She encouraged people who are suffering not to stop bringing their grief to God. “That’s what so many in Scripture do—they took it to God,” said Smith. “At least you’re communing with the one who can help you, the one who can heal you, and you’re not turning away from him.”
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“So keep coming every day. Keep showing up. Keep crying out. Keep praying. Keep reading your Word. Just keep showing up,” she said. “I promise you, he will heal the pieces of your heart that have been hurt and broken if you keep coming to him. Because he gives you himself…he gives you his presence, and that’s enough to sustain you.”
Seeking God through his Word is critical, said Smith, because “if you are grieving the loss over a child, the enemy will make you feel all kinds of things. You will feel guilt and shame and pain over that loss.”
“So whenever those horrible thoughts or feelings come into your mind,” she said, “[you need] to replace them with God’s truth.”
For example, Psalm 139 says, “All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.”
“God knows all of our days. God knew River’s day. God knows your day and my day. And we can’t add one more day to our lives than God has allowed and allotted for us,” Smith said. “So going to the Scriptures for truth really helped me process my pain and my grief to know that I don’t have as much control as I thought I did and that he holds all of our days in his hand.”
Smith also offered insight into how to comfort people experiencing deep grief. “So often we don’t know what to say. We really don’t,” she said. People might have an impulse not to bring up another person’s loss so as not to cause the grieving person more pain. Smith felt that herself when her husband’s father died.
“But I’ve realized in going through my pain that they want to talk about their loved ones,” she said. “We want to talk about those that we have lost. And I want to talk about my son.”
“And it’s also ok to say, ‘I don’t know what to say. There are no words that can make this better,'” Smith explained. “‘But I’m going to be here with you. And if you want to talk, about your son or daughter or mother, I would love to be a person that you could talk to about that.’”
Even acknowledging that we don’t know what to say is better than saying nothing. “That silence sometimes hurts more than saying something,” she said. “What really helped us was we just had friends that just showed up—not to fix it—they would just pray with us. They would cry with us. They didn’t try to say things to make it better. They just were present.”
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