pain 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...

Trivia time! What natural disaster is the most destructive to a forest? Chances are that the first thing that comes to mind is a forest fire. After all, fire is pure destruction to plants. What possib...

God of grace and God of glory on your people pour your power...Grant us wisdom, grant us courage for the facing of this hour. Lord—we need You...today, tomorrow and forever. We need you to heal those ...

Was ever grief like mine?

Merciful God, we turn away from the pains and cries of our world. Overwhelmed by its brokenness, we ignore the call to engage and love those who are hurting. Father, forgive us, strengthen us, and hel...

Some kind of loss is usually necessary to turn the mind toward faith. If you’re satisfied with want you’ve got, you’re hardly going to look for anything better.

Live to the point of tears.

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.

Waiting is painful. Forgetting is painful. But not knowing which to do is the worst kind of suffering.

Merciful God, we turn away from the pains and cries of our world. Overwhelmed by its brokenness, we ignore the call to engage and love those who are hurting. Father, forgive us, strengthen us, and hel...

All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story.

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

Out of the depths, we cry to you, Lord; Lord, hear our voice. Let your ears be attentive to our cries for mercy. Living in frailty and weakness with adversity in our path, we too often buckle in despa...

With the global coronavirus pandemic in spring 2020, life stopped. Overwhelmed by the threat of a disease we couldn’t stop and for which we didn’t have the hospital capacity, everyone moved work and s...

When pain is this fresh and this awful, I’m not sure much light can get through. You have to wait for some of the initial jolt to subside, to let something settle enough that you can emerge from being...

I know a spiritual director who begins each of her sessions with five to ten minutes of silence. Sitting in silence is a new experience for many, and she told me that during these few minutes nearly e...

Not one thing in your life is more important than figuring out how to live in the face of unspoken pain.

Most who know anything at all about the Oxbridge professor C. S. Lewis know that he wrote two books on pain and sorrow. One is more an apologetic on the nature of suffering, The Problem of Pain, and a...

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?...

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

Remember Miss Haversham in Charles Dickens's Great Expectations? Her entire life was defined by the fact that she was jilted on her wedding day. People can become very attached to their pain and i...

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?...

Do you remember the first time someone explained to you the concept of “Good Friday?” I remember my own mother explaining how it was possible that Jesus’ death was “good,” not because torture and suff...

If we all acted the way we really felt, four out of eight people at a dinner table would be sitting there sobbing.

One of life’s enduring mysteries is that you don’t have to do anything wrong for your life to go horribly wrong. When we are abused, rejected, hurt, betrayed, or manipulated, we search our hearts and ...

So pain endures for a time. Its role is to purge us, to make us to know ourselves, and it drives us to the Lord to plead for mercy.

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

Paradoxically…healing means moving from your pain to the pain…When you keep focusing on the specific circumstances of your pain, you easily become angry, resentful, and even vindictive. You are inclin...

Gracious God, I am reminded today of the horrible pain that sin causes. How many lives are destroyed by sin? How many families rent apart? How many parents overcome with grief? And this is just the be...