You Are Free to Weep Because Jesus Did
This weekend a copy of Free to Weep: Finding the Courage to Grieve and Embracing the God Who Heals arrived at my house in an Amazon bubble bag. It’s a new book by my friend Brittany Allen (Substack, Instagram). Brittany also authored Lost Gifts: Miscarriage, Grief, and the God of All Comfort. When that came out last year, I bought five copies to give to suffering moms in our church and community.
Because I wrote an endorsement for Free to Weep, I know the publisher (Moody) would have gladly sent me a free copy, but I bought my own copy anyway. I have a pet peeve about my author friends buying me copies of their books. I don’t like letting them do this and try to avoid it whenever possible. After three hundred hours or more of work writing the thing, you shouldn’t then have to buy your own art and give it to others. It feels wrong. Laboring over words is the giving of expensive resources. By the time the book becomes available for purchase, the author has already given so much.
Probably, however, another reason influences this conviction. I don’t let my friends give me their books because deep down inside me there’s a belief that thinks that if I always buy copies of my friends’ books, then maybe they’ll do that for me. In fact, maybe lots of people will do that for my books.
And in a strange way, this quirky, subconscious belief is part of why Brittany’s book is so necessary.
Good, Bible-believing Christians, pastors, and churches know how and why to denounce the prosperity gospel, which promises that God blesses his children in proportion to their faith. Big faith, prosperity preachers say, means big blessings. And when those blessings come to God’s children, they often—perhaps primarily—come in the form of material blessings.
Again, good, Bible-believing Christians, pastors, and churches recognize the problems with this. We know the prosperity emperor has no clothes.
Sometimes God does make a Christian’s life excruciatingly hard. And sometimes the hardship and suffering have little to do with the believer’s little faith. The suffering might even have nothing at all to do with a lack of faith.
We must always keep before us the interaction Jesus had with the man born blind. “It was not that this man sinned, or his parents,” Jesus said, rebuking his disciples who thought otherwise (John 9:1ff). And we must always keep before us the actual life of our Lord and Savior, not the sanitized version. The most faithful child of God who ever walked the earth was a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief. How easily we forget this. How easily I forget this. If we had been alive to experience the weeping ministry of Jesus, some of us might have looked at all his afflictions and said to him something like, “O ye of little faith. If your father loved you, he’d turn these stones to bread.”
This is why I’m thankful for Brittany’s book. She helps us remember. She helps me remember a better way and a better gospel. We should probably call that way the true gospel.
I’ll include my endorsement for the book below. I’d love for you to pick it up. You can have it delivered to your house in an Amazon bubble bag.
Oh, if you don’t particularly love Amazon and want to get a copy in person, you can do that at Barnes & Noble. The other day, Brittany posted some pictures of herself at Barnes & Noble with her own book. That was so cool to see. I’m really happy for her.
I’m also happy that the words I wrote as an endorsement for the book are now at Barnes & Noble too. It must be because I’m a very faithful and good pastor that the Lord would bless me in such a significant way.
Endorsement
In Free to Weep, Brittany Allen mounts a compelling case against the abuses of what she calls the “emotional prosperity gospel,” the idea that a mature believer would handle suffering in ways the Christian subculture considers healthy—but are actually deeply unhealthy.
Allen, instead, presents believers with a better vision for life in a broken world, focusing especially on Jesus, the Man of Sorrows and one acquainted with grief. As I read her personal and theological reflections, I immediately thought of a dozen people in our church who would benefit from this book.
Benjamin Vrbicek, pastor and author
