Posts with the tag “grief”

Most of us have places in our lives that used to bother us. The relationship that drifted. The habit we know is costing us something. The dream we quietly filed away. We stopped seeing the ruins because seeing them hurts and not seeing them is easier. But numbness is not healing. And the comeback begins the moment you stop being okay with things being broken.  Read More

Psychologists call it a defensive mechanism. Pretending to be indifferent when you actually care deeply is a way of protecting yourself from rejection, from helplessness, from the pain of wanting something you cannot control. Most people know what that feels like from the inside. Here is what they may not know. The Bible has been addressing this condition for thousands of years. And the God at the center of the eschatological story is not a deity who performed indifference while creation fell apart. He is a God whose care has been constant, purposeful, and driving the entire story toward the day He makes all things new. The comeback Nehemiah experienced did not start with a plan. It started with grief. It started when he stopped pretending. Read the full post.  Read More

In Coco, the rule is devastating. When the last living person forgets you, you suffer the Final Death. You simply cease to exist. It is a beautiful movie. But it cannot answer the one question that matters most: what happens when everyone who loved you is also gone? What happens when there is no one left to remember? Isaiah saw the answer. God sends the dew of the dawn onto those sleeping in the dust, and the earth gives them back. Not because someone kept a photograph on a shelf. Because God remembered where He put them. The people you love who belong to Jesus are not waiting to be forgotten. They are waiting to be raised. Read the full post.  Read More

Most of us have something we stopped reaching for after a significant loss. A dream that got attached to someone or something that is no longer here. When they left the dream felt like it left with them. But Isaiah says God will carry you. Present tense. Still moving. Still sustaining. The adventure did not die with the loss. It was waiting on the other side of it.  Read More

A foreman walks up to Carl Fredricksen's house, surrounded by construction equipment and developers who want him gone, and asks plainly: when are you going to give this place up? Carl does not flinch. He says: "When I'm dead." The audience laughs. Then they cry. Because every one of us has something we are holding onto with everything we have. Something the world keeps pressuring us to release. But here is what Peter told people who had already lost most of what they had built: you have an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading. Reserved in heaven. Beyond the reach of any bulldozer. The question is not whether you will hold on. The question is what you are holding. Read the full post.  Read More

For some of you yesterday was genuinely good. For some of you it was hard in ways you did not fully advertise. The empty chair. The complicated relationship a Hallmark holiday does not fix. The grief that does not take Sundays off just because everyone around you is celebrating. All of that is allowed. God heals the brokenhearted. Not the ones who performed gratitude correctly. The brokenhearted. He is already close.  Read More