A third of the Psalms are lament. Church gave grief one sentence.
Week three of Unforced opens with a confession: Chad is not good with grief. Not his, not yours. He traces where that comes from — personality, a nervous system trained over deployments in Iraq, and mostly how he was raised, including and maybe especially in church. Nobody taught him to grieve. He was taught to get past it. They're in a better place. God needed another angel. Everything happens for a reason. Sentences you reach for like a light switch in a dark room, because the dark is uncomfortable and the switch is right there. There's a name for it: spiritual bypassing, coined by psychologist John Welwood in the 1980s — using spiritual language to step around pain instead of through it. It sounds holy. It's a trap door out of the room before the grief finishes its sentence. And bypassed grief doesn't resolve. It waits.
Then the turn: the book we built that curriculum on never did this. Roughly a third of the Psalms — the prayer book Jesus grew up singing — are lament. And Psalm 88 ends in the dark. Almost every lament Psalm turns; somewhere near the end there's a "but." Psalm 88 has no but. Its last line is "darkness is my closest friend." Someone looked at that prayer and said: that goes in the book. Which means there's a page in Scripture for the day your sentence doesn't get better.
From there it widens. Job's friends, who did the best pastoral care in the Old Testament for exactly seven days of silence — then opened their mouths, and were told at the end that they had not spoken rightly. Dacher Keltner finding small moments of awe inside the grief of losing his brother, and the research that puts death on the list of things that most reliably produce awe, right next to the night sky. Brené Brown and Stanford's James Gross on why you cannot selectively numb — suppression doesn't reduce the pain, it reliably reduces the joy. And Walter Brueggemann's claim that only grief permits newness: the prophets wept in public first, because a system runs on nobody feeling anything, and public grief is the crack in it. Chad is careful with the guardrail — he is not saying your pain has a purpose. The claim is narrower: the door grief opens and the door awe opens are the same door, which means the faith that taught you to slam one shut closed the other too. It lands on the first page of the Bible, where there is darkness over the deep and the first thing God does is speak into it.
In this episode:
- A confession: "I'm not good with grief"
- The sentences we were handed — "they're in a better place"
- Hope is a discipline, not a feeling (a clip from Dr. Ulcca Joshi Hansen)
- "You're not out of hope. You're out of practice."
- You cannot train imagination on a numbed heart
- The grief nobody threw you a funeral for
- Spiritual bypassing — naming what we were taught instead
- A third of the Psalms are lament
- Psalm 88 — the prayer with no "but"
- Job's friends: seven days of silence, then they spoke
- Keltner, his brother, and awe found inside grief
- Guardrail: your pain does not have a purpose
- You cannot selectively numb
- Empire wants to colonize your imagination
- "Only grief permits newness"
- Genesis 1 — God speaks into the darkness
- The practice: write the prayer you were never allowed to pray
???? References: Psalm 88 · Job 2:13 and Job 24 · Genesis 1:1–3 · John 11 (Lazarus) · John Welwood on spiritual bypassing · David Gushee on Job · Dacher Keltner on awe · Brené Brown · James Gross on emotional suppression · Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination · Rob Bell, How to Be Here
Series: Unforced
Speaker: Chad Belew
Date: 8/23/2026
Location: The Arsenal, San Antonio, TX
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The Arsenal | San Antonio, TX
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