The Grief He Couldn't Argue Away

When Joy Davidman died of cancer in July 1960, C.S. Lewis — the man who had spent decades writing the twentieth century's most compelling defenses of Christian hope — found himself staring into an abyss he couldn't reason his way out of. He had told thousands of readers that suffering had meaning, that God was good, that death was not the final word. Then grief arrived like a wall falling on him.

In the raw journal he later published as A Grief Observed, Lewis wrote that Joy's absence was "like the sky, spread over everything." Every room in the house held her shape. The intellectual architecture he had so brilliantly constructed couldn't bear the weight of that particular darkness. He wasn't losing his faith so much as discovering how thin his comfort had actually been.

But Lewis didn't stop there. Slowly, painfully, he clawed his way back — not to easy answers, but to something harder and more durable. He came to believe that grief itself is a kind of testimony, that our tears point toward a world where such losses simply won't exist anymore.

Revelation 21 is the Almighty's direct answer to that grief. John sees a new heaven and a new earth, and hears a voice from the throne announcing that God himself will wipe every tear from our eyes — no more death, no more mourning, no more crying, no more pain. Not a philosophical resolution, but a personal one. The One who made us for joy will, one day, make good on that promise completely.