God about his grief over the death of H. In this small compilation of transparently displayed wounded thoughts, C.

Clerk, as Lewis wanted, but after his death, it was republished in 1963 under its true author's name. The book was first published under the pseudonym N. Lewis’ most honest and painful reflections have the passing of his wife Helen Joy Davidman, whom he affectionately called H. It is book 48 of 52 in the Tim Challies 2020 reading challenges, and this book is A Grief Observed by C.

Book a grief observed