There are two things people will tell you when your suffering has gone on longer than anyone expected, and I have come to believe both of them are lies, even when they are said with a kind Bible verse and a soft voice.

The first is some version of buck up. God ordained this season, so the most faithful thing you can do is stop asking why and start accepting it. The second is the opposite, and just as tidy. If you truly believed, if you prayed correctly, this would already be over. Both of these responses hand you a closed envelope and ask you not to open it. Both of them, in their own way, ask you to stop grieving, either because grief means you have not accepted God's will, or because grief means you have not trusted Him enough. I do not think Scripture asks either of these things of us. I think Scripture asks us to grieve as people who have hope, which is an entirely different instruction, and a much harder one to hold onto when a season will not end.

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There is a particular kind of woman who cannot sit still, and she is almost never the woman anyone worries about. She is the one who shows up. She is the one holding the calendar, the meal train, the prayer chain, the carpool. If you asked her whether she was tired, she would say yes and then change the subject, because the tiredness is not interesting to her. It is simply the weather she lives in.

What almost nobody says out loud, including her, is that the moving is doing something. It is not only productivity. It is protection. As long as she keeps going, the things she has not had room to feel stay where she put them.

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REST IS NOT ALWAYS THE GIFT WE ASSUME IT IS

We talk about rest in Christian spaces as though it were universally welcome, as though the only obstacle were a culture that will not let us slow down. For some women that is true. For a great many others, rest is not the reward at the end of th...

I was almost to the door.

I had made it through the entire service without falling apart, which in that season counted as a real accomplishment. There is a particular arithmetic you learn to do when you are barely holding on. You count the distance to the exit. You measure how many more hands you have to shake. You calculate whether you can get to the car before the thing rising inside you finishes its work.

I did not make it. My eyes filled. It was not sobbing. It was the part right before, the welling up, the moment when your body decides for you.

And someone stopped me and said this:

Why do you have tears welling up? Haven't you dealt with your childhood abuse already? It's been over fifteen years. Remember, Psalm 42 ends in hope in God.

I carried that sentence for years before I understood what had actually happened in that doorway.

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This post is the companion to Episode 22 of Lament & Light, part of A Summer of Sorrows. In the episode I go further i...

You know the feeling before you have a word for it. The chest that tightens for no reason you can name. The exhaustion that sleep does not touch. The tears that arrive in the middle of an ordinary afternoon, while you are folding laundry or answering an email or watching your child do something small and lovely, and you could not explain them if someone asked. You have learned to move past it. You call it stress. You call it a hard week. You tell yourself it will lift once things settle down.

But it does not always lift. And somewhere underneath the explanations, you have started to suspect that your body knows something you have not let yourself know yet.

It does. Your body has been keeping a record. I want to spend some time helping you read it, because a great deal of Christian grief goes unwitnessed for one plain reason: many of us were taught to treat the body as the least spiritual part of us, when Scripture treats it as one of the most honest.

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In the world of Fantastic Beasts, there is a creature called an Obscurus. It forms inside a child who has been forced, again and again, to suppress something that is actually a gift, something that was never meant to be hidden. The child learns, the only way a child can learn something this large, that the safest thing to do is to push it down, hide it, deny it exists at all. And the Obscurus is what that hiding becomes when it has nowhere left to go. Not the gift itself. The shape that survival takes when a child has to bury something true about who they are in order to stay safe.

The image is fictional. What it is describing is not.

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THE HIDING THAT DOESN'T DISAPPEAR

When a child has to hide the way she was made, that hiding does not disappear just because she grows up. It turns. It becomes something else, something that looks, on the surface, like a personality trait, or a coping mechanism, or just the way a person is. But underneath it, if y...

The Formation You Didn't Sign Up For

In Hinds' Feet on High Places, a shepherdess named Much-Afraid sets out on a journey toward the High Places, led by the Shepherd she loves. She expects the journey to be hard. What she does not expect, what nearly undoes her before she has gone any real distance at all, is who she is given to walk with.

Two companions are assigned to her for the climb. Their names are Sorrow and Suffering.

She did not choose them. She would never have chosen them. And for a long stretch of the story, she is convinced that their presence must mean something has gone wrong, that perhaps she has misunderstood the Shepherd, or taken a wrong turn, or that this was never the path after all. It is only much later, when she reaches the place she was being led to, that she understands what Sorrow and Suffering were actually doing the entire time. They were not a detour from her formation. They were the shape it took.

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WHAT IF THE HARDES...

Hagar was alone in the wilderness when she named God.

Not Abraham. Not Sarah. Not one of the patriarchs whose names we know from a hundred sermons. Hagar, a servant, pregnant and then pushed out, sitting by a spring in the desert with nothing and no one, is the one who looks at God and gives Him a name that no one else in Scripture uses first. El Roi. The God who sees.

She did not name Him that because someone explained His character to her in a teaching series. She named Him that because, in the middle of being unseen by everyone else in her life, she discovered that God had seen her the entire time. Not from a distance. Not in the abstract. He saw her specifically, in her specific wilderness, and He told her so.

That is where this week's episode of A Summer of Sorrows lives, and it is where this post lives too.

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THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN ATTENDED TO AND WITNESSED

There is a difference between being attended to and being witnessed, and most of us h...

There is a particular kind of grief that does not get a name.

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It is not the grief that comes with a death certificate, a funeral, a sympathy card. It does not come with a meal train. Nobody asks how you are doing in the careful, lowered voice people use for the griefs they recognize. This grief shows up on an ordinary Tuesday, in the middle of an ordinary summer, and it sits down inside you and does not leave. You go to the beach because it is July and that is what you do, and you sit behind your sunglasses, and you watch your children build something in the sand, and the grief sits there with you, unnamed, unwitnessed, and entirely real.

A Summer of Sorrows, the series this blog post grows out of, begins here. Not with a death. With a kind of grief that does not know what season it is. The kind that does not resolve by sundown, or by the next Sunday, or by the time everyone else has moved on to whatever comes next.

THE PSALM THAT DOES ...

What to Do When You Don't Know How to Pray Anymore

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There is a particular kind of grief that comes with losing the ability to pray.

Not a sudden loss — not the kind that comes from one devastating moment. The slow kind. The kind where you sit down to pray one morning and notice, with a faint alarm, that the words are not there. And then you sit down the next morning and notice the same thing. And then a week passes, and a month, and what was once as natural as breathing has become something you approach with dread — or stop approaching at all.

If you are in that place right now, I want to begin by saying something important:

The inability to pray in the way you once did is not evidence that prayer has stopped being real. It may be evidence that God is inviting you into a different kind of prayer entirely.

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The contemplative tradition — the stream of Christian spirituality that takes seriously the interior life and the long, often painful...

What John of the Cross Knew That the Modern Church Forgot

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I found them when I was drowning.

Not dramatically — the way we picture drowning from the outside. Quietly. The way a person drowns when they have been treading water for so long that the effort itself becomes the thing that exhausts them. I was in the darkest season of my life — shunned by a church community I had loved as family, my faith coming apart at every seam I had stitched together, unable to pray in any way that felt coherent, certain that what was happening to me was evidence of something uniquely, specifically wrong with me.

And then I found them.

The ancient witnesses. The ones who had been here before me — in the darkness, in the silence, in the long season where God felt absent and prayer felt like speaking into a void. They had not just survived it. They had written about it. With honesty and precision and a theological depth that the modern church has largely stopped passing on.

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