Grief

This is the chapter I almost did not write. Grief is the part of the story we would all rather skip — the one we hope never comes, and yet the one that visits every life eventually. But to leave it out would be to tell a story that is not true. And more importantly, it would be to hide the place where I met God most deeply.

There was a season when the loss felt unbearable. The kind of grief that takes your breath away in the middle of an ordinary afternoon. The kind that makes you wonder how the world keeps turning when yours has stopped. I did not think I would survive it. And in one sense, I did not — the woman I was before that loss did not make it through. But the woman God was forming on the other side of it did.

In the darkest days, I learned something I could not have learned any other way: that God is closest when we feel Him least. He did not take the pain away. But He sat in it with me. He became, as the psalmist says, a very present help in trouble — not a God who explains the suffering, but a God who enters it.

I also learned that grief is not a problem to be solved. It is a love that has nowhere to go. And rather than rushing it, God asks us to bring it to Him — again and again, as many times as we need — until the wound becomes a scar that still tells a story but no longer bleeds.

If you are in the grief chapter right now, I am so sorry. I will not tell you it will be okay soon, because I do not know your timeline. But I will tell you this: you are not alone. The Lord is near to the brokenhearted. And the same God who carried me through my darkest valley will carry you through yours. He has not left you. He is holding you, even now.