genesis on Grieving

To lick your wounds, to smack your lips over grievances long past, to roll over your tongue the prospect of bitter confrontations still to come, to savor to the last toothsome morsel both the pain you...

An individual doesn’t get cancer, a family does.

A preaching professor at Harvard University tells the story of the year his 5-year-old son was working on an art project in his kindergarten class. It was made of plaster, resembled nothing in particu...

Sometimes we have to “step over” our anger, our jealousy, or our feelings of rejection and move on. The temptation is to get stuck in our negative emotions, poking around in them as if we belong there...

The “gift of tears” written about by the desert elders and several centuries later by St. Ignatius of Loyola are not about finding meaning in our pain and suffering. They do not give answers but inste...

Your sorrow itself shall be turned into joy. Not the sorrow to be taken away, and joy to be put in its place, but the very sorrow which now grieves you shall be turned into joy. God not only takes awa...

Truly, it is allowed to weep. By weeping, we disperse our wrath; and tears go through the heart, even like a stream.

The way to love anything is to realize that it may be lost.

Dawn grew up in a family in which she felt she had a fairly happy childhood. But in her adult years she struggled greatly with emotional, psychological, and physical maladies. She never felt a sense o...

What is the shape of your pain? Is your pain a gaping wound? Is it stuffed into the back corner of a closet, or is it neatly categorized and filed away with annotations that no one but you understand?...

The story of young Matthew Huffman came across my desk the week I was writing this chapter. He was the six-year-old son of missionaries in Salvador, Brazil. One morning he began to complain of fever. ...

Notes on prayer: This lament can be used as prayers of the people, but can be adapted for other uses as well. It is designed to be responsive, but it would also work if prayed in unison. Leader: ...

He who cannot forgive others breaks the bridge over which he must pass himself.

What is the shape of your pain? Is your pain a gaping wound? Is it stuffed into the back corner of a closet, or is it neatly categorized and filed away with annotations that no one but you understand?...

Notes on prayer: This prayer is designed for a leader and a congregation, but it could be further divided so that the Leader/People response sections are "voice 1" and "voice 2." ...

My friend Wendy calls the incremental disappointments we endure over the years “the slow leak of life.”

What can we say, O Lord, to justify ourselves? You shower us with grace upon grace. Your mercies are new every morning. And we find it hard to forgive others. Sometimes we are petty and hold grudges f...

Almighty God, harsh words and personal attacks can bring out the worst in us. We find ourselves spending energy on thoughts of retaliation and plans to protect ourselves. Father forgive us. We long to...

There are two sides to forgiveness: giving and receiving. Although at first sight giving seems to be harder, it often appears that we are not able to offer forgiveness to others because we have not be...

Preaching Commentary At the Turning Point Following Simon Peter’s climatic height of his faith, his confession that Jesus was the “Messiah, the Son of the living God,” Peter now exemplifies our hum...

How To Apologize • express sorrow (I’m sorry) • own guilt (I was wrong) • name specific wrongs (I did X) • name impact (I hurt u) • no IFs (sorry if I) • don’t blameshift/defend (but u) ...

God uses our identity crises to reveal who we are and who he is. Sometimes these crises come out of nowhere. Something devastating happens. Someone close to us dies. We are diagnosed, or someone we kn...

“God pity them both! and pity us all,  Who vainly the dreams of youth recall;  For of all sad words of tongue or pen,  The saddest are these: ‘It might have been!’  Ah, well! for us all some...

In a poignant tribute written after his son’s passing in a climbing accident, Nicholas Wolterstorff reflects: When we have overcome absence with phone calls, winglessness with airplanes, summer he...

For several years, Jason and I nurtured a friendship that led us to decide to work together because we knew each other so well. But things soon became complicated between us. I began to notice some tr...

Who knows why God allows heartbreak, but the answer must be important enough because God allows His heart to break too.

George Matheson was just entering the bewildering teenage years when doctors informed him he was going blind. Undeterred, he pressed on with his education and graduated from the University of Glasgow ...

Growth in grace is growth downward. It is the forming of a lower estimate of ourselves. It is a deepening realization of our nothingness. It is a heartfelt recognition that we are not worthy of the le...

To enter into the realm of contemplation one must in a certain sense die: but this death is in fact the entrance into a higher life. It is a death for the sake of life, which leaves behind all that we...

Love keeps no record of wrongs. We keep to-do lists so we don’t forget We check them twice We carry them in our pockets Holding on to the pain The disappointment The failure Re-viewing the wrong Poi...