Many people remember November 3, 2020 as election day of a contentious United States presidential race. I remember the day, of course, but for two other reasons.

November 3, 2020 was the launch day of the book I coauthored with my friend John Beeson about blogging for God’s glory. Months and months before the book launched, we picked November 3 to release the book. And when we picked the date—as you might expect—we neglected to notice it coincided with the Trump-Biden showdown. Unfortunate timing, to say the least. We could have planned better.

The other event, however, we could have never seen coming.

My favorite blogger is Tim Challies. He’s so faithful in his theology, so consistent in his output, and so generous in promoting the work of others. When John and I thought about which author might write the foreword to our book about blogging, we, of course, asked Tim first. Thankfully, we didn’t have to ask anyone else.

But the day we launched our book was also the day Tim’s only son died.

Tim wrote on his blog the following day, “Yesterday the Lord called my son to himself—my dear son, my sweet son, my kind son, my godly son, my only son.” His son Nick had been playing a game with friends and his fiancée on his college campus when he suddenly collapsed and could not be revived. When Tim posted about the tragedy, he added, “And we ask that you remember us in your prayers as we mourn our loss together.”

I wrote my own prayer to God and posted it online, as did many others. I prayed to our Heavenly Father asking, among other requests, that “when a man who loves words—and spends his life using them for your glory and the good of your people—has nothing to say, whisper to his heart that you are still God and you love him and his wife.”

It’s been two years since that season. Joe Biden is still President, our book is still on Amazon, and Tim’s son is still gone.

But these years have not gone by without effort from Tim to capture the story of his loss and the ways God has remained faithful. Those reflections, many of which have never been shared in public before, became his latest book Seasons of Sorrow. The book chronicles his reflections over the first year of grief. When I finished reading the book, I emailed Tim to tell him that, for so many reasons, this book is the best writing I’ve ever read from him. Here are two main reasons I love the book.

Seasons of Sorrow puts the pain of loss on the page. I’m a sucker for stories about fathers and sons. Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road and Harry Chapin’s song “The Cat’s in the Cradle” make me melancholy like few other stories and songs can.

In Seasons of Sorrow, we see the picture of a father who loves his son. He loves the way I want to love my sons. He always made a point to wake before his family to pray for them so they would know that, before they woke, their father was praying for them. Tim would make his son coffee before his son went to work. Even now, he writes about occasionally bringing a cup to the gravesite.

All this love makes all the loss so hard and leads to excruciating moments of introspection. In one reflection, Tim asks a question that anyone of us might ask were we in his place, namely, whether the tragedy came from God as punishment for some sin in his life. “Could it be,” he asks, “that Nick’s death is God’s discipline toward me? Could it be that Nick was some kind of idol in my life, and to loose my grip on him, God took him away? Could this all be my fault?” Then he adds, “I’m haunted by these thoughts and questions” (33). As any good and godly father might be. In another passage, Tim wrestles with the emotions involved with emptying his son’s bedroom to prepare it for future use as a guest bedroom. “What right do we have,” he asks, “to barge in and sort through his possessions? Who are we to decide what will be kept and what will be discarded, what will be treasured and what will be thrown away? Yet it must be done” (102). Some nine months after Nick’s death, Tim wrote, “I miss my son today. That goes without saying, I suppose, since I miss him every day. But on this day, the pain is particularly sharp, the ache especially deep” (170). Here, Tim normalizes for readers what I’ve heard others say: there will be good days and bad days.

In all these ways, Tim does not shrink back from putting his pain on the page, telling readers his many frustrations with what William Cooper called God’s “frowning providences.” But that is not all he does.

Seasons of Sorrow points us to both the comfort of God’s promises and the comfort of God’s people. In a reflection he titled “My Manifesto,” Tim affirms his resolve to follow God and trust him despite the pain of loss. “By faith I will accept Nick’s death as God’s will, and by faith accept that God’s will is always good. . . . I will be forever thankful that God gave me a son and never resentful that he called him home. My joy in having him will be greater than my grief in having lost him” (36). Many such things he says. In the concluding paragraph of the chapter, Tim poetically strings together scriptural promise after promise after promise, affirming his belief in them with the concluding words, “This is my manifesto” (37).

In a chapter titled “I Fear God and I’m Afraid of God,” readers will notice overlap with themes from the book of Job. Tim writes of fearing God “in a new way” and of how “some kind of innocence has been shattered.” And still, he affirms his desire to continue praying, “Thy will be done,” while also noting, “even as I pray, I cringe just a little” (45). As Job came to learn, there is an unexpected comfort that comes to us when we remember that the God who is who he is, is who he is—he’s not a small, tribal deity, but sovereign and good, awesome and kind. There’s an unexpected comfort in having our innocence shattered and our foundation rebuilt.

In these ways and others, Seasons of Sorrow pastors and comforts those who grieve by sharing the ways God sent people to pastor and comfort him. In one section, Tim mentions to a friend he’s concerned his own eagerness to see his son one day in heaven has overshadowed the hope of seeing Jesus in heaven. To this, Tim’s friend tells him he does not sound like a pagan. “You sound like a grieving father” he says (122). That’s good pastoring.

Near the end of the book Tim notes the sadness that Nick “was the last male in the Challies line” and that now even the Challies “surname will in the course of time disappear” (183). But to this, Tim also encourages readers by sharing the truth he encourages himself with, writing that “Nick doesn’t need to be remembered by other people, because he will never be forgotten by God” (185). Amen and amen.

*     *     *

In the opening pages, Tim writes, “Writing is how I reflect, how I meditate, how I chart life’s every journey. And so when the sorrow was still new in my heart, when the tears were still fresh in my eyes, when I barely knew up from down and here from there, I began to write” (xiv). He goes on to say that he had to write because writing teaches him what he actually believes and what he should seek to believe. “I had to know,” he says, “whether to rage or to worship, whether to run to bow down, whether to give up or to go on.” Painful as the prose was for him, I am thankful he went on, bowed down, and worshiped.

For all these reasons, the subtitle could not fit more perfectly: the pain of loss and the comfort of God. It seems to me that not only has Tim been a good and faithful dad (the hope he writes about in the final chapter), but Tim has been a good and faithful author. In the coming years I expect I’ll buy more copies to give to those in our church going through their own seasons of sorrow.

* Photo by Jonah Pettrich on Unsplash