Blessed Are Those Who Mourn Correctly
“What do you think you’re doing, young lady?!”
Mr. Willey¹ was towering in the doorway of a poorly lit employee lounge, which was really just a couple of dusty couches and a microwave in the back of an old warehouse. It was part of The Thrift Shop that supported the Christian school I attended, and Mr. Willey was our principal. Many of the school moms worked at The Thrift Shop for extra income, and some volunteered their time because there was always pressure to support the school’s mission of Educating for Eternity.
My best friend and I would walk there after school and wait for our moms to finish their shifts. We’d play hide-and-seek behind the bales of rejected clothing donations that were too stained and torn to be sold on the floor, but still acceptable enough to be compacted into giant clothing bricks and shipped across the ocean to African children who would surely appreciate the faded Dr. Pepper logos and badly pilled Garfield sweatshirts.
I once heard a story about a missionary who brought T-shirts to African communities to “help” the women become more modest, since, I suppose, they were too poor for Western modesty. The women were so grateful! They held up the shirts, smiled, and thanked the missionary. The next day, he saw them wearing the clothes he had brought, but where there had once been a comprehensible logo across the chest, there were now two perfectly breast-shaped holes in each shirt.
I picture these women pointing to their free breasts and giving the scandalized missionary a big thumbs up and a smile. He was peddling shame in the name of Jesus, and they would have none of it. They had work to do and babies to feed, and it was freaking hot outside.
I later found out that this is an oft-repeated urban legend. Possibly even a myth perpetuated by 20th-century colonizers. But I like to imagine that somewhere in the world a North County Christian School T-Shirt has been altered, its helmeted Crusader mascot unrecognizable, carefully disfigured by two holes and a woman’s life-sustaining breasts. Educating for Eternity preserved in print.
Mr. Willey was very concerned about Educating for Eternity, so that was why he was there, in the back of The Thrift Shop, hands on hips, scowling at an 11-year-old child whose dad had died a couple of months before. Years later, when I read the Lemony Snicket series aloud to my daughter and tried to picture Count Olaf, it was Mr. Willey who came to mind. He was very tall and very thin, with a thick push-broom mustache under his long nose, and he loomed over me from the doorway as I sat on the stained couch struggling over my Saxon Math.
So when he asked me what I thought I was doing, I didn’t know what to say except the truth. “My math,” I whispered.
I racked my brain for things I could have done wrong, and with a guilty punch to the gut, remembered that morning: My mom had pulled up to school, and I felt like I was going to throw up, and I begged her not to leave me. This was common in the few months following my dad’s death. My stomach would knot up, and I would cling to my mom, convinced something was going to happen to her while I was at school. She didn’t let me stay home all the time, but on this particular day, she brought me to work with her as long as I did my schoolwork—which is what I was doing on the morning that Mr. Willey tracked me down.
He walked over and sat right next to me on the couch. “I know exactly what you’re doing. You’re using your dad’s death to stay home from school—to get out of doing your homework,” he said to me, as I sat doing homework.
When I got really upset as a child, I would cry until I couldn’t breathe. I would feel the panic rise up until I lost control of my body and my tears gave way to convulsion-like inhales and exhales. The last thing I wanted to do was hyperventilate in front of Mr. Willey, but I couldn’t stop it. Grief that had been all my own until that day was violently forced out by a middle-aged man hell-bent on authority and control. He was Educating for Eternity, dammit, and he couldn’t do it if I was in the back of The Thrift Shop, with my math book, educating myself.
“Can I get my mom?” I managed to choke out between sharp intakes of breath.
Nope. I was too big to need my mom. I had to deal with the consequences of my actions. To atone for my sin. To repent, turn the other way, and go back to the modular classroom building where my fellow 6th graders were probably doing the same math lesson.
Somehow, someone got wind of the situation and told my mom, who was on the register at the time and was not a volunteer because she needed to keep food on the table. I was a scholarship kid at school, and our lives depended on The Thrift Shop’s minimum wage and secondhand clothing.
“What’s going on???” she asked, horrified, when she found us alone in the employee lounge—Mr. Willey, scowling at me from across the couch, and her daughter, curled up sobbing in the fetal position. She rushed to sit by me, and I crawled up into her lap.
“Oh no.” He laughed. “Sit up straight and stop manipulating your mom.” But my mom held me even closer, totally stunned, as Mr. Willey buckled down and pulled out the big guns:
“MY dad died last year, and I had to move on. It’s time for you to stop this.”
It had been FOUR MONTHS.
I. Was. Eleven.
I don’t remember how the meeting ended. I know that later, my mom and brothers confronted Mr. Willey and gave him a book about grief.² She wanted me to know he was wrong, but I was so afraid of being manipulative, of sinning, of doing something bad, that I stopped crying that very day. And I wouldn’t cry again until I was thirty years old in therapy for spiders. Educating for Eternity, indeed.
