What does Tribe teach about grief?

At Tribe, the teaching on grief is honest about how disorienting it is, and it starts from the ground level of daily life. Joy Obot brought a message drawn from Luke 23:56 and Psalm 23 that used the women at the tomb as a picture of what grief actually looks like when it collides with practice. Those women had just watched Jesus die, and the work of preparing his body was urgent and real. Yet when the Sabbath began, they stopped. Joy connected that to what she called falling back to the level of your training, the idea that in the worst hours of your life you will not rise to what you hoped for; you will fall back to whatever has already been built into you. She was open about her own experience when her best friend Rachel died, describing those first hours as pure autopilot. Out of that she said, "If your autopilot is to fix your eyes on God, then even on the darkest day of your life, that is what you'll fall back to."

The practical weight of the message was on Sabbath as the preparation, not the performance. Joy was not presenting rest as a rule to follow in a hard season, but as a rhythm you build before the hard season arrives, so that something is already there when grief takes everything else off the table. As she put it, "The day that Jesus died was not the day to start practicing Sabbath." The women already had that in them, and it held them even then.

Joy also brought her grief into her later teaching on being with Jesus, where she drew on years spent with Rachel to describe what time inside a real relationship actually produces. You cannot shortcut it, she said. The same is true with Jesus. That time with him is what gives you the capacity to recognize his voice when everything around you is unfamiliar and hard. Tribe's teaching on grief, taken together, lands here: grief is not something to manage or move through quickly, but a place where what has been quietly built into your life either holds you or does not.

Taught from Luke 23:56 · Psalm 23