Bible Verses for Grief at Christmas, for the Woman Setting One Less Place

Everyone else is playing the music. You are standing in a store holding an ornament you almost bought for someone who is not here. This page is for the woman whose Christmas has a hole in it this year: a mother, a husband, a child, a baby you never got to hold, a friend, a parent, a marriage. It does not try to fix December. It gives you Scripture that can sit in the room with you.

You are allowed to not be merry

“Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.”

Matthew 5:4 (BSB)

Jesus said this on a hillside to a crowd, and He put mourning on the list of blessed things. Not fixed things. Not finished things. Mourning, as it is, in the present tense. If the carols feel like a demand you cannot meet this year, this verse is your permission slip. You do not have to perform Christmas.

“Jesus wept.”

John 11:35 (BSB)

Two words. Jesus knew what He was about to do at that tomb, and He wept anyway, standing with Mary and Martha in their grief before anything changed. Grief was not a failure of His faith. It will not be a failure of yours.

“The LORD is near to the brokenhearted; He saves the contrite in spirit.”

Psalms 34:18 (BSB)

David wrote this about the people the psalm describes: those who cry out to God and take refuge in Him. It does not say the brokenhearted get fixed by a certain date. It says where God is in relation to them. Near. If you are one of the people crying out this December, that is the word the psalm gives you.

The first Christmas had grief in it too

“He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief. Like one from whom men hide their faces, He was despised, and we esteemed Him not.”

Isaiah 53:3 (BSB)

Seven hundred years before Bethlehem, Isaiah described the One who was coming as a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief. The baby in the manger grew into someone who knew loss from the inside. When you bring your grief to Him this Christmas, you are not bringing it to a stranger.

“There was also a prophetess named Anna, the daughter of Phanuel, of the tribe of Asher, who was well along in years. She had been married for seven years,”

Luke 2:36 (BSB)

“and then was a widow to the age of eighty-four. She never left the temple, but worshiped night and day, fasting and praying.”

Luke 2:37 (BSB)

Anna is part of the Christmas story most nativity scenes leave out. Married seven years, then a widow, and now eighty-four. Luke puts her loss right there in the text, in the middle of the most joyful chapter in the Bible, and she is not asked to hide it. Her grief and her worship lived in the same woman for decades. Yours can too, and not because you have to hurry either one.

For the song that undoes you in the grocery store

For the empty chair

“Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for You are with me; Your rod and Your staff, they comfort me.”

Psalms 23:4 (BSB)

Read who is speaking. This is David's own confession about walking through the darkest valley: not that it was short, and not that it was safe, but that he was not walking it alone. The dinner table with one less place is a valley. The verse gives you David's words to borrow for it.

“Because of the loving devotion of the LORD we are not consumed, for His mercies never fail.”

Lamentations 3:22 (BSB)

“They are new every morning; great is Your faithfulness!”

Lamentations 3:23 (BSB)

The writer of Lamentations said this while sitting in the ruins of his city. It is not a cheerful verse. It is a stubborn one. New every morning does not mean the loss resets. It means the mercy does. On Christmas morning you will wake up into the ache, and the verse says something else will be there too.

For the woman who is holding everyone else together

“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort,”

2 Corinthians 1:3 (BSB)

“who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God.”

2 Corinthians 1:4 (BSB)

Paul wrote this to a church, about the God who had comforted him in his own troubles. For the believers he was writing to, comfort was something received first and shared second. If you are the one making Christmas happen for the kids this year while carrying your own grief, notice the order Paul uses. You are allowed to be comforted before you comfort anyone.

Small things that have helped other grieving women through December

None of these are rules and none of them are promises. They are things women have told us made the month survivable.

• Say their name out loud at the table. The silence is heavier than the name.
• Let one tradition rest for a year. You can pick it back up. You can also not.
• Skip the party, or leave at eight. Grief is a reason.
• Light one candle for them and let that be the whole ceremony.
• Write the ache down somewhere nobody will read. Getting it out of your head is not the same as getting over it.
• Tell one person what date you are dreading, so someone else knows.

If it is more than sadness

Grief in December can go darker than grief in April. If the days have gone dark enough that you are having thoughts of harming yourself, please tell someone today, tonight if you can. In the US you can call or text 988 any hour. A grief counselor, your pastor, or a group of women who have lost someone too is not a shortcut around faith. It is company for a road that is genuinely long, and asking for it is not weak faith.

A prayer for Christmas morning

A prayer for the empty chair

“‘He will wipe away every tear from their eyes,’ and there will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the former things have passed away.”

Revelation 21:4 (BSB)

John saw this at the end of his vision, and the people in it are God's people in the new creation. For anyone who belongs to Christ, this is where the story ends: not with a better December, but with the day mourning itself is over. That day is not here yet. This verse does not ask you to feel it early. It asks you to know it is written.

If you are grieving a specific person

Two more pages on this site were written for particular losses: Bible verses for a mother who lost a child and Bible verses for a woman who lost her husband. If you want the rest of Advent to have Scripture in it without asking much of you, the Advent devotional for women is five minutes a morning in any order.