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Why tell this story now? What’s the point? Adults don’t really do this anymore, right? Well, I guess that depends. I have worked very hard to make sure nothing from the Gospel Coalition shows up in my social media feed, but a few weeks ago, this article headline drifted across my screen:
Whoo boy. I immediately and physically felt panicked rage. And I scrolled through to see what exactly Tim Shorey had to say about the “sin” of grief. Shorey claims that the Book of Job shows that there is clearly a blameless way and a sinful way to grieve and maintains that grief is okay as long as you don’t cross a line. And how does someone deep in the throes of grief “cross the line?” Shorey gives us five examples:
Grief becomes sinful when it’s blasphemous (accusing God of being unjust).
Grief becomes sinful when it’s ruinous (keeps one from facing life responsibly).
Grief becomes sinful when it’s hopeless (a denial of God’s promises).
Grief becomes sinful when it’s idolatrous (refusing to be comforted).
Grief becomes sinful when it’s joyless (“Joy isn’t optional for the believer.”)
As someone who got a B+ in The Book of Job³ in Divinity School, this is probably one of the worst takes on the Book of Job I’ve come across, but that’s not the point of this post. The point is that in the year of our Lord 2026, dudes are still out there managing others' grief and tying it to sin.
The point is that Mr. Willey isn’t a 1990s outlier, or a product of his time. He was a product of his theology and formation.And this theology hasn’t gone away. It shows up in Sunday School rooms and pulpits and in Christian articles that moralize suppressing the honest ways grief often manifests. It shows up when it denies bodies and demands we cut off the most brutally honest parts of ourselves.
I’m not saying that Mr. Shorey and his Coalition of theobros would agree completely with Mr. Willey’s spiritually and emotionally abusive assault on a child. But let me be clear. What happened to me is the fruit of the fearful, shame-based theology that they peddle.
Mr. Willey didn’t use the exact words of the article, but he was still saying I was being sinful by how I was grieving—that skipping school was something akin to grief turning “ruinous” and irresponsible. And I certainly wasn’t grieving with a lot of hope or joy at the time. Listen, even as an adult who has experienced grief, I would love some hope and joy to break in right when I needed it. But it would be lying to say that I lived in joy or even believed in a just God 100% of the time.
Can you imagine Jesus telling a child in Gaza whose home was just blown apart that joy isn’t optional?
Can you really picture him eye-to-eye with a child of abuse, telling him that his justified questioning of God is blasphemy?
Can you see him, sitting on a couch beside a weeping, fatherless child, telling her that she just needed to…get over it and get to math class?
Posts like the Gospel Coalition’s are not only dangerous, but indicative of the pervasive harmful theology that must be exposed and purged. I love my faith tradition. I treasure the connection to God that I have had since I was a small child—one that was, and has always been, independent of what the adults tried to make it. But Mr. Willey’s tirade was a violent severing of that connection. I didn’t feel guilty about grief before he told me I needed to be.
I know this can read as another angsty ex-evangelical indictment of the Christian church, and I guess maybe it is—but it’s also my story, and as a children’s priest and chaplain still in the Christian tradition, I feel an acute responsibility to make sure this doesn’t happen to another child. And still within me is the little girl who doesn’t know what to say except what is true.
In the meantime, here are a few scriptures for Tim Shorey to mull over for his next article:
Psalm 77:2 - “I looked for the Lord on the day of trouble. All night long I reached out my hands. I cannot be comforted.”
Jeremiah 31:15 - This is what the Lord says: ‘A voice is heard in Ramah, mourning and great weeping, Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted, because they are no more.’”
Psalms 34:18 - “The Lord is near to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit.”
Psalm 22:1-2 - “My God, my God, why have you left me alone? You are too far away to save me. You are too far away to hear my moans. My God, I call to you during the day. But you do not answer.”
And of course, from Job: “I cry out to you, God, but you do not answer; I stand up, but you merely look at me. You turn on me ruthlessly; with the might of your hand you attack me. You snatch me up and drive me before the wind; you toss me about in the storm. Have I not wept for those in trouble? Has not my soul grieved for the poor? Yet when I hoped for good, evil came; when I looked for light, then came darkness (30:20-22, 25-26).”
Liberation theologian Gustavo Gutiérrez writes of God’s acceptance of everything—every word and emotion Job brings, “But these bold expressions do not prevent God's agreement and approval; God does not accuse Job either of sin in his earlier life or of blasphemy in what he has said. This is a first surprise for Job's friends, who had been convinced they were defending God against Job.”⁴
God doesn’t need a principal or a theologian or Job’s friends or a coalition to protect God. But you know who does need protecting? Grievers. The poor and the suffering. Little children.
If Jesus told us to become like children to see the Kingdom of Heaven, what permission might that give each of us to grieve honestly, in our own ways?
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Name has NOT been changed to protect the adult who should have known better, because, as the wise Anne Lamott once wrote: “You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.” Also, if I were to make up a name for the creepy villain of this story, Mr. Willey would be perfect.
This apparently did nothing, because he did and said the same exact thing to a little boy younger than me a few months later.
This was my only B in grad school, and I’m still salty about it. But the class was amazing. My professor wrote one of the leading commentaries on the Book of Job.
Gutiérrez, Gustavo. On Job: God-Talk and the Suffering of the Innocent.
*The featured photo is 11-year-old me at Disneyland, right before starting 6th grade and right after my dad died, trying my hardest to be joyful.