How to Grow Through Sadness
Where will the river take you?
The most powerful thing you can do with pain is feel it.
You may have a complicated relationship with sadness. Perhaps you grew up in a home where feeling sad was considered disrespectful or distressing. Maybe sadness was viewed as a weakness or only seen as problem to solve.
In this perceptive episode of our ongoing How to Handle Life series, John will help you understand sadness better: why it feels so disorienting and uncomfortable; how Jesus is the ultimate example of engaging with grief from a place of strength; and the reason sadness isn’t the enemy of healing, but the path to it.
John draws a sharp distinction between depression and sadness. Depression is like a block of cement: heavy, stuck, and cut off from anything that would bring life. Sadness is something else entirely: a river that will carry you somewhere good if you’re willing to learn from it.
If you’ve ever wondered if any good could come from sadness—and why God allows grief in the ‘middle pages’ between Genesis and Revelation—you’ll want to listen in to John’s insight on this topic.
Highlights from This Episode
As I sit here today to talk to you about sadness, I consider it a special opportunity. Over the years, I have used ‘sadness’ as a tool to help many of my clients. In fact, if I had only one thing I could teach my clients about how to handle life’s difficulties, traumas, and disappointments, it would be learning how to grow through sadness.
You’ve probably experienced a time in your life when pain rushed in like rapids, almost powerful enough to sweep you away. When you felt loss, pain, disconnection, or trauma, you most likely instinctively swam toward one of two riverbanks to try and find safety.
The first riverbank is one you may know well: blocking the pain. You fight your feelings, go numb, avoid, blame, deny, and shut down. This response is an act of self-protection, but staying on this bank leads to bitterness, isolation, and a slow kind of emotional flatness. You don’t move forward, you just stay stuck.
The second riverbank is different, and it’s harder to choose: it’s using the pain as a school—a place that teaches you how to learn, grow, and navigate what life brings you. It’s the riverbank that you may have never learned to turn to.
You Were Never Designed for Loss
Why is loss so disorienting in the first place? It’s because you weren’t built for it. Genesis 1 and 2 describe a world with nothing but goodness: unbroken connection with God; no shame, no separation. Then Genesis 3 arrives, and with it, loss enters the picture. And it never really leaves. Everything between the opening pages of Genesis and the final chapters of Revelation is loss—big losses and small ones, macro and micro.
Big losses are easy to identify: the death of someone you love, a health crisis, deep betrayal, chronic illness, the end of a career. But there are other losses that you may overlook, like being misunderstood at a meeting, left out of a group trip, unjustly maligned by a friend, or unable to connect with your spouse no matter how hard you try. These feel small, but they register as real loss.
There may even be loss from obedience—the genuine grief that comes from saying no to something you want because you’re choosing to follow God instead.
None of it is small. All of it belongs in the river.
Jesus, the Man of Sorrows
When you’re swept down the river of sadness, it’s a time to see Jesus as the ultimate model for entering grief rather than avoiding it. Isaiah 53 describes him as “a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief”, not because he was frail or broken, but because he engaged with loss honestly and fully.
In the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus experienced the weight of obedience in the most profound way imaginable. He faced unbelievable suffering because he had stepped from perfection into imperfection. Yet his sadness was not weakness. In fact, it was incredible strength channeled into the right response to a broken world.
This reframe matters. If Jesus—fully human, fully God, who did life the right way—was a man of sorrows, then sadness isn’t something to be ashamed of. It’s something to be learned from.
The ‘Science’ of Sadness
Here’s something about sadness that might surprise you: sadness is actually compassion turned inward. When you choose sadness over avoidance, you’re actually doing something radical: you’re connecting with the part of yourself that’s hurting instead of abandoning it.
That connection is a form of love. When love meets pain, something shifts. The pain doesn’t disappear, but it’s no longer alone. The Latin root of the word comfort is com (with) + fortis (strength, fortress). Comfort isn’t just a warm feeling. It’s fortifying. Sadness leads to comfort, and comfort leads to strength. That’s not a platitude. That’s how grief is designed to work.
Sadness leads to comfort, and comfort leads to strength. That’s not a platitude. That’s how grief is designed to work.
Think about a child who skins their knee and starts crying, then immediately wants to get up and play again the moment mom or dad shows up. The child wasn’t comforted because the pain went away. The child was strengthened because they were no longer alone.
Three Scenes from Real Life
Here are three scenes where choosing sadness over avoidance actually changes the outcome:
In marriage, when you can’t seem to get through to your spouse no matter how hard you try, the temptation is to fight, because a bad connection feels safer than no connection at all. But choosing sadness instead sounds like this: I’m sad that you can’t see my heart right now. I wish things were different. It doesn’t fix the disconnection in the moment, but it keeps you from building a wall.
With anger, sadness works as a kind of diffuser. Instead of becoming angry about being angry, or shutting down entirely, you can choose compassion for the part of you that feels powerless over it. I really wish anger weren’t such a struggle for me. I’m sad about that. That simple act begins to shrink what felt unmanageable.
In spiritual dryness, instead of generating more willpower or white-knuckling your way toward growth, you can step into the sadness of not being where you want to be. Lord, I’m not in control of my growth. You are. And I’m sad that I’m not where I want to be. That honesty opens the door for grace in a way that striving never does.
Where the River Takes You
The river of sadness doesn’t just move—it takes you somewhere. Psalm 30:5 puts it simply: “Weeping may stay the night, but joy comes in the morning.” That joy isn’t the same as happiness. Happiness is tied to circumstance and it comes and goes.
Joy is the quiet strength that comes from knowing you are not alone, and that you are going to be okay. It’s what Paul found in 2 Corinthians when God sent Titus to him in the middle of his suffering. It’s what the crying child on the playground finds when mom or dad kneels down. It’s what you find when you choose to swim toward the riverbank of growth.
A Closing Thought
There will come a day when every tear is wiped away and there is no more sadness. But you don’t live there yet. You live in the middle chapters, between the garden and Jesus’ return, where loss is real and grief is the way through it. Not around it. Not over it. Through it.
No matter what you are facing right now, there is a way through the sadness, and it leads to something incredible. That’s the way life is done according to God’s design as demonstrated by Jesus, the man of sorrows.
How can you grow from sadness? Start small. Think of one loss from this week—even something minor—and instead of resenting it or shutting down, try naming it. I really wanted that, and I’m sad I didn’t get it. See where the river takes you. It might take you further than you think.