It came home to me that the most profound blessings we will ever know are those that meet us in the place of our deepest loss and inspire us to choose to live again.
03107 – Encounter with Death
The worst thing is not the sorrow or the loss or the heartbreak. Worse is to be encountered by death and not to be changed by the encounter. There are pills we take to get through the experience, but the danger is that we then do not go through the experience but...
02857 – “Refuge in Grief”
Here's what I most want you to know: this really is as bad as you think. No matter what anyone else says, this sucks. What has happened cannot be made right. What is lost cannot be restored. There is no beauty here, inside this central fact. Acknowledgement is...
02815 – Choosing Love
When we choose to love, we choose to face death, and grief and loss, again and again and again. Just as much as we choose the friendlier parts of love. It's all there, present and contained, in everything.
02675 – Losses that Rearrange the World
There are losses that rearrange the world; deaths that change the way you see everything; grief that tears everything down; pain that transports you to an entirely different universe, even while everyone else thinks nothing has really changed.
02660 – It’s Okay…
It's okay to grieve and hope at the same time.It's okay to exhale all of your loss and sadness and pain and feel an aching emptiness words cannot express.And it's okay, in the very next breath, to inhale joy and expectation and assurance with all the strength you...
02497 – I Rest This Day in God
I rest this day in God. I put in a single place all the pieces of my erring ways, the urgent thoughts both good and bad, together with my rights and wrongs. All in a single place they go. Here they lie where all is loss and all is gain, for they are mine. As for me--I...
02210 – Using Gender-Inclusive Language
As the father of two girls (now also grandfather of three), I have cringed listening to some preachers and teachers in the church make perfectly good points while using solely male pronouns during their exposition... There are, indeed, “hidden figures” in our...
01579 – A Blessing Hidden in Our Grief
What to do with our losses? . . . We must mourn our losses. We cannot talk or act them away, but we can shed tears over them and allow ourselves to grieve deeply. To grieve is to allow our losses to tear apart feelings of security and safety and lead us to the painful...
01239 – Finding God in Everything, Everywhere
If there is nowhere where you have given me a place to which we can just flee away in order to find you, and if everything can be the loss of you, the One, then I must also be able to find you in everything. Otherwise, humanity couldn't find you at all--humanity that...