Guiding hearts for spiritual formation through suffering
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Not all darkness is the same.
And one of the most disorienting — and quietly harmful — things that happens when faith stops working is that we apply the wrong remedy. We treat a dark night of the soul like burnout, and wonder why rest is not helping. We treat a faith crisis like a personal crisis, and wonder why our circumstances improving does not make the questions go away. We treat a blowout like spiritual dryness, and wonder why discipline is making things worse.
The wall has different faces. And knowing which face you are looking at is the beginning of knowing how to stay.
This post is a companion to Episode 2 of the Through the Wall podcast series. If you have not yet listened, you are welcome to start there — or to begin here, and let this be your map.
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When you are at the wall — when faith feels dry, distant, or broken — the instinct is to work harder a...
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There is a particular kind of exhaustion that does not have a name in most Christian circles.
It is not burnout, exactly — though exhaustion is part of it. It is not depression, though the weight of it can feel indistinguishable. It is not a crisis of belief, though you may have begun to wonder if that is what it is.
It is the experience of waking up one day and realizing that faith — the faith you have practiced, built, tended, and sometimes fought for — has stopped producing what it once did.
Prayer feels hollow. Scripture feels distant. Worship feels like going through motions you no longer understand. And God, who once felt present and close, now feels somewhere behind a door that will not open no matter how many times you knock.
If you have found your way to this page, you may be living in that space right now. Or you may be watching someone you love live there. Or you may have been there once and are only now finding lang...
There is a space in the Christian life that few people name and even fewer know how to hold.
It is the space after the prayer has been prayed but before it is answered.
The space after the loss but before new life has taken root.
The space where the old story has ended, yet the new one has not begun.
It is the space between grief and glory.
Many of the women I walk with find themselves here. Faithful. Still loving Jesus. Still showing up. And yet quietly weary. Quietly aching. Quietly wondering whether God still sees them in the middle of what feels unresolved.
This is the sacred middle.
And it is not a detour.
It is formation.
Between grief and glory is a liminal place. It is unsettled, tender, and often lonely. It does not look like victory. It does not resolve neatly. There is no ribbon tied around it.
In faith spaces, we are often uncomfortable with what cannot be quickly r...
There are stories we bury because telling them feels like reopening a wound.
And then there are stories that, when spoken, become a doorway—not only for us, but for someone else who is still living in the silence.
Recently, I shared my story publicly for the first time in a long-form setting. Not because I am “fully healed.” Not because everything is resolved. But because I know what it feels like to wonder how to navigate grief as a Christian when your story includes abuse, betrayal, and loss.
And I know what it means to need Christian grief support that does not rush resurrection.
This is my story of Christian trauma recovery—and faith-based healing that did not erase grief, but met me inside it.
I was born into violence.
My earliest memories include instability, neglect, and fear. As a child, I learned how to read the emotional temperature of a room before...
To the weary heart reading this—
There are seasons when prayer feels impossible.
Scripture does not deny this reality. It names it.
“How long, O Lord? Will You forget me forever? How long will You hide Your face from me?” (Psalm 13:1, NASB95).
Not because faith is gone, or because desire has dried up, but because the well of words is empty. Grief has a way of doing that. Trauma does, too. Suffering presses so deeply on the chest that even familiar prayers feel unreachable, as though they belong to someone else, in another life, before everything fell apart.
Many who come to Between Grief & Glory describe this moment with quiet shame.
I want to pray, but I do not know how. I believe God is near, but I cannot speak to Him. I open my mouth, and nothing comes out.
If this is you, let me say this gently and without qualification: you are not failing at prayer.
You are encountering the honest limits of language in the face of...