The church has learned to rush past grief. We quote Romans 8:28 before we have wept. We say 'God has a plan' before we have sat in the weight of the loss. But Scripture does not sanitize suffering. It holds it. And the science of the grieving mind confirms what the Psalms have always known: grief is not a spiritual problem to be solved. It is a human process to be honored.

Lately, I’ve had more than one person tell me something that stopped me cold: “I almost took my life a few years ago. And nobody knew.”...